Friday, January 14, 2011

Outer and Inner Snows

It is cold here in the Northeast. We are digging out from Tuesday's significant snow. It was a fluffy snow so it's not to hard to shovel.

Life is a lot like that. We get some storms that are heavy and hard where the emotional shovels and medical plows have difficulty removing the burden. Then, at times, we get the light stuff that frightens us before we assess the accumulation and ascertain that it wasn't as bad as we thought and we worried for nothing.

I can't tell you how many times the emotion of a "snow" cancer scare has moved through my family's lives and the lives of friends and neighbors. The specifics are not necessary in this post, but tangential to the snow metphor .

Doctors, by training,  must present all sides of potential possibilities or, at least, an educated prognosis of a cancer or illness path. It's never an absolute, but it is a possibility and we the family and the patient must absorb and assimilate the information to the best of our abilities and then the patient must take responsibility for his or her total health and the family must embrace the patient's choice as sacred.

Eventually the warmth of healing melts the fear of the unknown and we all embrace the inevitable and rejoice in the knowledge that each of us, in time, are, and will be, going home. What more could we ask?

Be well and have a great weekend.

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