Schrödinger's Chronic Cat
I feel like we spend so much of our lives waiting.
Waiting to grow up. Waiting for the weekend. Waiting for the movie to start. For our nails to dry. For our food to come. For our packages to arrive. But when it comes to chronic illness, waiting reaches an entirely new level.
Schrödinger’s Cat theory plays an interesting role here. TLDR: Schrödinger’s Cat is a thought experiment. The experiment goes that a cat is locked in a box with a poisonous substance that could kill it. We don’t know whether the cat is alive or dead, since it’s in this box. Therefore, it is BOTH alive and dead until we, the observers, open the box. It's a thought experiment, totally hypothetical, playing with the idea of uncertainty. Once we open the box, we 'decide' the cat’s fate. The theory gets a little more complicated as it continues, involving things like quantum physics and parallel universes, but that’s a basic summary.
Why am I bringing this up? In my medical world of waiting, I’ve often found comfort in this theory. And I’d be interested to know whether other chronic individuals have too. Here’s why:
Whether we are waiting 11 months to see a specialist, 2 weeks to get lab results, or 30 minutes in a waiting room, our deepest fears are neither true nor false until confirmed. And oftentimes, our deepest fears can be BOTH true and false. For example... I’ve been having symptoms of an autoimmune disease. If I’m getting bloodwork drawn up at the rheumatologist, and the results come back positive for a specific condition or disease, that is going to be a really hard pill to swallow (no pun intended). But if they come back negative for any type of condition, I will also be disappointed because that means the mystery deepens, and the search for an answer continues. Therefore, in a sense, the waiting period is the best time. Boom. Schrödinger’s cat.
Let’s take it a step further. Let’s say I don’t get the answer, and the search continues. That means more doctors. More waiting. More Schrödinger’s cats. The deeper we dig, the more we discover that the chronic journey is just an infinite experience of Schrödinger’s cats— information we do and don’t want to confirm. Tests we do and don’t want to come back normal. Diagnoses we do and don’t want to have.
And when we wait— both are true and neither are true. And we are caught in a limbo that frees us from any responsibility of next steps. Does waiting suck? Of course. But of the three, does it suck the least? Also yes. Sometimes it’s just a lot easier to worry about what the answer’s going to be than to figure out what we are going to do about it.
Be well,
Amanda
