The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I don't know why I'm doing this, but I can't exactly stop myself. Maybe it'll help someone else who finds themselves in a similar situation in the future.
I visited my father in the hospital today. The drive down was awful. I traveled the highway by myself for several hours, alternating between grief at what was happening and absolute self-loathing that I had not made the journey to visit more often over the last several years. I try to get there at least four to six times a year, but it doesn't feel like it was nearly enough.
When I arrived, I wandered through the hospital in a daze. The facility is gigantic, and it took me nearly fifteen minutes to even find the reception desk. The staff was friendly, but every one, from the security guard at the weapon check to the thoracic surgeon, had become numb to the suffering that people experience inside those walls.
I had last seen my father over Thanksgiving, and I was shocked at how thin he had become. He seemed to be taking things well, but the hospital also had him dosed to the gills on an antidepressant that sees off label use as an "appetite stimulant". It's hard to tell how much of that is organic.
I have always been a good actor, and that was vital today. I could tell that he was glad that I was there, but he was clearly more worried about all of us as he was himself. I kept it together whenever I was in the room. I made sure I absorbed everything the medical staff said, kept up conversation, and even got a few smiles from a joke here and there. When I had to leave the room, however, I couldn't hold it together anymore. The click of the door produced an almost pavlovian response. The hurt felt like a living thing trying to claw its way out of my chest. I could barely breathe. I threw up into more than one trash can. But when I got back to the room, I pulled my shit together, because that's what he needed.
We spoke with the oncologist, who told us that the cancer has metastasized. He was very clear that a cure is off the table now - at best, we're looking to buy time. They'll be using a combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy in an effort to slow the progression.
Last summer, the doctors said he was cured. The scans had repeatedly come back clean, and there was no sign of it anywhere in his body. Fate is cruel like that sometimes. I wish it weren't.
Some of you here are Believe. If you do, I would ask that you pray for not just him, but anyone who might be experiencing the same thing.
I will dedicate the merit from my meditation today to your father.
I genuinely appreciate it
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