Jealousy

I've been experiencing a very strange kind of jealousy that I've been trying to put a name on for quite some time now.

I've had a chronic illness for over twenty years now.  When it comes up in conversation or I find a space to relate to someone by revealing it, I will openly talk about my experience with Crohn's Disease.  Hell, I have gotten to a point where I make space as I need it, using this blog as a particular focal point.  In some of those discussions, I undertake the emotional labor of teaching for the bulk of it; in other discussions, I build off of the foundation and educate less but still tend to have some kind of component; in a few conversations, there is a different kind of understanding, where we can get right into the important pieces that were driving the impulse to bring up the subject in the first place.  

In some of these conversations, I've thought more than once, "I wish I just had cancer."

Now, I absolutely do not intend that thought to delegitimize the pain, fear, heartache, and agony that someone with cancer is or has gone through.  Not at all.  It's not the Pain Olympics, where I'm trying to judge nor compare the pain that someone else is going through to my own.  All of that pain is valid.  I would go as far to say that cancer is one of the places many persons first truly confront the idea of mortality.  

Here's what I mean:  a cancer patient doesn't have to explain to most anyone what cancer is.  Most people have some idea of the general process of how cancer works, with vague ideas of treatment options.  That empathy is there IMMEDIATELY.  The sympathy is accessible and available sometimes just by looking at them, particularly when they are in treatment.   

And in my nursing textbooks, there is a whole chapter dedicated to the pain management of cancer patients but not any other condition.  No specific notice in the part that discussed Crohn's, how to deal with its specific pain.  There were two pages dedicated to how to guide someone through some of the emotional changes of a cancer diagnosis, recommendations on how to be empathetic and how to approach the conversation.  In a textbook by the same authors, someone with Crohn's?  Two generic paragraphs.  For an ostomy?  Three paragraphs.  Three paragraphs to gloss over what has taken me many, many blog posts to attempt to address.  

I am envious of empathy that I don't have to ask for.  I am envious that there is a place for these persons to be seen that I cannot access.  I am envious that even in my training to be a nurse there is an implied bias to see these persons differently, just in exposure of information alone.  

I'm aware of what my own biases are--or at least as many of them as I can be.  I know that when I get a patient with a stoma or a patient with some kind of inflammatory bowel disease, I'm going to approach the situation very differently, that there will be an understanding that is unique in those places.  I recognize this.  I don't pretend any differently.  But that doesn't mean that when I get a patient recently diagnosed with cancer that I'm not going to approach them with grace and compassion.  And I still long for that understanding for the persons with the more obscure diseases, for those that don't have that instant empathy, for those whose suffering the same but understanding is obscure, too.  There is extra effort in understanding these persons, and not all persons are willing to put in the extra effort to understand.  

It takes effort to see me.  It takes effort to see people.  I wish that understanding Crohn's was as effortless as understanding cancer, unfortunately reinforced by its prevalence and the related public understanding.  Even in pop culture, I can name characters who have had cancer, but I've never seen Crohn's featured outside of a medical drama.  I would wish this understanding for persons with myasthenia gravis or lupus or SCID or EDS or MS or any number of diseases.  

And that's the trick.  I would want everyone to have accessible empathy.  To not have to ask to for empathy, for immediate access to those human elements that I crave for in places, I would wish that for others, too.  To have nurses primed to meet them where they are, too.  That's what I would want, not to lessen the care those persons with cancer need to but to expand it to myself and others.