Regret

I volunteer as a moderator/counsellor on an online support group. The kind people there helped me when I was lost and hurting almost a year ago. I'm still somewhat lost and sometimes it hurts, but not as much as before. So I pay it forward by helping when I can.

I have a rare Condition which I'm not going to go into here. Call it paranoia or call it commonsense - I'm not going to blog anything quite that personally identifiable. Recovery is possible but very long and painful. Oh, and horribly horribly expensive because large parts of the treatment isn't covered by provincial medicare (not surprising when they don't even cover some basic things like dentist visits or eyeglass costs). It's also something that's very hard to diagnose, which means that there are potentially more people out there with this Condition than the official stats show. I didn't know I had it until well into my 30s. Certainly there is a steady stream of new people coming into the support group.

There is this one person who's been on the group for almost as long as I have; let's call her Ella. Ella's a cheerful soul. She always has a bright smile and a willing ear for anyone who needed help. Today, it was her turn, very suicidally so. We had a long chat where she unburdened herself on me. Basically, treatment for the Condition takes a long time. There are many many hoops to jump through before even a diagnosis is given. I went through 3 specialists before I found my current primary care provider. Of the 3 prior to him, one didn't care because he was retiring, the other was running so ragged he gave me the wrong diagnosis after just a casual examination (which was borderline criminal, IMHO) and the last saw me as a cash cow - she wouldn't render a diagnosis until I told her I was quitting and even then, she said she wouldn't prescribe treatment until "more tests had been done". So yes, it's not as simple as "go to the doctor, get meds". Anyway, back to Ella.

She knew she had this medical problem since she was a kid. She didn't do anything about it because she was, well, a kid. Her parents didn't care and when it cropped up, they just told her to ignore it. As I said, the Condition is *rare*. People aren't very well educated about it even now, let alone 3-4 decades ago. So, she let her Condition progress until it was blatently obvious except now she's a grownup and can't work because she's got other medical issues. Being on disability doesn't pay much. Despite all that, this brave soul slogged on and managed to get treatment nonetheless. This is not trivial, folks - treatment is *expensive*. One of my former doctors (now fired from my case for prescribing me placebos) was pushing a $1,000 shot 4 times a year as part of the medication regime. Ella's got everything lined up: as I mentioned, there are many hoops to jump through and she's got them all set up ready to go. That's an amazing feat. I'm not sure I could have done anywhere near as well as she has if I were in her position.

Ella's main problem today was regret. Regardless of the fact that she's got everything ready to go, she's looking back at her life and seeing all the misery and pain which could have been avoided had she had the courage to take action 20 years earlier. I too, play the "What if..." game far more often than is healthy for me. Here's the thing: regret is good. Regret helps us learn from what we've done wrong. Regret stops us from doing it again (assuming we learnt anything). Regret is also a way that we cope and heal from doing bad things. Equally important is forgiveness. It took me years to learn to forgive myself and let past mistakes go so the wounds heal. Regret is healthy...except when it puts you in a position of so much anguish that it paralyzes you because you can't let go. Which is what happened to Ella today.

I chatted with her on the phone for nearly 2 hours. We talked, we cried and eventually she felt better. It doesn't take much to help. She was feeling all alone facing the Condition; I merely showed her that she wasn't and that the Condition is survivable. She hasn't learnt to forgive herself yet - she's not ready for that yet but I hope she will soon. For now, all she needed to do was wait a few months for the treatments to kick in and then the sun will shine in her life once more as her depression lifts. I think she believed me, enough to back away from her suicidal plans anyway. When I said my goodbyes, I had one thought in my mind: there but for the grace of god go I.