What Drives You?

I’ve been having an heart-felt back and forth with a concerned mom via my contact form whose 16-year old son has become non-compliant recently. He’s described as wonderful and smart, but just doesn’t care to do many, if any, of his treatments any more and stopped a sport he had played previously. I got to wondering what drives him, because I’ve been there, done that, and bought the t-shirt.

I had to burn that t-shirt the day I knew I wanted to marry Beautiful, but it still didn’t fully change what I was doing to make sure that I gave us the most time together. I’ll place a lot of the blame on my eFlow not working properly to allow me to actually have the time in the day to do my treatments (and I probably wasn’t getting the meds as I should when I did them most nights). Since that’s a cop-out, I’ll admit that I should have been more aggressive in doing whatever it took to get to a solution to be able to do my nebs properly. I take full responsibility for that end of the deal. It was stupid and will never happen again. Now, let’s get back to the underlying issue at hand: drive.

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.”

— Lao Tzu

Where are you heading by doing what you’re doing? How is that working for you? Where do you see yourself in 5 years doing what you’re doing? 10 years? If the answer to either of those is, “I’ll be dead,” then it’s time for an intervention, my friend. You are severely lacking a purpose-driven life.

You don’t have to know the purpose for your life, but you do need to have a purpose for your life. For me, that was Beautiful. It doesn’t have to be the woman of your dreams. It could be to get a certain degree, attain a certain level in a career, or something as materialistic as wanting to earn enough money to have a Ferrari some day. The point is to have a direction to head and then have the intestinal fortitude to make headway towards that goal.

I almost failed at my goal when I got so sick before we got married. I was on IVs something like three or four times that year. It was a horribly stressful year that ended on the high notes of getting married at the end of October and having our first Christmas together with our new Christmas tree. Everything before that day in October took everything I had to make it there. I was fresh off IVs for our wedding and able to sleep all night without coughing every 5 minutes, but I was a roller-coaster of PFT results until this year because I wasn’t compliant. Since then, things have gone nothing but up, up, up. Amazing how the meds work when you take them all, isn’t it?

I had my direction, but I hadn’t put the car into “Drive” yet

Until Beautiful made it abundantly clear to me how much I mean to her and how she would feel to be without me (after repeated attempts at telling me this same feeling), I thought that doing what I was doing was good enough and what happened with my health was going to happen anyway, and in its own time. I was being an inconsiderate jerk thinking that way, but it doesn’t feel like that to the person thinking that until they have their own epiphany.

It was a serious, honest to goodness “I am not going to let CF happen to me. I am going to take this bull by the horns, wrestle it to the ground, tie it up, and shoot it to have for dinner” attitude that I had to put on that night that I decided to turn things around.

Sick and tired of being sick and tired

I’ve heard that phrase at least 100 times on The Dave Ramsey Show podcasts I listen to every morning. Until you are sick and tired of being sick and tired, you are not going to change your ways. After Beautiful said her piece and went to bed, I set into reading the account of someone who had received a lung transplant from having CF. There was a video on her site that told her tale of literally being at the last hour when new lungs came – but what got me all torn up inside was seeing her struggle for a breath. Then her husband put the camcorder down and went to the head of the bed to run his hand through her hair and kiss her and comfort her. He was about to lose his best friend. I put myself in his shoes and thought about how he was going to feel the next day, week, month, year… that was what I was going to be putting Beautiful through at my own hands if I didn’t change.

I was no different than an addict who was destroying his life in that respect, only I was going about it by not doing something.

At that moment I decided that scene would not play out for us because I was negligent in taking care of myself from that point on. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to be because CF is a horrible disease and it would happen knowing that I did everything I could to ensure that doesn’t happen since March 2nd, 2010. 3-2-10: the day I woke up.

• What is driving you?
• Are you in “Drive” yet?
• Are you sick and tired of being sick and tired yet?

Tagged as: ambition, cystic fibrosis, drive, epiphany, goals, life, love, marriage, purpose, Relationships, transplant

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