Mondays with Mike: Beats the alternative

Was it a virus? I don’t care, I feel better already!

Last night I woke up in the in the wee hours feeling like a little volcano was erupting in my stomach, forcing nearby areas to evacuate. It might have been something I ate, or a gastrointestinal virus, but at this point it doesn’t matter. I know it wasn’t the flu, because I’m sitting up straight and working on this blog. This morning, that didn’t seem possible.

Right now I’m having that feeling where, really, I’m still wiped out, but by comparison, I’m positively bouncy. Even if still in my robe. Feeling good is relative. Of course, while in the trenches of misery, I was resolving to go to the gym more often, eat better, you know the drill.

But that gall-bladder attack feeling so awful that I wanted to leave my body behind until it got its act together reminded me that, a) we humans can’t do that and so I had to suck it up and grin and bear it, and b) I’ve been pretty lucky for a long while to be mostly healthy.

I seem to have reached a new stage of life. I mean, I still feel like I’m 25, looking for the next adventure. But before I can embark, I feel the need to call out “oil can,” like The Tin Man, to get things humming.

Beth’s always dealt with a chronic disease—type 1 diabetes and all its ravages. And for the better part of my life, in a real way, I have, too. I watched her lose her eyesight, and I spent more hours that I can count maintaining hospital vigils for her and for Gus.

Any time I’d rant about how illogical and inefficient the health care system was, most friends looked at me with glazed eyes. Some would pretty much run away. I’ve come to realize that they just couldn’t relate. We were all 20-somethings, and had been healthy and had minimal experience with the system.

I’ve come to understand that because of my unique experiences compared to our cohorts, there were some lonely periods. I struggled with how far I should go with the stiff upper lip thing—I didn’t want people to think either of us couldn’t do something because our lives were taxing enough. Our lives could be really hard sometimes and I wanted to be able to say that without people thinking we were whining. Sometimes I think I isolated myself.

Fast forward, and whaddya know? No one gets out of here alive, and the people around us are catching up to us in maladies suffered, doctor visits, and hospital visits. A few weeks ago, Beth turned to me and asked, “Do you think that for the rest of our lives we’ll know at least one person going through radiation or chemo?” I would’ve liked to have said, “Nah.” I didn’t say anything.

I don’t like it much.

For one, I don’t want to lose friends or see them suffer. For another, I’ll be honest, I feel like I went through this whole health problems thing once, and now I have to do it again? Who do I see about this?

But I like to think that one upside of the struggles in our twenties is that it may have taught me, just a little, about how to be a comfort. It requires walking a line. The people that helped me keep afloat made themselves available. They knew when to be there, and when not to intrude. Being there has an intrinsic value. You don’t need to provide answers. Be there.

Just as important, they knew that sometimes, they could see things we couldn’t, and the injected themselves at just the right time and the right way. Sometimes, it’s best to intrude.

When I was in college literature classes, I used to scratch my head when professors or TAs would say something heavy like, “This book wrestles with the human condition.” What are they talking about, I thought, what’s the big deal about this human condition?

Now I know. The human body is both miraculous and wretched. We love people only to lose them or leave them behind. We want to live on, vaguely, but what if that life bears little resemblance to life as we have known it? Financial companies implore us to plan, plan, plan and make sure we have enough money to ,,, I don’t know. We are asked to trade off the present with future, when despite our best efforts, the future is one big crapshoot.

I don’t know about any of it.

What I do know is we just bought tickets to see the Sox play the Cubs in a spring training game—and Nancy Faust will be playing the organ!

The White Sox are still in the running for Manny Machado.

Last Saturday we made new friends over a scrumptious pot of red beans and rice made with the Camellia beans our friend Seth gave us while were visiting New Orleans last week.

We’re doing our best, and it ain’t all bad.