Embrace the Suck

Before Dad could speak at all, he was trying to communicate with his doctors and nurses by mouthing words to them. Some of the nurses and doctors were better than others at figuring out what he was trying to say. Some were abysmal. One day we had the head of Critical Care medicine in his room and his Cardiac Thoracic surgeon. They were trying to explain to him the next steps of recovery. They were telling him he was making good progress but the next steps were going to be difficult. They were going to suck. He was trying to tell them something, but they couldn't understand. He tried to tell me but I was struggling too. So the doctors said, "Screw this, let the man speak." And they deflated his tracheostomy cuff, and pulled his ventilator for a few moments to let him speak his first words. My dad said, "Embrace the Suck." I started laughing like crazy and the entire room of doctors and nurses just turned around and stared at me.

If you've never worked in a military setting, or dealt with self-help books, or motivational types of things, you may have never heard of this phrase. But I have. It's one of my favorites from Dad's military repertoire.

If you've ever been in a crappy situation, one where every single thing is just horrible, it all sucks, right? Everything. The setting, the people, the tasks, all of it. You have two choices. You can make your attitude suck as much as the job/orders/mission. Or you can Embrace the Suck. You can change your attitude to turn the whole thing into something different. You can embrace every horrifying, shitty part of it and turn it into the best damn thing you've ever done. You hold the power to change your mentality.

I gave a brief synopsis of this to those doctors and the nurses and the surgeon liked it so much he told Dad he was making it the new slogan of the ICU and wrote it on Dad's window in his room.

Dad got moved to a new floor yesterday. And when I was in his room after they had put him in bed, done all of his assessments and wrote on his new board, guess what I found on his new board? His motivational saying again!

It may not seem like much, but to me it shows his fighting spirit. It shows that he's trying like hell to beat this. It shows that even though he's worn out and the simple acts of speaking a few sentences or eating a few bites of food exhausts him; he's still fighting.