How Are You Feeling?

One of the things about having a degenerative chronic illness is that people want to be nice, they want to be helpful, but they have absolutely no clue how to go about it.

My favorite is when someone asks the question "how are you feeling?"

Now, I know that the intention behind the question is good, but it leaves me struggling. First of all I have to try and ascertain what it is exactly that person wants to know. Because if you ask that question of an otherwise healthy person who has say a cold, well chances are good that they're on the upswing and can say, "much better today, temperature's almost normal!" You can walk away feeling good; you did a kindness by asking, and you know they're getting better.

But my friend Parkinson's disease isn't going away anytime soon, if ever, so when someone asks me how I'm feeling, I want to say, do you really want to know? And if so, how do you want me to answer, scale of one to ten maybe? Or shall I tell you what my own monitoring system told me today; balance seems a bit worse, slept pretty well last night though, my tremor is a little better, but last night it was really bad, all in all, I'd say I come in around a 5.3., and it'd be a little higher except for the German judge.

The answer that I really want to give is – "well, you see I have a degenerative illness, so the best way I can answer that is to say, I am worse today than I was a month ago and better than I'll be a year from now. "

I have a friend who has never asked me how I was feeling. But she brought it up once, saying that she wanted to be sure I understood the reason why she hadn't. She said, "even though I don't ask, I certainly think about it a lot, but I figure that when you have something you want to share with me, that you will. Is that the right thing?" I looked at her and said, "that is just the right thing."