Change of Plans
After I sprinted face-first into a tree playing
kickball in 7th grade, a few things immediately ran through my twelve-year-old
brain. One, that friggin hurt. Two, maybe I shouldn’t have just lectured my
teammates to try harder to catch pop flies in my tree-littered front yard. And
three, my future as an international spy was over.
As blood from my lower lip was staining my shirt
at an alarming pace, my mom tried to calm me down. But it’s hard to calm down
when your life’s career plan just careened off a cliff. (And have you noticed
that one always “careens off a cliff” never off a small ledge into a field of flowering
poppies.) The hole in my lower lip needed stiches, multiple stitches. And as
the doc was tugging needle and thread through my puffy face, he announced that,
yes, it would leave a mark. A scar. I was distraught.
Based on my extensive middle-school knowledge of foreign
espionage, nothing was worse for a future spy than a tell-tale, identifying
scar on your face. Nothing. Granted, growing facial hair, aka a beard, would
have solved the issue rather quickly, but facial hair was not yet on my radar
at 12. Spying was. And, just as suddenly, was not. My future career opportunities,
with the gnarly scar and all, now appeared to be winnowed to driving a school
bus part-time or playing a masked cartoon character at Disneyland. Maybe Disney
World.
I was mourning the loss of a future I thought for
certain I was supposed to have, not unlike what happens when you get diagnosed
with a (currently) incurable disease like multiple sclerosis. Everything gets
fuzzy, hazy. Certainties become maybes, and maybes become wishful thinking.
Before I got diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, I
had lots of plans, including one in particular: to snowboard until I was 80
years old. My favorite day of the year was the summer solstice, because that
meant winter was coming, and this was years before Game of Thrones. I was a
daily exerciser, not for my health, but to get ready for ski season. Working on
balance, endurance, strength, and explosiveness, my body was always prepared
when the flakes started to fall.
Okay, so I only made it to age 40. No, that wasn’t
my plan—hell no. But plans change. In the game of life, plans always change. When
life doesn’t go to plan, and health issues usually aren’t planned, it’s easy to
wallow in sadness, frustration, fear, anger. There aren’t enough emoticons to
convey the feelings that rush you when getting diagnosed with a disease. Besides
it would max out your cell phone data package and drive your friends bonkers as
they try to decipher a string of facial expressions only a crack international
spy could decipher. Oh, the irony.
Comments
AMF Adventures
BTW, your newsletter just disappeared into some rabbit hole in my phone. I wanted to reply that your MS website gets an #1 THUMBS UP badge from me. It delivers such a great boost in so many ways: new research, encouragement, community. THANK YOU.
Fantastic post! Moving forward is all we can do.
Keep striving!