Recovery

"I mourned my husband for a hundred days. I never left my house. I never spoke with anyone."
"And after that?"
"I left my house and I spoke with people."

Cancer runs rampant in my family. One of my many aunts had uterine cancer and was treated at Walter Reed hospital, from which I infer it was something really bad.

I once had a conversation with her a bit like the above Stargate SG-1 scene where she talked about going back to a normal life after it was all over.

I was diagnosed with atypical cystic fibrosis in May 2001. I hope to return to something akin to a normal life maybe this year or next.

Twenty-one years is a long time, though it's small potatoes given an expected timeframe of never.

With willing hearts and skillful hands, the difficult we do at once; the impossible takes a bit longer.

The goal of managing health issues in this manner is to put health drama behind me and establish a normal life. The longer I work at it, the larger my window of opportunity grows for getting there.

Recover is about gradually, steadily moving the needle away from drama and back towards normal. This is somewhat counterintuitive and sort of the opposite of what Western medicine shoots for.

Western medicine tends to fight fire with fire. Dramatic, life-threatening health events get met with dramatic, heroic efforts.

I want to gently shrink the problem as much as possible. This is a death of my problems by a thousand paper cuts rather than by lopping the head off the snake.

That doesn't mean it isn't sometimes a pitched battle. It does mean what I do is gentle and nuanced compared to the strong drugs and surgeries that are the norm for treatment of CF and which I have gradually walked away from.

Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal. -- Albert Camus