Effort & Illness: The Confusing Habits of Sick People

Since I surround myself with people who know better, no one’s yet given me the dreaded words You don’t look sick. Even people who do look sick often don’t look as bad as they feel*.  As Jen Fulwiler explained it last year:

I feel self-conscious that I’ve been doing better, and have no visible symptoms of being ill. . . . I worry that the folks dropping off the food are starting to suspect this is some kind of scam. The other day a super sweet lady from the parish came by with a steaming gourmet dinner for our entire family, complete with appetizers and dessert. I had just gotten back from a doctor’s appointment so I was dressed up and wearing makeup; I’d been resting most of the day so I was unusually energetic. She seemed tired from having worked so hard to cook for our entire family in addition to her own, and I used my Neurotic ESP to determine that she was wondering why I wasn’t cooking for her.

I told Joe that I should get some crutches for when I answer the door for people delivering meals, as a symbolic gesture to assure them that their efforts were not wasted. He looked at me like I was insane, and pointed out the obvious fact that my problem is with my lungs and that I would have no use for crutches under any circumstances. I said that I know, but they sell them at the grocery store, and I didn’t know where to get my hands on a ventilator — and, again, it’s all for symbolism anyway. He backed away from me slowly and went to pour himself a large glass of wine.

Yes.  This. I put a short section in my catechist book on invisible disabilities, because it’s something that comes up in religious ed more often than you’d think.  Mostly among catechists, but among students as well.  That one chapter is the one I get the most thank you letters about.

You can be seriously ill without being 100% incapacitated.

It’s pretty rare for someone to be completely felled in a single blow.  This causes confusion, because you see people wandering WalMart who look like they’re going to collapse any second now.  So if your sick person still has good balance and coordination, and manages to answer the phone in a cheerful manner, you think, “Must not be that sick.  There are people at WalMart who look much, much worse.”

The people at WalMart might be worse.  But that doesn’t cause the sick person to be less sick.

Some people are good at putting on.

I knew a lady once who would answer the phone cheerfully even if you woke her up at 4AM.  It wasn’t that she wanted you to call then.  She just had excessively good phone manners.  And thus the Perceived Illness Paradox: Some people complain a lot, other people don’t.  Some people are good at masking their symptoms, other people aren’t.  Some people are good at coming up with clever work-arounds that keep them high-functioning, other people aren’t.  You really can’t judge how someone feels inside by how they’re acting outside.

Rest makes a difference.

Anyone who races knows you manage your training schedule so that you peak when it counts.  There are days when you can ride hard and fast, no problem, and days when you can’t.  Depends on how much sleep you got.  What you did the day before.  What you did the week before.

Illness doesn’t change that, it just changes the scale.

Figuring out an unpredictable body is exhausting.

Normal people spend most of their time operating well within the margins of their abilities.  If you knew you had to ride 100 miles on your bike sometime soon, you’d have to plan ahead to make sure you could do it.  You’d strategize how to make it happen with as little trouble as possible.  But you wouldn’t feel the least bit of guilt if you misjudged: “Wow, that was easier than I thought it would be, why did I make such a big deal out of it?”  Or conversely, “I knew it would be hard, but I didn’t realize how hard!”

Sick people have to figure out the 100-mile ride about everything they do . . . and then get in trouble if they misjudge.  “Why’d you spend half an hour answering e-mails? You should have rested up so you could talk to your mother on the phone!”  Or “Why’d you put off that phone call, look, you talked for twenty minutes, no problem!”

It’ll make you bonkers.  You hear the mail truck go by, and you think to yourself, “Should I walk to the mailbox?  Or get a kid to do it for me?  What’s the best thing here? How will this decision impact my family life?”

What you like is easier than what you don’t like.

Sick people are confusing because their gifts don’t go away.  Okay, if your gift is watching football on TV, everyone will think, “Look he spends all day watching football games, he must be sick.”  But what is hard for you is effortless for someone else. What is easy — even fun — for you is difficult for someone else.  It’s not about the sheer physical energy required.  It’s the mental energy.

