It’s All Relative: Gaining Perspective in Maintenance Mode

After twenty-odd years of respiratory emergencies, bizarre infections, and multiple body systems going haywire at the same time, I am used to crisis mode. I studied for finals and wrote newspaper articles from the ICU in college, backpacked through Europe with a broken ankle and torn ligaments, and taught undergraduate writing classes so fresh from the hospital that I still had an IV in one arm and a hospital bracelet on the other.

My attitude matched my actions. During ambulance transport, I cracked jokes through an oxygen mask. I referred to spells where I was too run down to even leave the house as my “Boo Radley” days, and when innocent phlebotomists entered my hospital room to draw blood, I serenely offered them my ankles since they’d be hard-pressed to find a vein anywhere else.

And then something happened.

I got better diagnoses, more targeted treatment plans, and doctors who managed to unravel the thorny mess known as my medical history. I entered a hitherto foreign place known as maintenance mode. I wasn’t healthy in maintenance mode, but I was stable. Instead of the cycle of crisis-recovery, crisis-recovery that had shaped most of my life, I had series of so-so days punctuated by the occasional really good or really bad day. The difference was that the really bad days were not nearly and difficult as they had been, and the really good days were markedly better.

Sounds great, right? And it was. But it was also hard. I simply didn’t know how to exist without a constant barrage of setbacks and calamities, and I’d never had the downtime to evaluate how my baseline health status had changed over the years. While it was wonderful to not be in and out of the hospital as often, it was almost as tough to see for the first time what “everyday” health meant for me. Most days, I did have a hard time breathing, and that was never going to change.My energy level was still pretty low, but I began to see that the more carefully I planned my activities, the more successful they were. I stopped looking at life in terms of “getting back to normal” and realized that this new reality was my normal. There was no drama to eclipse the hard facts anymore.

It took awhile for me to relax enough to start making weekend plans with my friends again and be confident I’d feel well enough to attend. Slowly, I went through “re-entry” into the world of the healthy, and found my position within that world. While the wheezing and congestion had worsened over the years, they now fit in around teaching, writing, and getting to the gym. My daily chest PT visits were no longer my only contact with the outside world but were routine activities I scheduled into my busy days.

Maintenance mode, then, was largely about accepting realities that were so easy to ignore in the flurry of ER visits, CT scans, and IV lines. It was also the first time I’d really seen how skewed my understanding of “crisis” was. If I wasn’t turning blue from lack of oxygen or having some sort of cardiac episode, then that meant there was nothing really wrong, which I now see is a dangerous lack of a middle ground.

Luckily, I have an exceptionally healthy husband who helps in the ongoing process of defining things for me. Things like bronchitis, pneumonia, or kidney problems don’t faze me, but they certainly faze him. Somewhere in between my laissez-faire attitude towards anything short of near-death and his usual interaction with sickness—a seasonal cold or allergies—is the common ground I need to survive as well in maintenance mode as I do in crisis mode. The choices I make for my health no longer completely usurp the choices I want to make for my spirit and because of that, I no longer resent them.