I keep hearing my doctor’s voice –

He puts his hands on my shoulders, stands right in front of me – he was 6 ft tall and I was me – and he says: “You can do this. You have to work very hard, but you can do this.”

He would smile, take his hands off my shoulders and leave.

I think the hardest part of all this is knowing everything matters; everything counts.

In 2004 Dr. Warwick was in “The New Yorker,” and in the article he was having a conversation with a patient. The patient had a recent dip in her lung scores and he was trying to get to the bottom of it.

After some digging she said that she had not been doing her treatments as she should. She was taking college classes, had a boyfriend, and didn’t really feel the difference if she did them or not.

He says:

“Let’s look at the numbers,” he said to me, ignoring Janelle. He went to a little blackboard he had on the wall. It appeared to be well used. “A person’s daily risk of getting a bad lung illness with CF is 0.5 per cent.” He wrote the number down. Janelle rolled her eyes. She began tapping her foot. “The daily risk of getting a bad lung illness with CF plus treatment is 0.05 per cent,” he went on, and he wrote that number down. “So, when you experiment you’re looking at the difference between a 99.95-per-cent chance of staying well and a 99.5-per-cent chance of staying well. Seems hardly any difference, right? On any given day, you have basically a one-hundred-per-cent chance of being well. But”—he paused and took a step toward me— “it is a big difference.” He chalked out the calculations. “Sum it up over a year, and it is the difference between an eighty-three-per-cent chance of making it through 2004 without getting sick and only a sixteen-per-cent chance.”

He turned to Janelle. “How do you stay well all your life? How do you become a geriatric patient?” he asked her. Her foot finally stopped tapping. “I can’t promise you anything. I can only tell you the odds.”

In this short speech was the core of Warwick’s world view. He believed that excellence came from seeing, daily, the difference between being 99.5-per-cent successful and being 99.95-per-cent successful.”

The math never lies. He ended up admitted Janelle, as he said later in the article and said, “They both failed.”

Everything matters; everything counts.

I remember him going to the blackboard countless times and drawing curves, numbers, charts, and notes to emphasize the importance of everything.

That’s the hardest thing – everything.

The orchestration of everything. I say orchestration because it has taken me years to find the right method:

Smallest amount of time + the perfect, nugget, amount of energy + the method (1st + 2nd + 3rd of medications, treatments, and exercise) = to achieve the best possible outcome – or the hope for the best possible outcome. Because that is what I am, or what we are all working for, right –

Dr. Warwick copy righted this method of breathing and coughing that he performed, and I practiced after. He did once, I did it; he did it a second time; I did it. By the 3rd or 4th time I got it. Then he told me how many times a day he wanted me to do this.

Then he told me his secret – “Patients do about 70-75% of what you instruct them to do.”

He told me to drink 20 glasses of water, this is the year 1998 or 1999. He said, “I know you will drink about 16.” And he smiled.

What I have learned from most things and everything is that I love work.

I love feeling the satisfaction and sometimes exhaustion from work.

It is because you feel alive.

Laying around – unable to do what you like, unable to get up, you feel worthless and dead.

Getting up and being among the living is the best possible thing ever.

And everything is up to you – and it is on you. You can get help, assistance, teams of people – as I have and do. But, when that exhaustion sets in deep and the gravity weighs you down like a soaked trench coat, you have to still do it.

No one can do my treatments for me or do the right thing for my health.

Everything matters.

Everything counts.

Thank goodness for the years I had with Dr. Warwick.

post script: my medication got approved through my insurance. Excitement and relief. 🙂

Oh and if you could follow me, that would be cool. 😃

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/12/06/the-bell-curve