Life - in perspective.

Hey everyone. This isn't a post directly about H, but I wanted to share something and ask this wonderful, supportive, amazing group to pray - send good energy - meditate - whatever your preference is for a friend of mine. She's my age, 29, and she has an 8 year old son. A few years ago it was discovered that he had a brain tumor - a very large one. He had emergency surgery and they were able to remove most of it. Ever since then he's struggled to regain some sort of normalcy to his life. Speech therapy, trach tubes, nurses round the clock. Things were ever so slowly creeping back towards normal. Yesterday they discovered two more tumors in his brain, and one on his spine. I'm not sure yet what his prognosis is, but it's not very promising.

I see her, my friend, and I love her so much and it breaks my heart to see her going through this. Our lives are so similar - young, single moms, kids around the same age - and yet this one small thing has made them SO drastically different. I see what she's going through, and I can't imagine having to deal with it. And as awful as it makes me feel to say this, it makes me SO incredibly grateful for the good things in my life. It makes my worries about H outbreaks, and my daughter passing her EOG's, and my cat puking on my bed while I was at work yesterday seem miniscule in comparison.

I know how much H sucks, and I know what a rotten awful occasional really bad OB feels like, and I know how hard it is to disclose to someone you really care about. I would never want to diminish any of that, because the trials that we go through are personal, and intimate, and difficult because they're OURS. But sometimes when I'm getting overwhelmed and stressed out and OB'ing (and then more stressed out and then more OB'ing!) I stop myself and I think about my friend, and I realize that I should be grateful. Grateful that I have a healthy child, and that the only health problem I have to worry about is H. It could be a hell of a lot worse, and I guess I just wanted to share that with someone. Thank goddess we're all on an H forum, and not an aids forum, or a cancer forum. Or a brain tumor forum. I'm not saying I'm happy I have H - I guess I've just put life a little more in perspective, and it ain't so bad.

This is a great reminder, erin ... thank you. I totally agree that sometimes we can so get caught up in our own stuff that we fail to look around and notice all the things that are going oh-so well. And have compassion for ourselves about the stuff that we judge isn't going oh-so well.

AND comparison can be a sharp double-edged sword: we can find plenty of reasons out there why we should be grateful for what we have because there's always someone who's got it worse AND we can find plenty of other people who (from our assumptions) seem like they've got it so much better. It's a sneaky thing. Use comparison with caution. ;) What it really comes down to is taking our lives as our own and being grateful for them how they are right now instead of beating ourselves up over how they *should* be. By all means, we can strive to become better people, have better lives, but not to beat ourselves up because they aren't different right now.

And I'm loving that awesome, strong 8-year-old child. Much love goes out to your friend and her little son. I imagine their lives are full of plenty heartache and plenty of reason to be grateful, too.

(And there can't possibly be anything worse than your cat puke in the bed. I'm convinced of that.) :)