Tag: Challenges

Being Scared and Looking At My Future

I’m scared. It’s hard for me to admit it but it’s true, I’m scared to death. The reason I’m feeling this way is because of my legs. Over the past few months I’ve been having a lot of pain in my legs, to be more precise, my hips. It seems like every morning I wake up and my hips feel like they’re on fire. I’ve tried for months not to worry about it and just block out the pain but recently that hasn’t been the case and now I’m worry that something is seriously happening to me and I’m beginning to question whether I’ll walk again.

Now I’ve had problems with my legs from the moment I was born. I’ve used braces as a child, walked with a serious limp through most of my teenage years, and I’ve been using a wheelchair for close to 13 years and I’ve never worried about my legs this much, so why now? Why am I so scared, why am I suffering with this fear of something bad happening to me?

Then it hit me. I’m scared because my life is changing right before my eyes. I’m preparing to graduate from college, I’m working on my first film, and now I’m thinking about things in my life that I’ve never thought about 5 or even 10 years ago. I’m thinking about marriage, my career, and whether I want to have children. Knowing that I have these leg problems, I’m truly concerned about how this will affect my future.

I don’t want to be constantly worrying about the condition my legs for the rest of my life, that’s why going to see this doctor at Northwestern Hospital is very important to me. I have to find out what’s going and figure what to do about it. I know I have the support of my friends and family through this tough time and I need every bit of support I can get now. I just want to find out what’s wrong with me and what I can do to fix it .

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New wheelchair brings new film challenges

The many new gadgets and buttons on my wheelchair

So it’s been over a week since I got my new wheelchair and I absolutely love my wheelchair. So far I’ve had a few kinks like the fact that my new chair is a speed demon and I have to really be careful driving it because I’ve crashed into a lot of things around Chicago during my first week. I’ve to get more adapted to way this wheelchair drives compared to my old wheelchair. I’m a good driver but I just have to get use to my new wheelchair.

While I’m dealing with those kinks there’s one challenge that I completely forgot that I was going to deal with and that’s how my new chair was gonna affect how I shoot my film. The reason this is a challenge because my new chair and my old one are completely different. For example, in my old chair when I would film the camera would be in my lap and that’s how I was able to film while I was riding in my wheelchair. In my new one I don’t have the same luxury of putting the camera in my lap because of size of my new chair which is smaller than my old one.

This is a huge challenge for me especially since I’m getting to close to end of the shooting part of my film. I will stop shooting my film in November and with that deadline I set, I have to figure out between now and November how I’m gonna handle this. The next few months are gonna be tough for me now that I have my new wheelchair but if anyone can take on this new challenge its Justin Cooper

Now I have to go and see if I can tame this speed demon that I call a wheelchair. Wish me luck!

Justin