THE WAITING IS THE HARDEST PART
Tom Petty understood. “The waiting is the hardest part.”
We’re taught to get good at waiting. “Patience is a virtue.”
I’ve waited for important stuff my whole life. Waiting for a call from a med school, “I want to be the first to tell you that you’ve been accepted into the class of ’81.” I waited for my med school classmate to ask me out. That wait was tough. I almost had to ask him first. Waiting the nine months for my first child to show up! A letter from the American Board of Orthopedic Surgeons to tell me I passed the board exam. It seems we wait so patiently for the critical challenges life throws our way. It might be years in between these huge “waitings.” And they consume us with their importance, and the waiting can sometimes be excruciating.
I can’t think of anything I wait for every day, or even every week. A sunrise? My car to start? My next breath? If I had to wait every day for a phone call telling me my children were safe, or how I could get my next meal, life would be certainly be very different. But thankfully that’s not how most of us live. So, we make assumptions about the thousands of routine things we could wait for and assume they’ll occur.
Until ALS. Then every-single-day becomes a waiting. I wake up every morning and wonder what will not work. Some days, I can feel no perceivable change, but slowly the changes happen. My voice gets slower, more nasal. More foreign to me. I wait for the day that my voice doesn’t work at all. When will that be? How will it happen? I wait for the day I can no longer swallow. How will I know? Will I choke? When will I drop a dish? They always ask me if I notice changes in my handwriting.
“No.” But I’ll most certainly wait for that.
“All good things come to those who wait.”
Those people didn’t know about ALS.