Disease Is a Brutally Efficient Social Filter

One thing nobody warned me about wasn't COPD.

It wasn't oxygen.

It wasn't the transplant.

It was what happened to your address book.

For most of my life, my social circle was built around work.

Clients.

Colleagues.

Business partners.

People connected by projects, deadlines, and the occasional airport lounge.

Then I got sick.

At first, nothing changed.

Everyone called.

Everyone cared.

Everyone wanted updates.

Serious illness has a remarkable honeymoon period.

Then life resumes.

For them.

Some people quietly disappear.

Not because they're bad people.

Most simply don't know what to do with someone whose life has taken a direction they never imagined.

Illness is uncomfortable.

Especially when it belongs to someone else.

So they drift away.

Usually without intending to.

And then something unexpected happens.

New people begin to appear.

Not through work.

Not through mutual friends.

Through pulmonary rehabilitation.

Hospital corridors.

Waiting rooms.

Support groups.

One day you realize that one of your closest friends is someone whose lung function you know better than what he did for a living.

Nobody asks what car you drive.

They ask how your latest CT scan looked.

Nobody is impressed by your job title.

They're impressed because you walked a little farther than last month.

Success is measured differently.

So are bad days.

I've also discovered something slightly uncomfortable.

I have less patience than I used to.

Not because I've become less tolerant.

Because I have less breathing capacity for superficial relationships.

Life has become too short.

Breath has become too valuable.

Very few people remained.

The surprising part wasn't how many left.

It was how much the few who remained mattered.

None of them seemed to have the perfect words.

They never tried to cheer me up.

They never promised everything would be fine.

They never explained that everything happens for a reason.

Thank goodness.

They simply kept showing up.

Sometimes for coffee.

Sometimes for a walk.

Sometimes just to sit.

It turns out that silence, shared with the right person, is a perfectly good conversation.

One of the nicest surprises has been the community that has grown around this blog.

We come from different countries.

Different professions.

Different religions.

Different diseases.

Yet we understand each other surprisingly quickly.

We all speak a language we never wanted to learn.

CT scans.

Pulmonary function tests.

Medication changes.

Bronchoscopies.

Side effects.

Insurance forms.

And the quiet excitement that comes from hearing two words:

"Everything's stable."

Healthy people rarely celebrate the word stable.

Patients do.

I've also noticed that friendships formed through illness skip an entire stage.

There's very little small talk.

Once you've discussed mortality, fear, oxygen, and the possibility of running out of options, asking what someone does for a living almost feels irrelevant.

Looking back, my address book became much smaller.

My circle of real friends became very clear.

There weren't many.

Apparently, there didn't need to be.

It may have been one of the few side effects nobody mentioned before the diagnosis.