I am Grateful

In the comfort of my own home I find my thoughts returning to my recent admission to hospital. I was initially parked in a two bedder ward while waiting for a single room to become available, and I remember feeling rather like an intruder.

There was already a lady patient there near the window, hidden by curtains, surrounded by women and possibly in her 70's. I was lost in my daze of abdominal pain and busy trying to subdue my groans and moans because I didn't want to disturb her. Her doctor appeared and then, in that relatively small space that we shared, I entered into her narrative, only because her doctor had the loudest of voices and liked hearing himself speak.

The lady had brain cancer, and had to decide between localising radiation and risking missing tumours or irradiating her whole brain and probably accelerating dementia and experiencing a poorer quality of life sooner. As I lay there, softly moaning while curled up in a fetal position, the thought crossed my mind that she was probably going to die.

I suddenly felt so flaky and fake in comparison... there because a chronic illness I've lived with for two decades has flared up again and yet not having a terminal illness to battle. I felt so healthy suddenly despite my pain. It was excruciating pain but I knew I would live through it as I have in the past, leave the hospital on my own two feet, go home to my family and some day soon eat again and do the stuff I enjoy doing... till the next flare pulls the rug out from under my feet again, or maybe not. But I knew I was going to live and I also knew that the lady next to me did not have that reassurance. Hers was a choice of killing off healthy cells in her brain... by a matter of degrees. Not much of a choice, really.

I was moved to my own room soon enough and I don't know what happened to the lady. I do know that I felt grateful to have a chronic illness as opposed to a terminal one, though one might prefer no illness at all! I think it's a good time to focus on gratitude as a proper attitude in life, especially when one sees how everything is relative.

My gratitude for chronic illness is relative to the fact that I am not dying from illness. Not yet anyway. In fact, we are all slowly decaying but most of us will take a long time to truly fall apart. I feel, however, that my time in life has shortened with chronic illness. And so my gratitude is all the more necessary and timely. So little time, and so much to be grateful for in life. Indeed. May we have the wisdom to truly number our days well. 

Thanks for reading,

Pav