Published by
Amy under
Friends,
Jesus,
Residency on
September 19, 2011
The sermon on Sunday was on good friends.
The kind of friends who you can show up dripping wet on their door step after the worst day and they will let you in, let you cry a bit, tell you to clear off the laundry from the sofa and rest or hand you a crying baby and to get busy (which ever seems the right reaction). The kind who tell you the truth both good and bad. And the kind of friends that point you to Christ and speak wisdom into your life.
I am blessed young woman. Because at quick count I can count about 10 friends like that in my life.
Then the sermon went on to making your life where you are, finding those friends where you are and locally because thats how the local church was. The elder argued that we cant live elsewhere. We have to live here and now.
I shifted uncomfortably. I have tried very, very hard to build roots like that here. But frankly they just have not dug deep. I go to things post-call, I go to things when I am so sleepy I can’t stay awake, I am in a small group, I go to social events, I go to church and I have done these things for a year an half but the people who are the friends that keep me sane are not here.
One out the 10 are local and they followed me here from NC. You may ask how I make this work. How I deal with my best friends being far way? How I keep myself accountable? How I keep myself sane? Well when you grew up all over the US and plan on living all over the world…you learn fast.
I felt guilty about this and then I just realized you know this is a season of my life. God knows I have tried and he seems to have brought people into my life for the right seasons. I have faith he has done the same here.
Maybe its not the 15 people in my small group, maybe its the 6 amazing young women in my residency program who I spend consistent time with. Maybe its the children who steal my heart, maybe its the preparation for having my friends a continent a way.
Here’s the truth. I am a little bit more of a Paul/Priscilla kind of figure than a Lydia or Mary/Martha. Jesus have multiple friends in different cities. I am a nomad by birth and by calling.
So make new friends, invest in where you are, yes. But keep the old.
Published by
Amy under
Disability Stuff,
Patient-ness,
Random,
Residency on
September 7, 2011
I have been in 7-8/10 right hip pain post-call for about a month and half.
Yesterday was Grand Rounds and I was post call. It was on chronic pain in connective tissue disorders….NO REALLY it was. I slumped in the back, ate my oatmeal and hoped that sleep would overtake me quickly. It was all fun and games while the geneticist gave an explanation of connective tissue disorders. Then the rheumatologist went on about Fibromyalgia and JIA. I drifted in and out. Then the psychologist got up to talk and went on about chronic pain and patients (our) poor quality of life. And how much they (we) feel persecuted in the hospital when they come seeking meds and how they pass up activites they would otherwise enjoy and then how there is a higher rate of suicide. They went on to talk about new research studies that were ongoing looking at day hospital treatment for chronic pain. and cognitive therapy.
I sat there in the corner in my imaginary white coat (I never wear one, it scares kids) and shook my sleepy head at this. Its all fun and games until someone misses the point. Maybe part of why we have a higher rate of suicide and “poor quality of life “is not so much our pain but the medicine we use to treat it. And medicine in the literal and larger sense.
What if instead of taking our chronic pain patients out of society and out of school to be in a day hospital program, we find ways to help them engage in life? What if instead of giving narcotics like candy to our sickle cell population, we tired alternate methods or we at least stop complaining about how they are addicts because WE (the doctors WE) gave them their addiction!! What if we stop trying to make pain less depressing and find ways to make life more worth living? What is our goal, be pain free, or be living our lives?
I agree grand rounds friends, chronic pain is a mind game.
But its some what clear to me that you have never played.
Chronic pain is a series of choices. Difficult choices. Defining choices but choices never the less. Every day you wake up and you decide what rules today? My life or my pain? Do I fit my pain around my life or fit my life around my pain? You can tiptoe around on eggshells and slip and fall or you can run and not look back. You don’t choose to live with pain but you do choose to live to the fullest. TO live with joy. To live with gratitude.
Doctors, all the study show we are actually quite bad at understanding what “quality of life” means to our patients so maybe we should listen to them.
I rolled my eyes and my wheels and took my poor quality of life upstairs to rounds and helped save some lives. Then I went home, had a mug of tea, a long bath and a nap. I woke up and read a book, went to bible study, came home and finished the book.
Like I said me and my poor quality of life…..
