30 years I had a surgery on my back where the surgeon wired steel rods to my spinal column after I had crushed a vertebrate. It has worked really well for me.
A friend had a teenage daughter with scoliosis that is going to have a similar procedure done next month. Naturally she was scared due to a lack of experience about the process and the results when we talked yesterday. I did not think much about sharing my experience at the time. I all too often think that others know what I know and this was another case of that. Plus, telling surgical successes over lunch has the tendency to put the damper on conversations and appetites.
I realized on the way home that it might really help my friend (and her daughter) if I shared my experience with her. I wrote her a one-page email explaining what happened, what it was like and what I thought of it now. My experience was almost all good. The somewhat bad experience was that I broke a wire tying the rod to my spinal column after a few years of hard use that would sometimes be uncomfortable for a year or two. Her petite daughter is highly unlikely to put the same sort of stress that a 6'3" 215 lb active guy in a wheelchair could do.
My friend wrote a kind and gracious reply to my email with clear relief thanking me for sharing my experience with her.
In the past, I could share stories like that—in a gruesome way that was unlikely to bring comfort to a single mom with her only daughter facing major surgery. Thanks to the improvement & empathy I have made in my relationships with others, I was able to help two nice people feel much less scared and far more optimistic about their upcoming surgery.
I am grateful for the good friends in my life that I can relate to fantastically better than how it used to be.
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