Tiffany (my therapist) told me she thought there was a chance that if my recovery continued at its current pace, I’d have a good shot at completing the SkyRise Chicago. It’s climbing all 2,109 steps of the Willis Tower (still known as the Sears Tower in Chicago). As Mark Stephan says, “If you can climb 2 stairs, you can climb 2,000!” Well, apparently Tiffany asked Mark if he thought I could do it. Upon hearing I had already climbed 40 stairs, Mark - perhaps overly optimistically - said, “Oh yeah. Easy.”
Mark has climbed the tower 2 or 3 times already. Maybe more, I’m not sure. Apparently he shaves off an hour each year. I figure if I get in good enough shape to climb 7 stairs a minute, then I can do it in 5 hours. 7 stairs a minute doesn’t seem hard. 7 stairs a minute for 5 hours seems pretty daunting. But so did running a marathon the first time. And so did climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. Well, fine, yes, they WERE daunting, even while doing them. But still, I need a big challenge and I think this is it.
Here’s the link. I think I’ve posted it before. There is a cool marketing video. Mark, who I’ve mentioned several times, is actually in the video.
http://ric.convio.net/site/PageServer?pagename=home
Okay so that’s the big news. Other than that, therapy has been progressing. It’s been less than a week since my last post so nothing revolutionary to share (other than what I just talked about).
One cool thing Tiffany did was use electric stimulation (stim therapy) to get some of the weaker muscles in my left leg kicking. It worked. I’ll post a video in a sec of what she was doing below, which is getting the muscles to flex that make my foot lift up. This is the muscle that, since it’s weak, causes my left foot to drag when I’m not wearing braces.
After we did that for a little bit, she got a “trigger” that allowed her to shock the muscle at just the right time while I was walking on the treadmill. She’d go 1:30 minutes like that, then 30 seconds of me on my own to see if it continued. Pretty cool. We did that for a while.
What is probably the biggest news of the week is that my friend Tony, who was my last roommate at RIC, was baptized this past Sunday at his church down in Englewood in Chicago. A couple weeks ago when I asked him how he was doing he texted back, “I was saved today,” at which point I started bouncing off the walls. Very cool to see this change in him. 
Tony and me outside his church after the baptism. What an awesome worship, by the way.
Tony and I agree on the answer when the inevitable question comes up, “Why me?” First of all, God doesn’t punish us. Not since Jesus died. Okay there’s that. Next, if this happened to us without us having any decision in the matter, then it was God’s will. Either that or you can argue that it was meaningless, which is fairly depressing. Okay so let’s go with God’s will! So if it was God’s will, and He doesn’t punish us, then what is the number one thing God wants of us? To worship and glorify Him. So there’s that. So then, it’s only logical that this happened to us because we would better worship and glorify Him, and better show others how to worship and glorify Him. And we know it’s true because it’s already proven itself over and over again.
Okay so big week, actually. Let me see what videos my dad took that I can post. He is heading home tomorrow to Kentucky for good. He will certainly be missed but it’s time for him to go hang with my mom again :)
Oh yeah - also Rebecca and I are heading out to California tomorrow for her friend’s wedding this weekend. We’ll be staying in a cool beach house in LA for the wedding, then going down to San Diego to see her brother Jonathan and his wife, Kristen. Jonathan has a pilot’s license so I’m gonna try and hop up into a private plane so we can buzz over to Catalina Island. Sounds pretty sweet, huh? It’ll be an experiment! Where do you put a wheelchair in a small prop plane? Haha…
G’night!
Chip
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