Ahira's Hangar

A student at an Indonesian medical school wrote this on facebook and agreed to let me post this if I didn't use her name:

Philippe Petit’s Walk

A 5-year-old girl rolls into the pediatric intensive care unit with a subarachnoid hemorrhage. She was
playing with her brothers on the swings outside this morning, developed a severe headache, and collapsed on her front lawn.
Before today, she was the picture of life: vibrant, healthy, young. Now her eyelids, fingers, and toes are painfully swollen from the fluid accumulating in her body. She breathes on a ventilator. She does not awaken. Deep in a coma, she waits for us to bring her back. Standing at the side of
her bed, we rack our brains and wonder if it is possible.

Illness does not discriminate. Instead, it strikes as lightning does – a random, focused beam of electrons that swoops down into this world to take those it will. It
does not avoid or target anyone in particular – and yet, the casualties abound.

A 25-year-old with a heart attack. A 28-year-old with a carotid dissection. A 21-year- old hit by a bus. And then there is a juxtaposition to these casualties – Mr.
Philippe Petit, man on a wire, who walked – danced, really – on a wire between the twin towers in 1974 for all to see.

Our lives are unlike Philippe Petit’s walk. The only difference is that, if that wire is life, then we walk it until we fall – and, inevitably, each one of us will fall. Philippe Petit did not. I often wonder what it would feel like to wake up one morning and be on that wire, balancing in the wind on a thread thinner than a finger’s breadth. The intensive care unit is another kind of wire – a live wire, strung from one room to the next, from one beating heart to another, until the moment when one decides to stop….

That's cool, danlo.

One of my friends is dealing with several chronic illnesses (fibromyalgia and psioratic arthritis, to name two). She's had to scale back her counseling practice severely -- vertigo keeps her from driving regularly, so she set up a home office and now only sees patients she can trust with her home address. She took up knitting as a sort of stressbuster, and of course that's when the arthritis kicked in, bless her heart.

Anyway, awhile back I expressed my admiration to her for the way she's handled it all (very matter-of-fact, this-is-how-it-is -- apparently I missed the part where she took it out on her husband ). And she asked me what I thought I might do if something similar happened to me. And I didn't have much of an answer for her. I mean, it's not as lightning-fast as being hit by a bus. But what if I suddenly learned I had to make a living -- to make a *life* -- almost totally from home?

I thought about this again today. I still don't have a good answer.

I saved this for Tam, really, as a pediatric nurse and infusion specialist (chemo) it could mean a lot to her (she hasn't read it yet...). She had two nurse friends in their 50s die of cancer in the last two weeks....