So my son might say to my daughter, “I see you have plenty of time for scrapbooking.  Why don’t you research computer components?  What’s wrong with you?  Just lazy, I see.”  And she’d point out to him that he received a photo album for Christmas, and he’s supposed to put his photos in it.  He had time to build a computer, and even more time for playing computer games . . . why so lazy with the photo album?

Everything costs.

There’s service to your fellow man, and then there’s letting your fellow man turn you into his servant. We live in a hyper-critical age.  What you wear, what you eat, what your hobbies are, how you spend your money — all of it is subject to the approval of seven billion self-appointed guardians.  That doesn’t change when you’re sick, it just becomes harder to please the seven billion, because you’ve got less to please them with.

Normal people might say, for example, “Is it worth it for me to give up an hour of my time to visit my crotchety uncle who invited me for dinner tonight?”  When you’re sick the question becomes, “Is it worth it for me to set aside an entire afternoon to rest, and give up getting any chores done, at all, the entire day, so that I can physically pull off the feat of visiting my uncle for an hour?”

In normal life, a dysfunctional friend is the one who makes inordinate demands on your time and energy.  In sick life, everything is an inordinate demand.  But some of those demands are very gratifying, so you organize your life to make them possible. The chief sin of sick people, I suspect, is in gratifying too many whims.

Order in all things.

Sick people are confusing because of the scale change.  With so little room for covering-over, it becomes obvious what the sick person values most.  It becomes obvious where the conflicts lie, because there’s no margin where you can quick slip in a nod towards other people’s priorities.  As in academia, the rivalries can be so bitter because the stakes are so small.  “Just a few minutes of your time” is now also, “all your time”.  How are you going to spend all that time? The way you want?  The way I want? Something in between?

The Darwins have a novena started on just this question.

*Sometimes things look so bad that you assume the other way, “It’s not as bad as it looks, I hope?”  To which I’ll observe: A badly scraped knee looks horrible.  But it feels even worse.

Rant-o-Rama – Catechesis Edition + Proof I Can’t Proofread But You Should Write Your Story Anyway

1. If you haven’t seen Dorian Speed’s posts on Catechesis, look now. #2 is up.  Don’t neglect the combox.  But here’s what: If your parish has to wring hands over whether to give the 2nd Graders a pre-sacramental quiz, the question isn’t, “Should we give a quiz?” The question is, “How have we gotten into this bind, and what do we need to do radically differently from now on?”

The answer is not in the quiz.  It’s not about the quiz.  Soul at a time.  Soul. at. a. time.

2.  You should never, ever, write something like this:

There’s a fine line between humility and stupidity, and I try my best to stay on the better-edited side of that line.

Yes, I used the word “try”. I was trying.  I was. trying.  I proofread that post.  I did.  Proofread. Solemn assurances of truth-telling.  And yet we’ve found three egregious typos in it so far today.  Read it yourself and see what else you find.

[Hint: I tell you that if you like to write, you should write the stuff you like to write.  Not complicated, and yet weirdly people get all confused about this.  Also I plug the CWG, because trust me your favorite best-selling mega-busy author is not your critique service.  But the CWG?  We do this.  Amateurs welcome.]

3. Back to catechesis: Allow me to tell you a terrible story. I once had a DRE tell me how much she loved her current job, because it was so different from her previous parish.  “Here, all the catechists go to Mass on Sundays!”

I was happy for her. I was.

But seriously.   Problems in catechesis run deep.  It’s not about the quiz.  The quiz conundrum is the nasty festering ulcer everyone’s tempted to chop off, and maybe it does need to be chopped off, or filled with leeches or maggots or I dunno what.  But until you figure out what’s causing that festering wound, new ones are going to keep popping up.  There are bigger problems.  Deeper problems.  Fix those.

