No Known Cause - Part I: For most of my life, I believed that diseases thrashed about in the atmosphere, attacking us randomly and without warning, with no rhyme or reason whatsoever. We, humans, sat helplessly as evil microbes and unknown germs and bad scary diseases swirled furiously around in the ether, searching out their next innocent victim to invade and destroy. The way it worked was as follows: Bad scary diseases flew around in an invisible place and nobody knew why, or when or where they would decide to attack. When an individual was targeted, for no special reason, the bad scary disease (possibly after holding a summit in a celestial war room with other bad scary diseases) would decide to join forces with the victims organs and launch an attack. If the bad scary disease was called cardiovascular, it would swoop down out of the sky and force your heart to attack you. If the bad scary disease was called cholesystitis, it would turn your gall bladder into your mortal enemy and leave you writhing in pain for no known reason. If the bad scary disease was called pancreatitis, it would join forces with your pancreas and force it to declare war on you. All those head-on blitzkreig diseases were scary enough. But, what really frightened the daylights out of me most of the time were the sneak attacks. As I came to discover, not only could the bad scary diseases swoop down from above and force our organs to rapidly attack us (kind of like Hitler invading Poland), they could also be crafty, cunning and treacherous, launching ongoing sneak attacks on our nervous systems, our immune systems and the very cells of which we are composed. All this would result in more bad, scary conditions with terrifying names like Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinsons, the ever-dreaded constellation of Auto-Immune Illness and....the grand-daddy illness of all time....Cancer. Of course, there was nothing any of us could do to save ourselves because, obviously, there was no known cause and no special reason for any of this. Diseases simply targeted and attacked us. As we got older, somehow, the bad scary diseases seemed to get angrier and angrier at us. Past the age of 50, we became susceptible to their attacks from all sides. I hunkered down and braced myself for the onslaught to come with the mantra no known cause, no known cause beating a furious drumbeat of fear and apprehension in my heart, as I watched so many people around me succumbing to their inevitable decline. In the face of all these scary, marauding bands of diseases, my family and friends and I invoked what I have come to refer to as the: If-God-Forbid Doctrine. The If-God-Forbid Doctrine clearly states that If-God-Forbid we are struck down with illness and If-God-Forbid nobody can figure out why and If-God-Forbid we find our lives being sucked from our very souls for no special reason, we at least had one shining resource of hope and light to save us. If-God-Forbid we got sick, the Doctor would fix it. The Doctor was a wise person who wielded a dizzying array of magic potients and government-sanctioned concoctions which would make us all better. The Doctor was there to face down the bad scary diseases with a vast arsenal of charms, hocus-pocus, wizardry and abracadabra. The Doctor, swathed in his white shaman robe, would poke and prod and see right through us and would eventually proclaim the name of the bad scary disease that had decided to attack us for no special reason. He would then reach into his magical black bag of tricks and conjure the perfect alchemy of chemical brews and pharmaceutical sorcery to make us all better. If-God-Forbid, the name of the bad scary disease was cancer, the Doctor could blast it away with the most powerful agents of chemical warfare known to mankind and, if we followed his instructions and listened to everything he said and fought our hardest we could become a survivor and get to march up and down with a pink, or blue or green or purple ribbon of honor affixed to our proud chests. I didnt relish the prospect of any of this. But, as my friends and family huddled together against the continual, random onslaught of disease, talking about what was happening in shaky frightened whispers, all I could do was try to get on with my life as best I could and hug the If-God-Forbid Doctrine close to my frightened heart. About two years ago, the day finally came when I had to put the Doctrine to the test.... To be continued.... Love, Lori
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 23:28:43 +0000
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