Magic Wand

Sometimes I find myself thinking about the strangeness involved in having a chronic illness. Not just the physical failings of your body, but how it changes you in a way that is difficult to describe. Trying to understand what it means right now, and what it will mean in the future is quite surreal. It's not as if this thing that you've just been told you have is going to kill you, at least not for some time, and the diagnosis itself is anything but definitive, because degenerative illnesses seldom have a set course. Terminal illnesses tend to get most of the press, I think because they are inherently more dramatic. Hearing someone say "I have cancer" has a very different impact than hearing someone say "I have MS," for example. Not that it's a contest and anything that forces an acknowledgement of the fragility of your body sucks mightily. But it seems to me that the psychology of the two is completely different. When one gets an terminal illness I would guess it must feel as if you have an enemy to fight, and that enemy either wins or doesn't. When you find out you have a chronic illness on the other hand, it's more like you have an unwelcome visitor; a visitor who has no intention of leaving, ever. So, you have to find a way to befriend it, arrive at a détente, or at least form an uneasy alliance.

But the thing that is really interesting to me is to think about what I call my magic wand question. Here it is. If someone had a magic wand and by waving it over me (maybe with some sparkly stuff thrown in for good measure) and make it so I never would have had PD, would I take them up on the offer? I want to be clear on the details of the offer – not that I would suddenly be cured, but that I would have never had gotten the disease in the first place. Poof, gone, never happened. And I have to say, I wouldn't take them up on it. Why? Simple, because I wouldn't know who I would be without it.

A friend of mine received his own life-altering diagnosis a few years ago. I think it was day three after he got the news, and he was in a really bad place. During one of our several times daily phone conversations, I said to him, "I'm going to tell you something and I don't expect you to believe me, but I am asking you to trust me; you will find blessings in this." Well, in the moments of silence that followed, I could almost hear his struggle about whether to tell me to fuck off right then and there, and possibly never speak to me again, or to do his best to listen to what I had to say. Through clenched teeth he replied with something that indicated he was less than grateful for the news. I told him in response that I wasn't in any way shape or form saying that it was a good thing that had happened to him and that I wished more than anything that things were different. But, I repeated, I'm going to say it once more at the risk of you hating me forever, because I want you to hear me. "You will receive blessings in this."

Well, long story short, we laugh about it now. He's told me that I was indeed correct in my speculation that it was all he could do in that moment to refrain from hurling a string of epithets in my general direction and then hang up the phone.

But it somehow stuck in his brain, and I think, offered him a bit of hope. Now we often talk about those blessings. And so will I, in future posts.