You’ve probably heard the term “invisible disease,” and it means exactly what you think. Cystic fibrosis (CF), for example, is an invisible disease since it’s not perceptible with the eyes alone. People might hear me cough and wonder if I’m sick. They might see me take pills before I eat. But none of these things communicate that I have a disease. So, to an onlooker, I often appear “normal.”
Breaking a leg, however, is a very visible condition. For the first several weeks after I broke my leg, I got around with the help of a walker, my leg bandaged. I was a wee bit anxious about going out in public, but everyone was overly kind. They insisted I go through the door before them, despite knowing it would slow them down. Nobody seemed rushed, and smiles were aplenty.
When I graduated to crutches and shed the bandages, I encountered the same compassion from strangers—the visual cues communicating my misfortune.
One evening during his cancer treatment, Ramon walked in the front door after work.
“I think people at work forgot I have cancer,” he announced. “I needed to have hair to lose.”
We laughed, but I understood his point. Because he’d been shaving his head so long, there was no visual indicator that he was undergoing chemotherapy.
“Nobody feels sorry for me,” he joked.
On the way home from the hospital one afternoon, Ramon wanted an Icedream cone from Chick-fil-A. He was wearing a face mask because he had no immune system to fight off illness—and the year was 2019, so this was unusual. He wore his face mask into Chick-fil-A and left there with the biggest Icedream cone I’d ever seen.
“See how much more stuff I’m getting with this mask on? And they think I’ve lost my hair!”
I’ve thought a lot about this in the last two months. It’s easy for us to get so caught up in the hustle and bustle that we forget the people we encounter are human—facing their own set of issues we know nothing about. When you look at someone, you can’t see their stress or heartache or grief. But I can almost assure you it’s there.
Since we can’t see what’s invisible, maybe it’s best to default to compassion. Imagine the walker or the hair loss or whatever it takes to give a friendly smile versus a “get out of my way” grimace.
There’s a lot that feels beyond our control, but being kind is quite doable.
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