The Irish Medical Times - Sick of being the best? Try being the worst!
n the Leaving / Junior Certificate exams, the aim is to do your best, hopefully even to do better than the rest. All that immense pressure to perform at such a formative time of our lives tends to stick with us. As we age and get sick we still seem to compete, but not to be the best, to be the worst of the worse off.
I recently sat beside an older lady in a waiting room full of patients, she stood out in her magnificently co-ordinated head to toe red outfit, a ring on each finger and perhaps a bell on every toe. Magazines were thumbed through and phones examined as we all tried to pretend we were terribly busy in our own worlds.
I could sense the colourful lady watching us all, waiting for someone to catch her eye and kick off the inevitable conversation she was dying to unleash. Having completed the start to every Gen Xers day - the New York Times games, I closed the app and decided to be the person who engaged. I put down my phone and turned my head to the lady. She was off.
“Shockin’ weather, isn’t it? Shockin, shockin, shockin weather!”
“It’s shockin’” I replied.
“Shockin’” she confirmed.
Another head popped up.
“Oh, stop, isn’t it just shockin’ altogether?” the head offered.
Other voices soon joined the chorus as we all agreed, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that despite it raining nearly every day in Ireland, we were in fact shocked by this recent downpour. Shocked.
With the flabbergasting weather out of the way, it was time to talk about something we all had in common - being sick.
The lady in red took centre stage and started her list. As people joined in with their own horror stories of suffering I began to notice a pattern of one-upmanship forming. Red was clearly in the lead with more illnesses than rings on her fingers.
One man decided to rattle off all his medications which turned into a laborious game of “What do you call the orange pill?”. After a painful deliberation on how to pronounce dapagliflozin, he totalled out at fifteen medications. Delighted with his high number and wow factor for remembering how to spell dapa, he sat back smiling. Basking in the admiration that he had indeed suffered the most and was inarguably the biggest warrior. Not to mention the most sick and most likely to die first, facts we glistened over.
Red wasn’t going to stand by and have her throne as the most-hard-done-by of them all threatened.
“Fifteen?” she queried with a smirk “is that all?”
An uncomfortable silence smothered the room as we all hid our meagre prescriptions.
“Well,” a woman with a short grey bob and an economical way about her entered the fray, “I’ve been in hospital three times this year. Last time was for twenty two days.”
Red threw her eyes up and down the bobbed lady and remarked.
“I basically live in the hospital, my house has become my holiday home. The fact I am alive is a miracle. The doctors ALL say they have NEVER seen anyone like me.”
People started to lean forward in their chairs, I could sense we were now moving to the miracle portion of the conversation.
“I died twice in the Cath Lab,” chirped up a small man.
“The nurses call me Lazarus,” said the large man in the corner and laughed.
“The doctors told me they had never seen anyone as sick as me in their whole lives,” a woman shared as she grinned with pride.
I could feel the bristling beside me.
“I was stone cold dead for ten minutes,” asserted Red, “Larry Massey had one of my legs in a coffin.”
People started tugging at clothes to brandish and explain scars. I wondered how far this would go, would the doctor emerge to find elderly dishevelled warriors wrestling for supremacy as the sickest of them all?
These people were long past the Leaving Cert, but the competition of living (or dying) never truly ends. Ultimately, we will all end up in the same place, the fight to stay around is common to us all. Our stories of survival may seem at odds but they can help us process, connect and be inspired. Being sick can be isolating and you lose your sense of self and purpose. Talking about your struggles and the strides you’ve made can be validating. Plus, it’s a nice thought to be a hero for a minute. Even if it’s self assigned and more to do with luck and medical intervention than bodily strength. It feels good to overcome.
As I looked around at people recounting their war stories, I wondered why we do this? It seems to be human nature to define your own experience by comparing it to others. At times people can over emphasize the severity of their illness or discomfort by exaggerating symptoms or focusing on the negatives, this may simply be a prompt for empathy or reassurance.
When the door finally opened and the doctor entered the room, it wasn't to a chaotic scene, but to a room strangely quiet, the collective sighs of relief at the doctor's appearance.
The doctor beckoned to Red with a warm smile. She had fought hard to be at the top of the heap on misery hill, but in the doctor's presence her vulnerability was laid bare. She looked smaller now, the vibrancy of her clothes faded somewhat. I realized she was scared. Maybe being the worst of the worst is not the competition you want to win. The doctor had kind eyes and I could see Red physically slack and relax. She would be in good hands. She was a warrior like us all, but the doctor was her ally, her trusted advisor, her sensei.
We wished her smiles and wellness and mutterings of good luck. True to form, we managed to turn the compassion into a competition, the whisperings of good luck getting higher, one patient even managed to grab Red’s hand as she left the room and squeezed it, hard. The squeezer looked around the room after Red had left, delighted with herself, the new wagon on top of the heap.
I smiled as the tales of war struck up again, until the next soldier would be called.
It was a peculiar kind of camaraderie, born not of wellness, but of wounds.
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