Having had all the usual childhood diseases (measles, mumps, chicken pox, etc.), plus weekly allergy shots,plus several trips to the emergency rooms for “injuries,” I was not unfamiliar with the doctor’s office when I was diagnosed with acute pyelonephritis when I was 16.

So, when I was diagnosed with Polycystic Kidney Disease at age 22, two years after my father died of it, I somehow felt the fulfillment of an inevitability.  Sort of like carrying on the family tradition.

When symptoms started showing up in my mid 30′s, I started to feel, as many PKD patients do, “defective.”

Now, externally, my life was pretty “normal(!?).”  Job. Marriage. Divorce. Girlfriends.

But when I experienced a burst cyst, and exhibited hematuria (blood in the urine), I began to really feel differently about myself. I felt like a sword was hanging over me. (In a very real sense, there was one. Technically speaking, there still is.) I still was working, but my perception of  “future” was rapidly changing.

I was so fortunate that the woman I was dating was willing to travel the “PKD Odyssey” with me and married me. Yet, even so, as the years went by, and my “numbers” deteriorated, I found that I had no perception of “future” at all!

When I thought of the “future.” I perceived a country road on a very foggy morning where you can’t see more than a few feet ahead. And as I took a step, the fog just moved with me, so that I really couldn’t see ahead.

Well, walking around with no sense of future isn’t helpful when you’re in conversations centering around the subject of  “future plans.” When friends were express their “dreams,” I felt out of place, and consequently began to be depressed.

It was only when I was studying Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and we were studying the concept of  “Time-lines,” did I learn, with the help of my classmates, how to develop the concept of “future.”

It is difficult to describe the therapeutic effect that had on me. The sense of not having “plans” went away. I started at least contemplating plans. I felt that the perception of my disease still included life in the “future.”

Now, granted, I wasn’t jumping for joy that I had PKD, but my perception was not a defeatist one. Without a doubt, the new positive attitude helped me see the various “negative” developments as “temporary.”

And, as it happened, they were. I now have the same attitude about everything: It’s temporary.

After all, from the higher elevation, isn’t everything…temporary?

Peace and Blessings!

Coach Richie Perl