I have a confession to make, and it’s neither pretty nor
complimentary to me. I am out of patience. I confess that on too many mornings
I am done with the trying to figure out if my 13 year old is ill, or if he is
just 13. I am ‘up to here’ with trying to be patient with a system that has no
way of telling me if any of his doctors have ever spoken to one another about
my son’s symptoms. I am done with trying to find out if they have even read
each other’s reports. I am tired of trying to figure out what departments are
overdue to be seen and who needs to be prodded and what reports aren’t in my
binder of medical history.
I am done with tying my brain into knots trying to make
connections between activity levels and symptoms, signal vs noise, data vs
everyday occurrences in a life that is an ongoing science experiment where the
outcome measure of success is less pain and better quality of life.
I am out of patience. I am tired of trying to figure it out.
I am done with the mental gymnastics of juggling appointments and interpreting
information between health care practitioners and school systems and government
bureaus. I need a vacation from this life of constant background calculations
of ‘if this, then that’.
I am out of patience with myself because there is no other
option. I am the one to tie it together, to find the pattern, to find the
signal within the noise, to pull the pieces together. I must be the bastion of
calm, the repository of memory, of information, of puzzling the pieces
together. That is my role. And I can not afford to lose patience.
