The Snows of Life

It is cold here in the Northeast. If fact it's cold almost everywhere the last few days. Where I live we are digging out from Wednesday'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 about nothing.

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

Doctors, by training,  must present all sides of potential possibilities or, at least, an educated prognosis of 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, for some, the warmth of healing melts the fear of the unknown. In the end, we all embrace the inevitable and rejoice in the knowledge that each of us, in time, are, and will be, going home. It's a hard acceptance, but really what more could we ask?

Be well.