How narrow can your vision get, exactly? Ask yourself honestly: When you are pissed off, tired, irritated, feeling imposed upon, taken for granted, overworked, underpaid, overwhelmed and underappreciated, how small – narrow, shallow, small minded and closed hearted – can your perspective devolve to?
Speaking for myself, pretty darned small.
It ain’t pretty, this closedminded, spiteful, arrogant (one might even say ‘sanctimonious’ and one wouldn’t be far wrong) self that crawls out of my own personal primordial ooze when less-than-positive feelings start tipping the teeter-totter their way.
Let me tell a story (because it is what I do.)
While working a very busy job split between several hospitals, the therapist who normally handled home-health patients took a vacation. Why? At the time I concluded principally to inconvenience me. She may in fact have had other motivations. So of course, on a particularly busy day, I got a call that a home health patient had been referred. And to make matters even better, the patient was nearly an hour away.
This would mean I would be getting home very late indeed, as I couldn’t leave the hospital jobs early to carve out the time. I grumbled. And I groaned. And I complained to anyone unfortunate enough to come within 10 feet of me about my troubles and travails. People were duly sympathetic. Poor me. Poor, poor me. But in the absence of actual choices, once done at my hospital sites, at nearly 3, I drove out the hour plus to see this patient.
She was a hospice patient. It was a little unusual to have hospice referrals, but they did happen. Swallowing problems are in the purview of my discipline, and a terminal patient might need help there. This was the case on this day.
After getting lost twice, I found the little cottage where the patient lived. I climbed the stairs and made my way to her. She was bundled up in her bed, covered in blankets, thin and bright-eyed. She told me her problem: she was having difficulty with her swallowing, and she wanted – more than anything – to eat a steak. It was all she was hungry for.
I had reviewed her chart before walking into the house. And although her history and her diagnosis were there for me, one key piece was missing: her prognosis. Now, “hospice” presumed terminal, but that could mean anything up to a year. And as I looked at the thin face with the attentive eyes I asked, as kindly as I could, “how long?”
“Two, maybe three months,” she answered.
The numbers failed to match the strength of the voice that responded to me, and while trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance in my head, my mouth engaged and I said, “I’m sorry. How do you feel about that?”
To this day I do not know why I asked the question. If I had thought clearly, I would have labeled it stupid, invasive, clueless or all three at once. I regretted the words as soon as they escaped. “How do you feel about dying in three months?” It would have been utterly fair if she had sarcastically responded with, “Like crap. How do you think I feel?”
So imagine my shock when she answered simply, “Emancipated.”
More confusion on my part. “Emancipated?” I asked. “Why?”
And she told me. She told me how before she knew about the quick terminal illness, she’d been diagnosed with a slow, progressive one. How the thought of the slow, progressive one – which would day by day drain her body, her mind, and her bank account – terrified her with its inevitable debility and dependence. How she was afraid she would exhaust her friends and family in her demands for care. How she was afraid of what her world would look like when she ran out of funds. How she was terrified of her quick mind slipping away without even the ability to recognize the loss.
But now she would go quickly. With her loved ones around her, her finances intact, with even a little left for the people who mattered most to her. Medical care that would keep her as free of pain as it could until the end. An end which would come in quick months with her mind able to appreciate each of the days she had left, instead of slow years where one day would bleed memoryless into the other.
And in that biological conundrum was her emancipation.
“I see,” I said once she had explained. And I did. With so much depth and clarity that I could feel its resonance in the moment it happened, clear through my body all the way down to the feet that rested on the multi-colored braided rug next to her bed. Understanding struck in that moment, sitting next to her in her west-facing bedroom with the late afternoon sun slipping away from us and turning the light a rich orange. I did not need later pondering to appreciate this gift, it took no slow realization. I was blessed to see it all and feel it all right then and there.
I wracked my brain for her, thinking up every trick I’d learned in my years in the field to try and make a piece of steak edible for her. She didn’t want hamburger – nothing chopped or ground. She wanted STEAK. If anything, my experience cooking may have been brought more to bear on that exchange than my experience as a speech pathologist, but between the two cortical file cabinets, I hope I found enough strategies that at least a few bites of steak the way she wanted to have it was within her reach.
And as I left, going down her stairs with the sunset infusing the sky with radiant reds and yellows, I savored the moment when “I have to go see this patient,” became “I got to go see this patient.” Because what I wanted to remember most was that moment of transition – when my sour outlook was swept away by a joyous one, when a misfortunate inconvenience became a celebration. I needed to remember that, because the next time my psyche sank into a state of cynicism and my perspective could see no further than the next annoyance, I might not be so lucky to have an apple fall from the sky onto my head.
Apples simply don’t fall like that every day. And really, I’m no Isaac Newton.
