Why Hard Trials?

©2022 by Vernon Miles Kerr and VernonMilesKerr.com

Writers have to be dead-honest about themselves to have any credibility whatsoever. I couldn’t do that, seven years ago, when I first got onto social media, but, subsequent life has molded me. The big influence has been this #CancerOdyssey I’ve experienced.

From the very beginning, the prognosis was not good. Starting in the sinuses, it had already reached the brain barrier. My four triweekly sessions of chemotherapy and six weeks of Mon-thru-Friday radiation therapy have been fairly-well documented on Twitter and on my blog.

During all this, I got kudos-galore for my perky, positive attitude of leaving it in the hands of God.  I was sincere. Then a few days ago, while I recuperated at home from the near-deadly poisonings and the continual onslaught of roentgens, and while selecting from the forest of bottles containing “remedies” on the bathroom counter several times daily, and while coping with winter weather after losing 25 pounds of insulating fat — the monotony and slow progress finally broke me.

I started feeling sorry for myself, wondering if it were all worth it. I expressed this to my wife and millennial son who lives in an apartment upstairs. Trained as a Certified Medical Assistant he came down and started a near drill-sergeant patois, along with guiding me through several mild exercises, with the admonition to keep these up on my own. He could see that I was withdrawing into my easy-chair in front of the fire, both physically and emotionally.

I don’t know if it was the exercise routine, or the reminder that I was not in this alone, that did the trick. But it worked, almost immediately.

Now the drudgery and monotony of medical-self-maintenance has not gone away, neither has the winter cold, but I keep going — now, more resolutely than perkily-and-positively. But I haven’t lost the firm conviction that I, like all humans am undergoing a, sometimes unpleasant, bootcamp, which will help us help others on some other plane, after we leave this one.