Stories of Survival

 

I am fascinated by stories of survival. Maybe it's because there is a built-in spoiler alert: the person who survived is actually telling the story so we know roughly how it ends. The story begins. There is an unanticipated event that causes an emergency. The person navigates each challenge in succession until the emergency has ended. The person survived--past tense. 

Undoubtedly there is psychological residue from experiences that generate survival stories. I can only hazard a guess, but can imagine that a person experiences a kaleidoscope of sensations and emotions from fight/flight/freeze sensations to recognition/denial, elation/guilt, and/or shame/embarrassment. 

Although I have (thankfully) never experienced a situation that required my successful navigation of a threat to my life; However, I am navigating a threat to my life, my longevity, and my quality of life every single day. That is the nature of surviving an illness characterized by chronicity, right? I am surviving the illness--present tense.

People use distinctly different lenses to view the two survival experiences. 

One experience, the survival of an unusual or unforeseen emergency or threat, features a person defying the odds of survival, cheating death, using one's wits and intelligence to overcome the threat. The survivor possesses a merit badge of sorts and a story that can take on mythological characteristics with super human strength, fortitude, presence of mind or making a gamble that paid off in survival.

The other experience, the ongoing survival of an illness characterized by chronicity, features a person, often an outlier in any group, trying to keep up,  accommodating a moving target illness, pretending to be pain-free, couching responses either verbally or nonverbally, assessing the energy levels, and doubting one's management decisions because the result is not measurably different yet. These survivors don't possess merit badges or stories that are sought after. No one attributes super human strength, fortitude, presence of mind or gambles that pay off in continued survival to people who have chronic illnesses. They don't. 

Yet, each person who has a chronic illness is surviving day to day, week to week, month to month and year to year, making decisions one at a time in hopes of improving his/her/their quality of daily life, or his/her/their longevity.

It's so true. It's a story of survival.