Monday, December 15, 2014

Only So Much You Can Do

Fretting is useless, and it's something I rarely allow myself to do.

That said, there are two situations going on right now that I'm tempted to fret about.

First, I should note that James, the guy we raised money for last year, died today.

I honestly didn't know him at all. By all accounts he seemed to be a good person, and it was a pleasure to meet and hang out with his friend Ben last year during the EarthBound Bash event, but my first-hand experience with him is basically nil. All I can relate to about the situation is that we put a lot of work into raising money to help him pay his medical bills.

I have no idea if we even put a dent in those bills--$12,000 seems a lot of money, but in the medical world it's a drop in the bucket. Ass we could hope for, though, was to help him out as much as we could and have a good time doing it. And that's what we did.

Did it make a difference? I hope so. If that money lightened the burden on his family even a little bit, I'm happy. If our goofy fundraising party acted as a bright spot during his last year of life, even better. We should be happy with ourselves.

That's not how it actually feels, though. In my mind I know there wasn't anything else to be done, that there's only do much you can do about cancer. My insides feel a bit twisted up right now, though, thinking about how useless we really were, in the end. The story doesn't have a happy ending, and the gamer in me is naturally flipping through past save files to see what I could have done differently.

Another friend of mine is currently in the hospital. Without getting into too many details, there's something in his brain causing strokes, and he needs to go 4-6 weeks without a stroke to be allowed to have the surgery to prevent him from having more strokes. It's been a few weeks, and we're getting our hopes up.

Eventually there's nothing you can do but hope and pray, if that's your thing.

No comments:

Post a Comment