I want to laugh some times when people utter those words, a laugh filled with  admiration and love and then I want to open up my arms and just hug them.  I’m talking big hugs here people, bear hugs!

Some choices in our life are pretty easy to make. What to have for dinner, should your loo rolls have teddy’s on or imprints of Winnie the Pooh (honestly), you know day to day choices and the likes there of.   Then you get those bigger ones, the ones hidden from our conscious at the best of times, the ones hidden in our personality.

Some choices just are, whether they are because of who we are or because we have chosen them consciously doesn’t change them from being what they are, choices.

If you were to get really sick tomorrow, I am talking sick as in Lupus, Cancer, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Idiopathic Intercranial Hypertension (I’m trying to look really intelligent here ok just don’t get me pronouncing it) or became disabled tomorrow how will you answer the following questions?

How will you react knowing that you are sick, that your life will never be the same again, that it will be filled with pain?

Honestly now, stop for a moment and really think about it.

Will you stop living, give up everything and become cloaked in the “illness and death” of it?

Will you start expecting people to do your every bidding and by doing so give up your independence?

Will you stop caring about other peoples needs and take on the “I’m dying you owe me” attitude?

It’s a choice or is it personality, who we are?  Some of us will never be tested to the levels that others are, perhaps because we will never be able to survive the kind of pain they go through.

Last year August a close friend of mine was told that his Cancer was incurable, stage 3 Lymphatic Cancer, he was 30.  The doctors in England said said it was just a football injury, that it would go away, it never did.  He went back and he was handed the life sentence of “Look we thought it was a football injury but you have 6 weeks to live, we can extend it and perhaps cure it with chemotherapy and the likes there of”.  He went in to hospital and had his vertebrae in his neck fused together, he had the lymph glands removed, he went through the chemo, he was told “Go to South Africa there is a world renown specialist there, he has offered to do your treatment for free”.  He was on his death bed and he flew to SA on the premise that he might be cured.  He died 2 weeks later.

Through it all, right from the time he found out that he was dying he had a smile plastered on his face.  He joked around the same as always this time poking fun at his illness and making light of the situation.  He did that for those that loved him and for himself.  He did not for one minute wallow in the fact that he had a so called 6 weeks to live.  He started making plans, he decided that he was not going to die, he was going to live.  He continued his business, he made plans to travel to America and plotted his route to travel right around it on his bicycle.  He continued to live, possibly more so.

He made the choice, he fought hard to keep his head above water and right up till his last few days he was jovial right through the morphine haze and the unbearable pain, he smiled.  The one thing that he said many times over, it is no big deal, stop fussing, let me live and be.

Was he courageous? Was he brave?

In my books he was that and more.

People with illnesses of all sorts, varieties and flavours, there are too many to go and mention, get that same choice as Lee.  Do you live or are you the living dead? Big question but to these people it is not, it is the “It’s no big deal”.  We all have bad days right, these people should have more than the rest of us, they do but their attitude through it all is “I’m no different, this is my lot in life, I am going to live with it and make the best of a crap situation”.

Make the best of a bad situation?

Could you do it?

When you are going through something, when you have gone through something big, experienced something traumatic or just had it really rough you tend not to see how “BIG” it was or is, it just is.  To the rest of us, to the people who have never had to face those things be it illness, experience or both, you are pretty courageous.

Yeah you heard it right the first time.  You know how you just get up out of bed every day and do what you do, how you laugh at a joke even though it hurts like hell or how you make that cup of coffee for the other person even though it feels like you are going to snap in two… yeah you are courageous and brave.

We only know what we can take, how much we can take when life throws us a bowl of sour worms.  Whether we eat the sour worms or not is up to us.

I admire each and every person who has an illness that rocks their world in a bad way and rises above it spiritually stronger.

I admire people who can smile and laugh through the greatest pain.

I admire those who still go out of their way to help others and do their best for them.

I admire those who still have a kick ass attitude even when the chips are down.

You inspire me each and every day to never give up, it is unintentional inspiration but it is inspiration all the same.

Thank you for fighting back, the world is a better place for it.  When those chips are down just remember the friends that are there to help, reach out and you will find us there ready to catch you.

Do you have courage? Are you courageous? Are you brave?

Not to you no, you are just doing what you do

To us you are amazing!