Patience, Please

I have always found Oliver Sacks to be a man who was worth listening to, and his experiences as a patient are no different from his observations of his own patients.  It is very wise when you are thrust into the patient role, especially if it is going to last a long time, maybe the rest of your life,  to slow down, pick your battles and figure out what is really important.

All of which is far easier to say than it is to do, of course.  I am pretty sure that I have not even begun down this road.  When I had a prolonged hospitalization for abdominal surgery (they just will not let you go home until you can keep food down, and I was pretty resistant to complying with that criteria) I got a sense of the task in front of me.  Some things I could actually do for my self with a little ingenuity.  Those were the easy things to manage.  After that, though, there is a lot left over, and I had to prioritize what mattered and what did not.  Since I was fairly uncomfortable from the surgery itself, one priority was to minimize additional discomfort.  That helped a lot, because while there are many things that I would have done differently myself, there were very few things that made me uncomfortable to wait to have happen.  So I lay back, literally, read a few books, watched a season of a TV show, and channeled my inner patient patient, waiting to go home.  And it worked.  So up ahead, I need to continue on the path I made baby steps to go down.