THE TIME had come. I leaned back in the doctor’s office, got comfortable and waited for Heather to begin the Chant of the Pills.
We’re used to the chant by now. It’s part of a tradition in my wife’s medical appointments. First comes the blood-pressure machine that squeezes and squeezes without producing any useful results — you know, kind of like Washington. Then we give some basic information, chat a bit with the nurse or doctor and wait for the question:
“So, Heather, what medications are you currently taking?”
I always have to suppress a smile at this point. Because Heather has so many chronic illnesses, she can usually recite a list of prescriptions long enough to have its own feature in “Reader’s Digest.” Muscle relaxants. Pain pills. Immuno-suppressants. At one stage, she was taking no fewer than 13 medicines, a lucky number for the pharmaceutical companies, though not for our bank account.
So I waited. Heather mentioned a pain medicine she’d been taking recently and I nodded. Yep, remember that one.
Then she stopped. I looked at her, confused. This was not in the ritual.
“Is that all?” the medical fellow asked us politely.
“Is that all?” I thought uncertainly. What about the ... well, surely, she’s still on the ... come to think of it, when’s the last time she took ....
Good grief. She’s right.
“Yes, that’s all,” Heather said.
One bottle of pills. That’s all.
Incredible.
Don’t get me wrong. Heather’s health has not zoomed up to Olympic standards. There’s still a lot to take care of and probably always will be. And I don’t doubt that more medicine awaits at some point in the future.
But for now, it’s a small triumph. A sign of hope.
And hope is the most potent medicine of all.
We’ve all seen it.
We’ve seen our friends and neighbors travel to the Gulf, hoping to help others recover something from what the winds and the waves stole.
We’ve seen college students volunteer for duty in Iraq, hoping that something can still be saved from the maelstrom.
We know people like Matt Jones, the ESU graduate who refused to quit in the face of cancer and now works to inspire others. Or like the Peter Pan Playground group who brought a project to the brink of success by continuing where others would have written it off. Or a thousand, no, a million, other cases, close to home or far from reach.
Hope is precious.
It’s also not enough. Not by itself. Hope requires sweat.
Pessimism is easy. After all, if everything’s going to go wrong, why try? But to hope for better — and see it happen — takes effort. It can mean toting a gun or a protest sign, heaving a sandbag or building a business. It can mean simply going on for one more day when everything in your body and your life says “Quit now!”
Hard? You bet. Is it worth it? That’s up to you.
Heather decided it was. She’s searched out doctors, looked up medicines, battled her own body rather than quit. She’s worked.
And now she knows that life doesn’t have to be such a pill.
Scott Rochat’s e-mail address is rochat@emporiagazette.com.