Hurry Up and Wait

Often throughout my time being sick, I have always been counting down the days until an important event. Sometimes it's been a doctors appointment where I knew big decisions were going to be made. My sophomore year of college it was a countdown until the end of the semester when I would have my colostomy reversed. These past couple of years it's been wishing for time to go faster so I could reach the time period alloted for whatever new therapy to begin "working". During these waiting periods, I've never been able to enjoy anything else that was happening in the present.

I figure in the past nine years with Crohns, I have wanted time to go faster more often than not. The big events of your life when you're dealing with illness are not like most where there's certainty in the reward waiting for you at the end. With chronic illness the waiting games are torture and you never know if the result will be worth the agony and exhaustion it takes just to endure the exams, medicines, and appointments. And even when there is good news waiting on the other side, it just means that you've bought some extra time. Nothing is ever certain.

Part of my decision-making lately has been thinking about all of the time in the past nine years I have lost because of Crohns. I wouldn't be able to live with myself, if, in ten years, I looked back on my twenties as a decade that should have been the time of my life. The time I've lost recently has been especially rapid. Everyone around me is moving and I'm just stuck in a rut where I'm standing still and I have nothing to show for it but the physical and mental effects of fighting a battle that can't be won. Part of me feels the defeat of this assault, but another feels victorious that the duration of this more recent struggle has allowed me to arrive at a place of acceptance.

I can see the light!