Anna Gets Another Management Plan
The plan made sense. The harder question was whether Anna’s life had enough room to carry it.
Anna came home from an appointment with a new management plan.
It was a good plan.
There were things to take in the morning, something else before food, exercises twice a day, symptom tracking and several dietary suggestions.
Anna put the sheet beside her other health sheets.
There were quite a lot of them.
Sometimes she had too many things she was supposed to do.
On paper, it looked manageable
The problem was that each plan seemed to assume it was Anna’s only plan.
Meanwhile Anna also needed to eat, sleep, shower, wash clothes, answer messages, organise appointments and occasionally participate in something resembling a life.
Even resting had somehow acquired instructions.
Anna was beginning to feel that managing her health had become a part-time job.
Unfortunately, nobody had supplied the part-time-job energy.
It seemed like a responsible question.
But there was always another possible treatment, another strategy, another thing to monitor and another habit that might help.
Eventually Anna noticed that every intervention also required something from her.
Health management uses capacity too
A treatment might require:
None of this meant the treatment was bad.
It meant the cost of doing it belonged in the decision too.
Anna started making smaller plans
Anna found a good-enough line
She didn’t stop caring about her health.
She stopped assuming that doing more was automatically the same as managing better.Some things were important enough to prioritise.
Some were worth trying later.
Some could be simplified.
And sometimes the most useful thing Anna could do for her health was not add another job.
Anna still kept the management plan.
She just stopped treating every line on it as an instruction that had to be completed immediately and perfectly.
The plan was supposed to support Anna.
Anna wasn’t supposed to spend her whole life supporting the plan.
