Okay the spelling of patience from my previous post Better with Patients – Part 1 has changed and that is mainly because I am running out of patience.

I have been home from my operation for a week or so and initially sitting around doing nothing seemed like a good thing.  Also I was taking pain killers so just about everything was fuzzy and funny.

Now, I am just sick and tired of being sick and tired.

I got to thinking about the little aches and pains that creep into your life as you get a little older; and the fact that you never appear to get enough sleep, even when you go to bed at times that in the past you were going out.   Of course these are aches and pains that are unfathomable to youth – as they were to me, until recently.  I now understand that part of being a patient is having patience.  Although I now understand that being patient is the same as being a patient.

I want to have a little whinge about a few things in the hospital but now I am home and the pain is fading, so are my motivations for complaining about people doing a hard job, in hard circumstances, often for hard to deal with people; I have decided that I don’t want to be one of those people, well, this time anyway.

I have remained a hermit during the initial part of my convalescence.  I understand that most times people really don’t want to hear about you being sick as they already have enough to deal with in their own lives.  Plus who needs further feelings of obligation slowing you down to your next planning meeting or Facebook update.  Also, it is like when you greet work colleagues or acquaintances and say “Hello, how are you?” and they actually tell you!

Anyway all this is part of my plan to retire the fittest I have ever been in my life – I think I have said before that I intend to retire to live, not die – bearing in mind there are many forms of dying in retirement, not just the physical type.  I just have to attend to a little ‘mono-ab’ problem and the monkey on my back called smoking.

So being a patient has taught me a little about patience.  It also taught me that no matter how much you may want to share your pain, in the end you have to decide if you are going to endure it until it gets better or make everyone else suffer along with you.

Irrespective of which one you choose, often getting better, or not getting better, is not so much about how sick you are, but how you look at it.

I think I am a little better now, not only physically, but as a man, and perhaps even as a patient.