4.  Prayer and fasting.  That’s how.

Knowing vs. Really Knowing

Sunday morning list of things we pretty much knew, but now we’re absolutely certain:

1. I was not made for wedding processions.  Barring strict orders otherwise, I’ve given it up.  Walk at a decent clip, cough cough cough, and sleep half the day.  Much better.  Moderation is overrated.

2.Properly-deployed Extraordinary Ministers of the Eucharist *rock*.  You who are prone to getting your socks in a wad over Speed Communion, in your Therese-like practice of self-control, resist the urge to make snarky comments to your pastor about how he’s doing it wrong.  The handy thing about parishes that unleash a fleet of EME’s at every Mass is that you know exactly whom to call when you’ve got a sick person at home.  So maybe your pastor’s doing it right after all.

3. Go to daily Mass when you can, and you’ll have it to draw upon when you can’t.  Nothing beats the silence of a good weekday Mass.  Grab one as often as you’re able, and that silence banks up in your soul.  It doesn’t go away.  Go when you can.  When you can, go.

(#3 I didn’t actually know.  It’s a pleasant surprise.)

A Feast Day Gift for You & Your Friends

If you are looking for some Petrine thoughts out of me today, take a look at the workbook I put together for today’s CCW retreat.  It’s conveniently stored on this page here on the blog, and this is the direct link to the PDF. It is not for sale, but you may use it and reuse it and pass it around.

Please keep the retreat folks in prayer.  Might I observe that the Joyful Mysteries are perfect for this sort of occasion?  Those of you who won’t see this request until after the retreat is over, consider yourself part of the post-retreat-letdown-prevention wing of the prayer group. Thanks!

Hey, and Pray for the Pee Dee Council of Catholic Women’s Retreat!

You praying types (that’s all of you, right?), mission for today and tomorrow:

Today: Please pray for Deacon F., who’s going to be giving the retreat in my stead.  Pray that God will give him wisdom and courage as he prepares, and that he will put together the retreat these ladies need, regardless of how that matches up with the notes and stuff I sent him.

Tomorrow: Please pray for those attending the retreat, that God will use this retreat to draw them closer to Him, and to help them to live more and more the way God is calling them.  Please pray specifically that those who need to come will be able to come, and that our Lord will use this as a stepping stone in the evangelization of the SC coast.

Thanks!

Sinful People Wanted.

It’s the 16th so that means I’ve got Gospel Reflecting Duty at CatholicMom.com.   I submitted this back in January, and frankly this morning as I was reading the Gospel, I found myself wondering, I wonder what I wrote about this?  Nothing I’m thinking of, or that I’ve read around online in various homily-blogs, is what *I* wrote, but I can’t remember what exactly I wrote.

So looked.  Just now.  Hey, I remember that!  Oh yeah!  And I think I did good, too. 

But you can verify.

On Faith: Sticking the Corners

The other day I compared the infernal Circle of Pulmonology to bicycle racing, and intentionally communicated one thing — pulmonologists, take care of your immortal souls!, or something like that — and realized I’d also let slip another: I was not a particularly *good* cyclist.  But I liked it.  And so, as with most things I like, I managed to get myself firmly into the middle of the pack by sheer enthusiasm and willpower.

I was so reliably middle-of-the-pack on the road bike that you could literally count the size of the women’s field for the day’s race, divide by two, and know what place I’d come in.  I placed 6th overall one year in the NC-SC State Championship Road Race because 12 women entered.  I medaled — bronze — for SC, because of the field of 12, six were from SC.  It always, always worked that way. Except one time.

The one time was a criterium in downtown Greenville. In a crit, you go round and round a short circuit for a lot of laps.  A typical ladies’ crit would take about half an hour, max, and because the course is short, in a small field of women at a local race, the pack tends to stay tight.  All of us average riders would just hang on and suck wheel, and the better ladies would pull us long grudgingly because they couldn’t quite breakaway. The race would be won at the sprint.

