Overcoming

Trey Smith

One of the headlines this week in pro football is that the head coach of the Indianapolis Colts has been diagnosed with leukemia. As is not uncommon with public figures, the coach has declared that he will not allow the disease to defeat him; he will overcome it.

Maybe he will and maybe he won't. A lot of people make declarations of this nature and yet they succumb to the disease they are afflicted with. I realize that a positive attitude is important and the will to live is strong for most people, but I've never understood these types of pronouncements. In some ways, it smacks of false bravado.

Of course, I'm speaking here solely as an armchair quarterback. As far as I know, I do not have a life-threatening disease. So, you can take what I write here with a grain of salt!

As stated above, I realize that a positive attitude is one of the best elixirs for combating disease. If you mentally give up, then your mind ends up working against your body. Be that as it may, it takes far more than merely a positive outlook to overcome almost anything. In the case of disease, your biological organism must fend off what is killing it and repair, when possible, what has been damaged. Sometimes these efforts save your life and sometimes the disease wins.

It would make far more sense to me if people simply said it is their intent to fight aggressively against a disease and that they realize that the chips will fall where they may. It is their intent to remain positive, regardless of whether they win or lose the battle. In the end, we each lose the battle to preserve our lives in one way or another anyway.

And no amount of "positive thinking" is going to change that.