TNR Happenings, February 12, 2024

We interrupt your slumber in the ordinary world for a moment and pose this hypothetical question: have you ever or do you currently know a chronically ill person? These are people with cancer, alzhiemers, auto-immune disease, MS, mental and emotional impairment, leukemia, PTSD, concussions, etc. They are all around us, and yet other than your known relatives they are separated from the general population. They are part of an invisible culture that, for the most part, stick to themselves and their caregivers. Contrary to popular thought, they are not always aged. We are insulated from much of this in our offices where economically able people come in for assistance with fairly uncomplicated, superficial aches and pains and many of them will resolve on their own.  What about the ones that won’t?

Homeless people don’t come to your office. Social laws and cultural mores prevent this from happening. They don’t live in your neighborhoods; they are isolated, relegated to rundown areas, many times urban in nature. Well, DCME/Level 2 people don’t make it a habit to congregate at a local DC/ND office either. They make their ways to MD specialists, hospitals, and institutions that isolate medical tourism (rehab, warehouses for the sick, etc.) As with homelessness, they weren’t always a difficult or chronic case. Somehow, somewhere both groups slipped through the cracks and there was nobody there to pull them up. Both groups have been let down, betrayed, and marginalized. There was no one to help them.  Most people who see a homeless person will look the other way and will cross the street at another location rather than come face-to-face with them. 

This article is not meant to shame any members. It’s to pierce your insulated, privileged orientation of the sanitized world and nudge you to acquire the necessary skills with inner work to have the courage to attract those people you would not normally find in an office like yours. There is a way of helping people and becoming ultra-successful. It’s not either or, like the world of appearance teaches us. It’s the love expressed between doctor and patient. It’s our connection to others, our devotion, the why behind what we do. In our offices and for Love Has No Color, this dimension is what drives us. The following quote is from the Alchemy of Illness describing these invisible people: “There is, perhaps rightly so, an invisible rope that separates the sick from the well, so that each is repelled by the other, like magnets reversed. The well venture forth to accomplish great deeds in the world, while the sick turn back onto themselves and commune with the dead, neither can face the other very comfortably, without intrusions of envy, resentment, fear or horror. Frankly, from the viewpoint of illness, healthy people seem ridiculous, even a touch dangerous in their blinded busyness, marching like soldiers to the drumbeat of duty and desire. We drop out of the game when we get sick, leave the field and desert the cause. I often feel like a ghost, the slight shade of a person, floating through that world, but not of it. The rules and parameters of my world are different altogether.”      

There is a handful of Miracle Training graduates that will read this and be immediately visited by involuntary tears of recognition. Put the word out today for those cases that nobody wants, the ones that are relegated to dying or being disabled in silence. Break your silence and make it your business to help these invisible people one at a time. It takes courage to pierce the veil of social culture of what can and can’t be done.

DCME Confidential