So this course in Greenville was unusually hilly, and the last corner was nuts, as road cyclists see it.  You descended fast, took a sharp left, and then sprinted back up hill again. The finish line was right at the top as you came out of that corner.  Without the corner, the sprint would have begun at the top of the downhill — pick up as much momentum as possible, to get you back up that last hill and over the line.

But because of that corner, you could only go as fast on the downhill as you were willing to move through that corner.  The course was clean enough — no debris or gravel or anything — but too much speed and you’d wipe out on that last turn.  And if you don’t make the turn, the faster you’re going, the worse the crash is going to be.

So Jon and a friend and I rode the course together before the race.  Big question: How fast can you take that turn?  Pretty fast, as it happens. I mountain biked before I road biked, so my bike handling skills were good.  Rock climbing + rugby + scary exposed gravely mountain biking with nutso turns . . . these things prepare you for a crit. Which is something of a combination of all three, accelerated.

And thus a strategy emerged: Sit in the pack for the race, and see how the other ladies take that corner.  And if they’re slow . . . go wide and get ahead of the pack on that final downhill, scream through that turn, and be back up the hill again.

But you can’t waffle.  Once you go wide, you’re committed.  The only way out is through that corner. Period.

This is what faith is.  Sticking that corner.  You know how it’s supposed to go. Everything up until this point in your life has given you reason to believe it’s going to work.  Maybe it’s a stretch, or maybe you’ve got good solid evidence.  But you won’t really know until it’s done. Until you’ve turned that corner, you haven’t turned that corner.

So we got into the bell lap. I hung in the pack, but worked my way forward a bit.  When we got to the top of the last downhill, I went wide and picked up speed.  No one else followed.  You feel a lot crazy when you do something that *should* be the obvious strategy, and no one else follows.

By the time I reached the bottom of the hill with the sharp left, I was all by myself.  No one was on my wheel.  No one was even close.

The only way out is through that corner. Or else through the crowd + signs + buildings. Nice big crowd down there, because everyone always gathers where the crash is going to be.

What do you do?  You stick that corner.

Do it like you mean it, and find out if you were right.

So that’s what I did.

And I’m not dead or anything, so it worked.

Jesus and the Laundry Fairy

Two weeks ago I was still ostensibly the person responsible for doing laundry, though I’ll allow that a party of alpinists had contacted us about permits for ascending Mt. Foldmore.  But let’s harken back to the days of old, when it sometimes happened that a person could toss his clothes into the laundry hamper, and a few days later find those clothes clean, and folded, and waiting in the drawer or closet for their next use.

There’s was something of cycle to it, though, and often the sock and underwear drawers would get perilously empty.  And then one day, just when things had gotten very grim, a certain SuperHusband would wake up and discover his drawers were restocked, and he would proclaim, “Behold! The Laundry Fairy has come!”

And I would remind him that there is no Laundry Fairy. That was your wife who did that for you, thank you very much.

***

This morning’s Gospel is one of those miraculous feedings of the crowds.  (Mark 8:1-10).  What caught my eye today wasn’t the Jesus part, it was the people part.  Our Lord observes, “They’ve been with me three days now, and have nothing to eat.  If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will collapse on the way, for they have come a great distance.”  The disciples up the stakes: “Where can anyone get enough bread to satisfy them, here in this deserted place?”

Those are the miracle conditions.  You’ve stuck around with the Jesus Person until you’ve run out of food and have no way of getting more.  You didn’t bail even as you approached the point of no return.

You’ve let yourself get desperate.  Empty-handed.  No way to make it on your own.

–> There’s an aid to faith here, by the way, if you can stick through the tempting part, the getting-out-while-you-still-can.  Once your case is hopeless, there’s really not much point in trying to turn elsewhere.  Makes it easier to stick the final corners.

