This morning I felt pressed for time. I had a deadline looming and a laundry list of things that I needed to do before I could call my day a “success.”
And then my friend Tom called.
Tom’s been living with MS for a while now, and this morning he wanted to tell me about a new treatment regimen that he has been undergoing since receiving the results of his latest MRI.
He began by telling me that he had read a book on the use of bee stings to help treat MS patients. And I could hear the excitement in his voice when he told me that one of his neighbors was a beekeeper.
Tom said that every other day for the past three weeks, his neighbor had come to Tom’s house to apply bees to his arms with the hope that the venom would help relieve some of his symptoms.
We laughed for a moment about the fact that, for our entire lives, we had tried to avoid getting stung by bees. And now here was Tom, intentionally trying to get stung. And not only that, he was doing it thirteen times every other day! When I asked how much longer the treatments would continue before he could hope to see some results, he told me that he had at least a couple of more months to go.
After we finished our conversation, I thought about Tom, a man in his early forties with a wife and three young kids. And it occurred to me that in pursuing the bee sting treatments, he was showing a tremendous amount of courage and hope in a process that many mainline physicians would look at with a certain amount of skepticism.
And yet, every other day the doorbell rings and the woman with the bees steps inside…carrying both the bees and a little bit of hope. Hope that Tom will be around to hear his kids laugh, bandage their wounds when they fall, take pictures of their first homecoming dances, escort them down the aisle, and answer those tough life-questions that only a battle-tested father can answer.
Laundry lists don’t seem to matter very much when the only item on the list is to survive. And when success is measured in breaths and not in tasks accomplished.
“I complained because I had no shoes until I met…”
Thank you, Tom
