Rewind #7 - Sense of Security

Original air date: 29Jan2010

I know not everyone grew up in Nevada, close to Yucca Mountain, so not everyone spent their early school years constantly writing reports on fault lines and half lives and nuclear waste dumps .... and why those silly little waste management plans would be totally useless the next time the underground water table rose above the waste stockpiles. Not everyone was raised doing bomb drills where you run under your little wooden desk to practice what to do in case an atomic bomb was detonated nearby. Can ANYone tell me what the point was of those drills??! I am positive it had nothing to do with nuclear safety. There is NO possible way that squatting under those low-bidder children’s desks would have saved us. BUT, what it WOULD have done was keep hundreds of students and teachers from running & stampeding all the exits and therefore avoiding some mass panic ... plus, when my little radioactive body was found 10,000 years later by archeologists, since my handwriting exercises of writing my name in cursive were all stored inside the desk over my head, I would be easily identified -- which I think was the REAL logic behind those drills ... cuz it sure wasn’t safety!! In fact, it was nothing other than a false sense of security. But even today we still have this false sense of security and control everywhere ... we eat salads (usually with our bacon cheeseburgers) to assure us of our good health, and then we get some disease outside our control ... we put our money in “safe” investments so that our future and retirement is secure, but then the bottom falls out of the housing market ... we are good, hard workers for job security, and then our corporation downsizes ... we’re even good, loving spouses to ensure that 50th anniversary comes, but some tragic accident comes and snatches that dream away.  What, exactly, do we really have control over?? I think the answer is pitifully little.

Recently I have become aware of a growing sense of this security  -- or maybe better, a false sense of hope -- that I am starting to adopt concerning different treatments. While I am weighing different treatment options for the Endo primarily, but my BD also, I am holding one option in one hand, that I think has some pretty scary and depressing side effects, but on the other hand in months and months and probably months of trial and error and wait-and-see treatments, when it’s quite likely that we’ll end up back at option A anyway. So do I start there? Do I give the other treatments a try?--even though I know it will require monnnnths to give it a fair shot?

I have to admit that part of my brain just wants to be DONE right now. Last night I couldn’t help but thing I’d love to be able to get sick with something like the flu ... where you get sick, you feel nasty for a little while, and then you’re all better! Wouldn’t that be nice?! I want to sign the dotted line agreeing to a treatment that has a “date” -- that has a starting point and a stopping point and a recovery window .... and then I’m better. Do you know what that sounds like to my ears and my heart? It sounds just like promises given to the elderly on how they can turned their fixed income into a small fortune, so they sign over what little they have and are left with nothing. That always breaks my heart to hear about. Am I doing the same? By me considering a complete hysterectomy, am I signing over a large part of health I *do* have left to follow some hollow promise ... some false sense of security over two diseases that can admittedly “never be cured?” And what would I do if I decide to accept all these risks and likely side-effects, and then it doesn’t work? Then I am still left with my health struggles as I currently have them, AND the addition of the long-term effects of that surgery. If all my eggs are in that basket and it doesn’t work, what would I do??

But ...... what if it works??