Reprieve

She held the results of the tests in front of her and summarized the findings. "There is something going on, but it's not what we thought," she said. "There is some hope," she said. "You can get better," she said. All of this came as something of a shock. I had been living in the shadow of a steep decline leading to a dark, and close, end. The weight of that had been crushing the light out of me and would not leave me alone. "You've got some work to do," she said. "You have to address the impairments, the decline in function. All of that is real." As she spoke, I did not know how to feel. Elation? Guilt that I was going to carry on? Responsibility? Whatever it was, she was delivering the news that I would have to serve a sentence and that sentence was life. I was sentenced to live again. Nothing had changed. Everything had changed.