Taking it for granted

 March 7, 2021

Greetings from the bestowed,

Yesterday my sister Leslie sent me a text reminding me how fragile we are.  She was telling me about a friend who is very sick and needs prayers.  This, even while Leslie is struggling with her own challenges.  “We just can’t take our health for granted.” she wrote.

That little phrase, ‘Take it for granted.’ held my attention during the night.  When I woke this morning and came in here to tell you something else, this other image came to me instead.  

I had this flyer, it was folded and refolded, for some reason I saved it, and I decided to take it with me.  I was a senior in high school, muddling through my last months of that prison, just back from a trip to Colorado with my Dad and sister.  It was a great adventure, and we brought back wonderful memories.  And this flyer.  And something else.

I don’t remember how long I had been feeling off, but finally my Mom said I should go get looked at.  We lived less than a mile from St. Joseph hospital, so I walked to the end of our block, turned left, walked five blocks to the hospital.  It was a regal, imposing building, but it was a part of the neighborhood, and it held no more interest to me than the grocery store.  Until I went in.

I walked back from the hospital on the same sidewalks that took me there, still carrying the flyer, feeling no more resolution than hours before.  The doctors suggested a couple of tests, offered to get back with me about mononucleosis in a week or so.  They were doctors, I was a seventeen-year-old boy with a tattered piece of paper from 1300 miles away.

I carried the flyer with me, the one the rangers in Colorado had given us when we got our back- country permit to hike in the mountains overnight.  On one side there was a warning: “The mountain doesn’t care.”  On the other side there were less dramatic, more practical directions about ticks.  

It turns out we would need the tick advice.  We picked up a few, and found more in our clothes, our sleeping bags.  Just when we thought we were done we would find another.  I remember being on top of Pikes Peak and my dad taking one off my back.  He lit a match and then blew it out, held the hot end against the tick to get it to back out of my skin.  Some were more stubborn, died in the process and had to be pulled out.

The other thing the flyer suggested was that some ticks could carry a disease called Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.  

I remember showing the flyer to the doctors at St. Joe’s, making a weak suggestion that perhaps I was dealing with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.  In retrospect, I wouldn’t have taken me too seriously either.  This was probably what it’s like today to have a patient quoting Web MD, but with less credibility.  The doctors indicated that the disease was extremely rare, and I had no spots. 

They were right, mostly, but I got worse.  In desperation, my Mom called a friend, who I always only knew as Mrs. Thurston, but turns out was a nurse at a tiny hospital in small town half an hour away.  My Mom put me in the station wagon and drove me to Wheelock.

I suspect none of this could have happened today.  We walked into the hospital, and in a few minutes, almost by accident, I met Dr. Dutt.  A little while later, after looking at my blood tests, I was put in isolation.

The disease had already ravaged my immune system.  Dr. Dutt explained that if I had waited to hear back from the hospital about my mononucleosis, I would already be dead, or wished I were.  As rare as Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever is, all that you have to do in order to die from it is ignore it.  I spent the next week or so behind glass, and longer recovering at home.  In fact, the aftereffects lasted the rest of the year.

I hesitated to write this, because my story is not as critical as many others, but it serves for this morning.  A teenager walking along a sidewalk on a warm spring day, thinking of plans for the summer, of friends, of fun, of beaches and travel.  And in his back pocket a piece of paper that tells him he shouldn’t take any of it for granted.  And then, what he thought was his right, what he had been granted for life, was taken away from him without warning.

Some of you know this experience, or are connected to it.  But we all slip into a little complacency as time passes, and we become secure that what we have been granted by our Creator, is a permanent gift.  We take it as granted, and in truth it is, but with an understanding that the gift evolves, and it is fragile.

No time in my life has this been made more plain, as the entire world has suddenly been taught the lesson.  A year ago we were walking along the sidewalk, confident in our near invincibility, and then what was granted, was revoked.  There is no warning.  It doesn’t have to be fair.  It doesn’t matter what your plans are.  The privilege of health, and all that attends it, is too easy to assume as permanently awarded.  It is in our care, but not without conditions.

What stayed with me from that experience four decades ago, and more than a few since then, is this feeling of gratitude for what is too easy to accept as always gifted.  With that comes an appreciation for nearly every other aspect of my life that I might take for granted.  I’m not saying I have it locked, but I am practicing.

Pause today and offer your kindness to those who have had to learn this lesson the hardest way.  And remind yourself of what has been bestowed in your own life, and offer thanks.

Hope this finds you treasuring it,

David