I’ve never been good at being sick. I learned recently that the word “patient” comes from the Latin word “patior,” which means to suffer or bear. I understand this to mean that patients, in the healthcare context, are called patients because they’re patiently tolerating whatever suffering has befallen them and any outside interventions required to heal. I’m good at a lot of things, but patience is not one of them.
I like to check things off my to-do list in one efficient movement. I like to solve the problem, whether it’s an empty fridge that needs to be filled or an email that needs to be sent. Healing does not work this way – it is a constant effort, a long term project. It is not one pill, but often multiple, with several long naps and drinks of water in between. Maybe a doctor’s visit, or three, or thirty, with swabs and needles and machines that whirr. And sometimes after all that, you’re still sick, and you have to do it all over again until you’re not.
I can’t remember ever being taught how to slow the rhythm of my busy life for things like necessary rest or inconvenient medical care. I know I had my fair share of injuries as a kid, and that my caregivers always pulled me aside to slap a bandage on my bloody knee before I could get back on my bicycle. Still, I was gratefully able-bodied enough to never have to learn the hard and necessary practice of slowing down in order to operate at full speed. Once in elementary school, I got food poisoning in the middle of completing a project. While the aid walked me to the school nurse’s office, I asked, “What about my work?” She laughed like I was making a joke and said, “You don’t need to finish it. It’s okay.” While I sat on the vinyl exam table in the nurse’s office, my mind still flipped through images of half-glued construction paper, shapes that needed to be cut out, and the marker left uncapped on my desk.
I think I’m this way, in part, because I was raised by a single mother who didn’t often have the ability to put life on pause when illness struck her. Or maybe because that single mother was also a nurse who, as I hear is true of many healthcare professionals, is also not a good patient. She liked to see how long she could push through on her own before asking for help, and when she finally went to the doctor’s office, she’d tell them what she needed before they had a chance to tell her. The apple doesn’t fall far, I guess.
I’m not a nurse, and I’m not a mother. I’m a girl in her 20’s, living on her own with generalized anxiety and a compulsive tendency to do everything herself. Last year, when I woke up with a 103 degree fever, I biked to the drugstore before work to pick up some cough medicine, which I hoped would heal me quick enough to host my book club that evening. It didn’t. I had the flu for the rest of the week, but took no more than half a day off from my remote job to rest. These choices felt right at the time, like they weren’t even choices but necessary chores. Who would go to the store for me, if not myself? Who would do my job, if not me?
In retrospect, I know there were people around me I could have asked for help. I could have tapped a friend, leaned on my community. Many probably would have even been happy to help, because helping feels good. But at the time, that felt like a sign of weakness, like a chip in my proud armor of radical independence. This moment did not teach me how to ask for help, but it did teach me that most things can wait. Meetings can be rescheduled. Plans can be canceled. Things can, and will, be okay if I need to take myself out of the game for a few days.
I still don’t think I know how to ask for help, but I’m getting better at learning to accept it when it’s offered. I’m writing this from bed, kept company by a pile of used tissues. Someone who loves me is making my breakfast while I bask under the humidifier’s steady vapor stream. Precedent states that whoever doesn’t cook is supposed to clean, but he’ll do both today, then kiss me on the head before he runs to the store to pick up cough drops and honey. He’ll make me tea and soup, and watch half a movie with me before I fall asleep on the couch at 8 PM. My water glass will never go dry, my sneezes never unblessed, and when he catches my cold in a handful of days, I will do all of these things for him.
Ironically, it feels easier to let people do things for me when I’m not sick. It’s when I need the help of others that it becomes hard to bear, mostly because I know I have done (and theoretically could do) it all myself. Still, I’m comforted by the privilege of being loved enough to not have to do it all myself. It’s why, on healthy days, I make him coffee and catsit for my friends and help my mom clean the expired condiments out of her fridge. Love is the same in sickness and in health, and even if its recipients aren’t, it is patient.
I’ve never been good at being sick either! What a great article!