Colin Guise is on the road to recovery after an infection nearly killed him. The Guise family received more than $10,000 from members of the Kamloops community. Dave Eagles/KTW
In the quiet moments, the moments when he finally allows his aching muscles to sink into the plush fabric of his living room couch, Colin Guise feels like his body is encased in a cast.
When he stops trying to fight his body’s ache and his near-unresponsive limbs, Guise imagines himself weighed down by hardened plaster and shreds of cotton, dragging an inflexible mould with his every move.
It’s the easiest way for him to think about how his life has changed, how his body no longer feels like his own. It’s easier than thinking about how a normally harmless infection nearly killed him after invading his body and growing for months, ravaging with debilitating headaches and blurred vision.
It’s easier than dwelling on the feeling of drunkenness Guise fought through as the mass grew on his brainstem. It’s easier than recalling the brain surgeries to relieve the pressure built up by the loonie-sized lump of festering tissue — an abscess. It’s easier than thinking about the months of recovery that have left him unable to referee soccer and basketball, unable to resume his role on the Kamloops Youth Soccer Association board.
In those quiet moments, after a day of fighting to get better, Guise feels something else: Gratitude.
He feels grateful to the people of Kamloops, those he knows and those he has never met, for donating more than $10,000 to his family, which has helped to pay his mortgage, put gas in his car and put food in his mouth — even as he struggled to chew and swallow.
But, most of all, Guise is grateful for their support.
He’s grateful for the progress he has made, even though it’s sometimes frustratingly slow. He is grateful he is now able to walk, no longer bound to a hospital bed, a slave to machines and tubes.
He’s grateful to have seen his 44th birthday on March 11. And, he’s grateful to be alive, thankful the loonie abscess is now the size of a dime and withering by the day.
He’s proud that, on a fresh spring day on the green grass of McArthur Island, under a fading blue sky streaked with sunlit clouds, he was able to run. He ran the beep test at the end of a KYSA referee clinic, with the support of two people. He may have run slow, but he ran.
“I met a whole lot of interesting people inside the hospital — I still do,” Guise said.
“The more I see how they’re working with things, just to pry open their fingers and stuff, I feel very fortunate. Even though it was major surgery and I almost died — it’s hard to fathom for me right now — but I could have been a lot worse off.”
So, Guise lies back on his couch and his muscles begin to soften as he tries not to think about how hard things have been or how hard they will continue to be.
His daughter smiles at seeing her perpetually busy dad finally having a little time to relax — even if he’s not doing much relaxing.
And, when the thoughts of his painful road to recovery inevitably begin to surface, he instead focuses on the gratitude he feels and the hope all will be OK in the end.
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