The Tyranny of Positive Thinking

The tyranny of positive thinking...this was the title of a chapter in a book on enduring cancer and its treatments.  This is the repeated phrase running through my mind this morning.

Yesterday, Kenny and I spent several hours in the emergency room with Lacy.  He had not been eating, had slept most of the day, and had a temperature of 102.  Not good.  The doctor's office was closed early for the weekend so we packed up to go to the ER.  We used the wheelchair and transfer belt.  He was way too unsteady to walk to the car.

Several hours later, after ruling out pneumonia and UTI, we left with antibiotics and a diagnosis of severe sinus/ear infections.  Kenny  had to go back to work for a while, and Lacy was feeling better after a shot to jump start his recovery, and kept talking about Sonic.

It will be better this time... always my mantra, always a mistake, but I pulled in and realized quickly that  it would NOT be better.  I drove him home with Lacy screaming in my ear, demanding my arrest.  His chorea movements escalated until he was a writhing mass of anger and frustration.  He exited the car in a huff, I drove home an emotional wreck.

"You're just an optimist," Kenny gently explained as he hugged me to him when we were finally both at home.  "You don't need to kick yourself over it.   We just won't do it again."

I keep thinking:  When will I learn...?  Yet I know that I will, at some point, hope for the best again.  Where is that balance between reality and hope?  The seesaw pull of both feels unsteady.  We love our son.  We hope, and pray, and despair, but above all, we love.

"Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never fails." (I Corinthians 13)
"Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, or bends with the remover to remove.  Oh, no!  It is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is not shaken." (Shakespeare)

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