Everyone Needs a Different Emergency Contact.

There is no right or wrong- sometimes both are used.

One of the more surprising side effects of serious illness has nothing to do with medication. It's theology. Not mine. Other people's. I have never believed in God. Not before COPD. Not during oxygen. Not while waiting for a lung transplant. Not after it. The diagnosis didn't convert me. The oxygen concentrator didn't convert me. The transplant certainly didn't convert me. If anything, it made me appreciate pulmonologists. Yet illness has a strange way of dragging God into conversations. Especially at three in the morning. People pray. Patients pray. Families pray. Friends pray. Complete strangers pray. Sometimes they even inform you they are praying for you, which feels a bit like being copied on an email thread you never joined. My wife prayed. A lot. She would ask God for help. I would ask the medical team for lab results. We both felt we were contributing. Neither of us tried to convert the other. Mostly because we had bigger problems. Like whether my lungs would cooperate. I've noticed that many patients struggle with this. Not necessarily with God. With the fact that everyone around them needs a different explanation for the same situation. Some people need faith. Some people need statistics. Some people need hope. Some people need spreadsheets. I am firmly in the spreadsheet category. When someone told me, "God has a plan," I always wanted to ask for the executive summary. Preferably with milestones. Maybe a risk assessment. A timeline would be nice. Because from where I was sitting, the plan seemed remarkably chaotic. One week you're discussing oxygen levels. The next week you're discussing organ transplantation. Then somebody says everything happens for a reason, which is a bold statement when you're carrying around a cooler full of medications. What fascinated me was not the belief itself. It was the function. Faith seemed to do for some people what data did for me. It reduced uncertainty. Or at least made uncertainty easier to live with. The destination was different. The mechanism was surprisingly similar. The truth is that severe illness forces everyone into an uncomfortable relationship with things they cannot control. Some hand that problem to God. Others hand it to science. Most of us quietly split the burden between the two and hope nobody notices. Personally, I trusted surgeons, researchers, nurses, physiotherapists, pharmacists, and a disturbing number of pills. Others trusted something larger. Neither group slept particularly well. After enough years around hospitals, I stopped being interested in whether people believed. I became interested in what helped them get through another day. If prayer helped, fine. If statistics helped, also fine. If yelling at the television helped, hospitals should probably study that too. Serious illness teaches many lessons. One of them is that everybody needs an emergency contact. Some people have God. I had my transplant team. And honestly, they were easier to reach.

Walk With Me- Click Here