A few weeks ago, while we were on holiday, our dog Pepper suddenly lost the use of her back legs. Completely out of nowhere.
Within a very short space of time, she was having surgery for IVDD. One minute everything is normal, the next you are in a vet hospital being told what needs to happen and making decisions very quickly.
Since then, the last 8 weeks have been very structured. Strict crate rest, very limited movement, physio exercises multiple times a day and hydrotherapy sessions. Everything has been slow, controlled and deliberate.
And to be fair to her, she’s been such a good girl. Each week there has been a small improvement. Not huge leaps, but enough to feel like things were moving forward. Standing a bit stronger, walking a little more confidently. You start to relax slightly and think that you are through the worst of it.
Then this week, she has started to get wobbly again.
Nothing major, but enough to notice. Enough to make you question whether things are going in the right direction. And if I am honest, my immediate thought was not particularly helpful. It was, “I really do not want to go back to another 6 to 8 weeks of strict crate rest”.
Not necessarily because of the routine itself, but because of what it feels like it means. That we are back at the beginning. That all of that effort has somehow been undone. But when you step back and look at it properly, that is not actually the case.
The progress is still there. The strength she has built is still there. This is just part of a longer recovery process that was never going to be completely straightforward.
And this is something I see quite often with CIPS students.
Things are going well, you are building momentum, getting into a rhythm with your study, starting to feel more confident. Then something happens. A topic that does not quite click, a set of questions that do not go as expected, or an exam result that is not what you wanted.
And the immediate reaction is that you have gone backwards. That you are not as far along as you thought, that it is going to take longer than expected, that maybe you are not progressing in the right way.
But in reality, progress very rarely works like that.
It is not a straight line. There will be points where things feel slower, or even like they have dipped slightly, but that does not mean you are back at the start. In the same way that Pepper has not lost the last 8 weeks of progress, you do not lose everything you have learned because of one difficult moment.
You are still moving forward, just not always in a perfectly smooth way.
So if you are in that position at the moment, where something has not quite gone to plan, it is worth pausing before jumping to conclusions. You are not back at the beginning, you are just in the part of the process that feels a bit harder.
As a reminder to you all, and myself – we have got this!