Professionalsickgirl

Good health is everything. So some people believe.

As humans  we structure our needs in that well-known colloquialism of ‘[insert life changing challenge e.g. having no job or experiencing a divorce] …but hey at least I have my health’.

I would argue that having no job or experiencing the break up of a lifelong relationship are often far more significant events than experiencing poor health, but as a society good health is so fundamentally cherished and important that the loss of it trumps most other misfortunes.

My issue with that idea is not just because it is totally subjective (someone’s poor health could be frequent headaches vs another’s experience of a life-threatening disease). But I also believe that some degree of poor health can be an enormously influential motivation to improve health. A motivation, that many people without an illness and those who take their good health for granted, do not have.

So I do believe that health is everything, but perhaps not in the same way that traditional phrase can imply, and I certainly don’t believe the opposite logic that poor health is worse than everything else life throws at you.

I’m aware that some aspects of this belief are controversial. Especially when poor health in its various forms kills people. It will probably kill me one day. But as a person with a chronic illness, I passionately believe I have gained things through having CF that I would unlikely have otherwise had.

Hopes, dreams, and a perspective that I fear would have passed me by if CF didn’t force me to slow down at times. A wish to be more grateful for the good happenings in life and a slow-burning determination to achieve what I care about, that personally, I think my CF is partially responsible for.

Some of the most inspiring, compassionate and intelligent people I have ever met live with poor health. I do not believe it is a coincidence.

No matter how difficult or uncertain life can sometimes be with a lifelong illness, had I lived a life with perfect health I would simply not be me.