I ran this morning. Under normal circumstances, that’s not
worth mentioning, because it’s not that unusual for me. It’s something I do.
But this entire summer I’ve been hampered by three successive injuries—a pulled
muscle in my calf, a groin injury and, most recently, a stress fracture in the
fourth metatarsal in my right foot. Individually and collectively, they have
caused a setback in my exercise routine and been a source of great frustration.
But they’ve
also been an ever-present reminder about the importance of being
healthy—something I think we all need from time to time. We typically don’t
realize how fortunate we are to be healthy until that health is taken away from
us. I always chuckle to myself whenever I ask an older person how they are doing—which
is usually more of a greeting than a true question—and they launch into a list
of all that ails them. When you’re ailing, though, it dominates your thoughts
and that has a tendency to spill out in conversation. Just ask those people who
asked my how I was doing when I was hobbling around on one foot for a couple of
months.
There are a
few people, though, who aren’t like that. That rare breed who smile through
their suffering. They remain upbeat despite being beat up. I’m jealous of those
people. I’m not like that. I know one person who is. Christy Barford, a graphic
designer in our office. A couple of years ago, Christy started disappearing for
extended periods, and it finally leaked out that she had melanoma—skin cancer. Being
a redhead with fair skin, that’s perhaps not all that surprising. And melanoma
isn’t that big of a deal, right? Go to a dermatologist and get it scraped off,
monitor it for a while and, bingo, you’re back running in the mornings.
Apparently
my knowledge of melanoma is frighteningly wrong. We would get updates that she
was in the Cleveland Clinic or the Mayo Clinic or undergoing this experimental
treatment or that new drug. That she was really tired and in a lot of pain. Yet
somehow she was constantly, endlessly—almost annoyingly—cheerful. No one who’s
that sick is supposed to be that happy. Especially at work. Yet she was.
One weekend
some friends from her church threw a party for her to raise money to help her
pay her growing medical bills. It was a huge affair and raised many thousands
of dollars. There were more people at the party than I even know. Christy, of
course, was there, laughing at the insanity of the whole thing, despite
spending the previous week in the hospital in Pittsburgh undergoing some experimental
treatment and driving back that afternoon.
Whenever I
would see Christy, I would, of course, feel like a piece of dirt because she
was going through hell and remained happy, while I was whining incessantly
about my poor little pulled muscle.
It seems to me that people like
Christy are rare. But they are right. We need to learn from them about health and happiness. But it's going to be a bit harder now. Christy died today. The cancer won. Damn the world.
