A serious one - originally posted April 6,2008

If you have not read the first post in this blog - please do so. All this is based around the first post.



I wanted to do a blog on perspective. Life and our evaluation of it is based a LOT on perspective. I got a great example of this yesterday.

My wife is disabled!! Officially. Perspective - - -

On face value, that would not appear to be a good thing. Disability is not to be cheered. Ah, official disability is (or can be). My seventeen year old was here yesterday when my wife opened the letter and we were cheering for disability. She made a comment that is was weird that we were happy with Mom being disabled. I explained we weren't, but...

My wife's condition is affected not one bit by what the doctors, bureaucrats, or anyone else labels it. She is no more nor no less disabled or ill than prior to getting the letter. However, getting the letter signifies official legal acceptance of her disability. That will hopefully lead to a lessening of the financial burdens of her condition and let us deal exclusively with the physical ones.

I think I mentioned before how during the diagnosis stage, my wife and I found ourselves cheering and wishing for a diagnosis of MS or Parkinson's. Not to say both of those diseases are not horrific and life changing in their own right, but... Perspective - - -

The other diagnosis we were faced with was of a magnitude worse -MSA. I wrote a blog a while back about the alphabet diseases. The addition of an "A" to "M" and "S" takes a horrible disease and makes it imminently more horrible.

In our discussions about disease and disability my wife commented on her possibility of having MS and/or Parkinson's. I said "I know I was pulling for you to have one of them as well." That caused another comment from my daughter about how we were weird. I had to explain to her it is all about perspective.

Let's have a round of applause for my wife's official disability. From anyone else's perspective that may sound strange. From here it is receiving a standing ovation.