There’s a lot I like about the film “Forrest Gump”, largely because I love the study of history and the film showcases so much of the past half century of my country and how we’ve been affected by it. My favorite line, hokey though it sounds, is the one everyone thinks of when you mention this film: “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” It brings to mind the stories I’ve heard about my Aunt Patricia, the eldest of four children, and a great connoisseur of fine quality chocolate like See’s Candies. Every time her parents splurged on a box of candy, she would poke her finger through the bottom of a piece to make sure it wasn’t something she hated, like coconut or cherry. If she didn’t like it, she left it in the box – hole side down. I’ve always been put off by the selfishness apparent in this behavior, but looking at it through the lens of pastoral care what disturbs me is the idea of leaving the undesirable as is; hiding it rather than facing up to it and finding that you might not only NOT find a chocolate covered cherry inedible, but might even find it enjoyable. Forrest saw a silver lining in every cloud – heck, Forrest didn’t even SEE the clouds that filtered the light over him. I want to be like that when I face the things I don’t like and have ignored which now come back to haunt me.
When I went to see my internist in March for a full physical, my exact words to him were that I had felt ‘off it’ for a while. It wasn’t something I could put my finger on, but I knew instinctively that something wasn’t quite right. He ordered a full workup and found two problems: my blood pressure was too high, and something was wrong with one of my kidneys. I made a deal with him: give me six months to implement a cardio program to improve the blood pressure rather than put me on medication right away. He agreed, and in only four months I brought it down from 150/90 to 122/80. The kidney, however, continued to remain an issue. After a failed communication that resulted in a missed appointment with a urologist, I saw one on Thursday afternoon, expecting to hear what I’d heard twice in the past two years from two other doctors, one at an ER in Phoenix and the other right here at our Urgent Care Clinic: that I had an infection, and here’s some antibiotics to clear it up. Instead, she told me that the tests they’ve run already are not conclusive, but they can tell that the kidney isn’t functioning at an acceptable level. They want to run another test later this week, which will result in one of two things: either I have some sort of surgery to address an ongoing problem, or I may have to have my right kidney removed altogether.
To say I was blindsided by this is a vast understatement. I truly wasn’t expecting to hear something that serious, even though I’ve had problems with this kidney for the past eighteen months. If I’d still been at the job I had before I went to seminary, I probably would have seen to it much sooner, but I had no health insurance for over two years, and medical issues took a back seat to things like paying rent and putting food in my mouth. Not that I’m whining; don’t get me wrong. I remember talking to two different people years ago in Tucson, both of them homeless because they chose to buy the medication necessary for their health issues over having a roof over their heads. They made their choices, I made mine, and I don’t regret it. But too many years of ignoring stuff I didn’t want to deal with have got me in a tough spot now. The doctor was very frank with me; I was told that if the kidney is functioning at a very low level, it would actually be far more harmful to leave it in, and may even be fatal. She also underlined the fact that many people function perfectly fine with only one kidney. After I left her office, I went back to the chaplains’ office and poured out my concerns on two fellow chaplains, and the office secretary. We sat and discussed things for a while, and one of them asked if the doctor had mentioned cancer. I replied in the negative, to which he responded, “Did you ask her?” I’d been so shocked that it never occurred to me to ask, but given her forthright manner with me I think she’d have said something if she had that suspicion. I sat there for a while, rolling around in a ball of numbness, until that little voice inside me told me that it was unhealthy to wallow in this. I gathered my things and made a concerted effort to visit several more patients in the last hour of the day. Initially I was afraid that I’d not be engaged, that my concern over my health would overshadow any pastoral care I could offer. That was before I met Tommy.
Tommy’s mother is in the hospital, and he doesn’t quite understand why. He was sitting on the window seat in her room (which happened to be the For Every Season There is a Miracle Room) while she lay intubated and unconscious. I asked what was going on, and he got a little agitated and explained that he didn’t understand all the things the doctors had said. It was at that point I realized that Tommy has a lower IQ than many people, but it didn’t stop him from talking animatedly about his Baptist church right down the road. He proudly told me that it’s his job to cut the grass because he’s the only person who is qualified to do it, and just like that I thought of Forrest Gump, the ‘gozillionaire’ who offered to cut the massive town hall lawn for free. Tommy takes great pride in what he does, as if it were the most important thing in the world – and to him, it is. He also said to me that God is his special friend. I was envious of his ability to focus only on what’s right in front of him and be happy about it, until I realized that one needn’t be Forrest Gump to do that. Worrying about what might be is pointless. Of course, God told us that, but hey, I’m only human. I worry, and I imagine the worst, which nets me nothing more than unwanted stress. I think God sent Tommy to me, and me to Tommy, so that we could offer each other the support that each of us needs. For Tommy, it was prayer about his mother’s situation. For me, it was the lesson that I need to focus on what’s right in front of me, and put all my energy into that, instead of wasting it on the hypothetical. After all, you never know what you’re gonna get in that box of chocolates called life. When you get stuck with a coconut when you were really expecting caramel, instead of imagining where the caramel might be hiding, enjoying the chocolate that covers the coconut is what counts.
No comments:
Post a Comment