PN, and trying not to become a one-trick pony …

Posted by Ray Kemble @ray666, Jul 30 11:29am

Hello, PNers!

Only yesterday, I did it again. One of my best friends phoned and said he’d like to come over and visit. ‘For only a short while,’ he said. ‘I know you have home-health nurses coming and going.’ My reply to my best friend? ‘Oh, I don’t know. I have so much to do, emails to send, calls to make. Can we make it another day?’ (It’s not my PN that has me homebound but my recent sepsis infection; that’s why I have home-health nurses ‘coming and going.’)

My wiggling out of a friend’s proposed visit had nothing to do with my having ‘so much to do.’ I was suffering from PN (and sepsis) conversation fatigue. I knew from other visits, initially, during the weeks that sepsis had me in the hospital and, later on, in a rehab facility, that every friend who arrived bedside (or, now that I’m home, sofa-side) would want to talk about my ‘condition,’ be it my PN or sepsis.

It would take very little to set me off on a medical jargon jag: my friend’s entire visit would be taken up with medical blah blah. If I tried to change the subject, I’d have no success. My ‘condition,’ be it PN or sepsis, would be all my friends would want to talk about. After a friend had left, I realized I was much to blame––maybe more so––for our one-subject conversation: I couldn’t get enough of talking about my ‘condition.’

The last thing I had ever wanted to happen was happening: I was becoming my PN. Or my sepsis. Or both. My ‘condition,’ or pair of diseases, was becoming who I was: my identity.

I don’t want to lose my friends, but I want to avoid a situation where, whenever they think of me, the only thing they think is, ‘Ray has such-and-such a disease’––a one-trick pony, in other words. I need to be thought of by my friends as a fully three-dimensional person of numerous identifiers, oh sure, my ‘conditions’ among those identifiers, but way, way, waaaaay down on the list.

I work at this every day. It's that important to me.

Cheers!
Ray (@ray666)

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Ray Kemble | @ray666 | Aug 5 1:49pm

In reply to @amkie "Funny!! But not funny...so much of life is like that now." + (show)

Good morning, @amkie,

Thank you for your post. For both posts. I hope it doesn’t surprise you to hear me say that I agree with you–how preoccupation with medical matters to the degree that’s all we can think to talk about––is both funny and not funny, NOT funny by a long shot. I’m guilty of that same preoccupation. If I’m not talking to a friend about my PN, then I’m reading something about my PN, thinking about my PN, or getting ready to do some balance work to counter the effects of my PN … darn near around the clock. On the one hand, I find my preoccupation amusing, but on the other hand, I don’t find it amusing at all: my preoccupation is a sure measure of how seriously I regard my disease.

What prompted my one-trick pony post was sitting with three of my best friends, all of them about my age (79), but none of them dealing with a chronic disease. Almost all of my friends are artsy types: theater, painters, poets, and the like––but it wouldn’t matter if my friends were chefs, auto mechanics, handymen, librarians. What struck me as odd was how none of us seemed able to talk about what they did for a living (e.g., paint portraits, bake cakes, repair plumbing); all we could talk about––or wanted to talk about––was my PN. Me, too, I fell right in with them, yakking up a storm about nerve numbness, alpha-lipoic acid, biomarker breakthroughs, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Only after my friends had left did I reflect on the one-trick pony-ness of our conversation. That’s when I chuckled—and got the idea for my post. But, as I said at the top, I understand my preoccupation with my PN to be both mildly funny and undeniably UN-funny all at the same time. I’m glad you called me out on this.

Cheers!
Ray (@ray666)