Motivation

I hope you never get to know "that feeling."  The feeling when someone you love tells you that they have a disease that you have never heard of and that disease will eventually kill them.  We don't know when, but sometime in the future that disease will take hold and that person you love will have to go into treatment probably involving them getting pumped full of chemicals and having key parts of their anatomy replaced.  You know that this process will mean that they will be sick and in pain and despite this all that this treatment will do is give them time.  Time, not a cure.  There is no cure.

What you do at this point varies.  Some cry, some get up and walk away and if you're me you sit there while every memory, every fight, every moment with them flashes through your mind, and every single thing you thought they'd be there to see becomes uncertain.  You tell yourself not to cry because you don't want them to see your tears.

You spend the next weeks in disbelief.  The world around you changes.  I found myself getting bitter and angry.  It's not fair, but no amount of wanting it to be fair or different will make it so.  You cry all the time for what many people think is no reason.  You're lost.  You've lost control of your life and how it was supposed to be.  No one is supposed to know, so you do this all in silence.  Eventually you have to tell people because the secret is too much to bear and you can't stand the way people look at you.

Some people tell you that it will be alright, just think positive.  You want to punch those people in the face.  Others will give you that look of sheer pity and you want to scream at them "I don't want your pity!"  You want your life back the way it was, that's all you want.  You want a life where every thing that person you love does isn't another sign that the disease is taking hold.  Every time they're tired, every time they get a nosebleed you wish that you could resist the temptation to hold your breath.  All you want is for things to go back to the way they were, but they won't.

You listen to the way they talk.  They talk about the future like they won't be there.  They talk about their condition like it's inevitable and you want to scream at them "FIGHT DAMN IT!  Don't let it get you!"  But you don't and part of you feels like they've already lost.  You watch as this person who was once larger than life becomes complacent in their prognosis and you get angry with them.  You get angry that they aren't being more positive, more proactive, that they aren't doing all the things you know they'd tell you to do if the tables were turned.  You just want them to say "I will NOT let this get me."  But they don't.

You need to be able to do something.  Anything to change the outcome.  You would give anything to make it better, so you search and you find out more about the disease and what you can do to help.

That is what I've done.  I am doing the only thing I can to keep me sane.  I have raised $3100 so far in my quest to fight the disease that my loved one is facing and I will soon be strapping on my running shoes for the fight of my life, my first half marathon.  I will be struggling through 21.1 kms, but that is nothing compared to what that person is struggling through and I will do this every opportunity I get until there comes a day that someone else doesn't have to get "that feeling."

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