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Too Many Hats: Stressed By CF Management
It’s only Tuesday, and already I feel like I’m juggling too many things this week. Other than homeschooling and teenage meltdowns, I also had a major doctor appointment today (always a long driving distance away, of course), plus a column to submit, ASL classes to finish recording, and two dance classes to teach online. Even though this feels like a light load on paper (my dance company is still on pause right now, for example, and other projects halted), the juggling of too many hats sometimes makes me feel like I’m short changing all of them. Know what I mean?
This made me think about this feeling when it comes to medicine.
Do you prefer doing one strong treatment (a round of IVs or a surgical fix) or juggling lots of little less-invasive fixes instead? Are you a fast fix or a long-term fix type of personality?
To expand: Do you like delaying more severe interventions that help a symptom quickly, or do you favor longer-but-less-intense options? Do you also feel overwhelmed by “too many hats” when it comes to your CF management?
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1 Reply
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Oh, I am pretty bad at multitasking and besides I hate it, everything suffers mostly.
And with treatments I also prefer one at a time, with some pause in between if possible.
That makes it also more easy to assess the effect of the treatment.Fixing symptoms is often the thing we have to resort to with cf, having no real cure, but I always try to get as close as possible to fixing the cause of what bothers me, rather than only short-term covering the effects. If it is possible to fix the cause (for instance chopping nose polyps with surgery), I tend to be as quick and radical as possible and choose for that, rather than muddling through with medication.
But when the cause is outside reach anyway or unclear, I tend to be more of the long-term-hang-in-there type. And I always consider the stress for the body of any therapy, so I can imagine delaying a severe surgery if I don’t feel my body is up to it, until a later time – and meanwhile try to mitigate the symptoms in another way.
Too many hats bother me mostly in the form of too many doctors, so I try to avoid that. There is only one thing worse than a doctor at your bed: two doctors at your bed – they mostly disagree about the treatment.
And I try not to overestimate the feeling of “management” of my health: I think both my role as well as that of the doctor(s) is more limited than reality allows for. Mostly the body does all the work and with a little time and patience many things solve themselves, or become more easy to bear unsolved. So not-doing is also a very strong option that should not be underestimated or overlooked.
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