I don’t do sick well. Or maybe there’s parts of it I don’t do well. I usually notice when illness strikes or when something’s wrong, having taught body awareness and embodiment practices for years. But the next step, figuring out the cause of what’s wrong, I’m not always good at that. Ten days ago, when my husband and I were coming to the end of our vacation, I awoke with painful pressure in my head and clogged ears. I thought I might have a sinuses infection. But these days, you always have to rule out COVID, so I took a test. It was negative, so I reasoned that my symptoms were from a sinus infection, something I used to get on occasion before COVID. I remember telling my husband I wasn’t sure I wanted to live, if this is how I’m going to feel, so we could say I’m pretty dramatic, and not very good at the patient suffering part of sickness. My husband, a compassionate man, went to the store and got me some medicine for symptom relief. I slept much of the day away, and by evening I was entertaining the notion that sometime in the future, life could be worth living.
In a bout with illness, grieving begins when we’ve lost our usual feel-good health, and the energy we need to pursue whatever we had planned for the day, or longer-term future, is gone. The next necessary step is a surrender to what our body needs–letting go of whatever was on our agenda, allowing the time necessary for our body to heal. Feeling sick does us a favor, making it easier to let go of our immediate life plans, but once we can control the symptoms, we can do what my friend Rose and I were fond of bragging about–“We’re both ‘Just take two aspirins and keep going’ kind of gals!”
There are situations, think major illnesses with lengthy treatment regimes, were that determination to carry on makes having any kind of life possible at all. You may have seen the television ads for various medications showing people enjoying energetic activities with friends and family, while living with challenging diseases. My daughter Corinne was the mother of three young children when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at 40 years of age. Throughout the 2 ½ years of her treatments, there were times when her biggest sorrow was that she couldn’t be with her children in ways that she would have wanted. Sometimes pushing through her own discomfort was necessary even to sit on the sidelines of the soccer or baseball game in her folding chair to cheer her young athletes on. Sometimes her energy level made mothering from the couch necessary, or when she was out of town for treatments, mothering had to happen through FaceTime. During periods of our lives when we’ve lost our good health, to artfully grieve requires acceptance of what’s possible in a particular situation, and wisdom regarding what’s necessary for our treatment and recovery.
“I’m getting what you have,” my husband said when we arrived home several days later from the onset of my symptoms. The following morning, he tested himself and I retested, and we discovered that we both had COVID. Dealing with my shock at this news, we googled and discussed the situation with a doctor friend learning that the recent variants sometimes do not show up if you test yourself too soon after exposure. I felt much sorrow for people I may have unknowingly exposed to the virus. So, I don’t get a good score in keeping up with the latest scientific realities and recommendations.
Our personal physicians assigned us different treatments and we were each compliant with the suggestions of our medical teams. But, in full disclosure about what kind of a patient I’ve been through the years, I must admit to trying to find a balance between my father’s view, (he didn’t believe in sick, almost never was, and took no medicine) and my nurse mother’s view, (she believed strongly in the medical professional, had many episodes of ill health, and took lots of medicine throughout the years.) I’ve always felt, and still do, that good health is our most precious possession, to be appreciated and guarded carefully because losing it inhibits our enjoyment of the rest of life’s gifts.