And that’s when the miracle shows up.  Not before.  If there’s something consistent in the Gospels, it’s that desperation.  Joyful, hopeful?  Sometimes, yes.  But unequivocal: Jesus isn’t one more tool in the portfolio. It’s got to come down to Him being the only way.

(And yeah: You’re left as your only hope with Someone who’s idea of goodness involves self-sacrifice and an eternal outside-of-time-frame.  If what you want is a patched-up Old Earth, you’re fresh out of luck.  That’s not what He does.  Not how He does it.)

Of course God sends us thousands of natural helps every day as well.  Our very existence — in this life or the next one — is only by virtue of Him keeping us here.  But either way, whether in the day-to-day miracle of ordinary life, or the big moments of divine intervention on this side of the grave or the other, there’s a consistent theme: No Laundry Fairy.  That was Me, thank you very much.

****

Back to practical stuff: SuperHusband’s taken over the mom-jobs like groceries and meals and laundry, but in a pared-back way that makes it not so overwhelming.  Our friends and family are totally showing up to do all the extras, like getting kids to activities, or whipping out dinner when we’re way late getting home from doctors appointments. I had three different people offer to step in and get the girls their valentine supplies. All that makes the load on Jon much, much lighter.

But something specifically laundry-related that we did was to give me a basket in the bedroom where my clean laundry lives. So no one ever has to put my laundry away in drawers and closets, only to have to pull it back out again. The nice thing about my particular state of decrepitude is that it isn’t fashion-intensive*. A pair of jeans to wear and one to wash.  Ditto on PJ’s.  Underwear, socks, a pile of t-shirts, a jacket.  That’s it.  You can store all that in a single laundry basket, no problem. None of it really needs to be ironed.  Works great.

*In contrast, in normal life on any given day I might have:

• Work clothes for doing stuff in the yard
• Normal less-grungy clothes
• Church clothes
• Possibly something business-y, or business-casual.
• Usually not workout clothes, because normal stuff works for that, but maybe yes, depending.

Completely different game.

And as long as we’re playing the gratitude game, you know whom I really appreciate? The people who’ve picked up slack for me on stuff I could do, but they could do instead.  It is remarkable how much fortitude gets consumed on accomplishing very very little.  I’m massively thankful for the slack I’ve been cut in a few places.  Pure luxury.

And some Valentines . . .

Sticking to the Sts. Cyril & Methodius theme:

At the blorg, I get into that “What’s the point of religious ed?” debate again.  On Catechesis: Love and Common Sense.

And at AC, I send a Valentine to a lady who needs your prayers, and also my husband in the process. Marriage Only Has Meaning if It’s a Lifelong Commitment.

Many happy returns of the day!

Plague Journal, Catechesis & Socialization Edition

Plague Journal as a theme is getting mighty old.  Good news: After asking a few friends to pray, I’ve upgraded from “death warmed over” to “death minced with bacon and turned into a proper hash, thank you very much.”  So I’m back to writing stuff again, that’s good.

Meanwhile, since you’re reading this it means you either have time to pray more, or else you have something dreadful to offer up. I’m asking specifically for prayers that: (a) I’ll get an accurate dx on this most recent round o’ plague, and (b) that I’ll get done everything I need to do.  The stuff I don’t need to do? Whatever.  Just the important things, thanks, that’s all I’m asking for.

Meanwhile, some things I wrote before this bout set in quite so aggressively:

At CatholicMom.Com, I answer the old “socialization” question.  I know. I thought I didn’t care about that argument anymore,either.  Then I saw a real live human being worry about it. So it became a topic again.

And if that doesn’t raise your blood pressure enough, at AmazingCatechists.com, I wade into the raging debate over whether we ought to have religious education classes for children at all. Lisa Mladnich tells me I’m insightful and clear-thinking, so that settles it.  Read the other opinions, than go see my article to find out what you’re really supposed to think.