There is a phrase people often repeat during hardship:
“No man is an island.”
Another says:
“It takes a village.”
For most of my life, I understood those expressions intellectually. They sounded wise, poetic even. But illness has a way of stripping language down to its bones until you finally understand what words actually mean.
No one survives alone.
Not truly.
We celebrate stories of strength because strength is inspiring. We admire determination, resilience, grit, and the will to fight. And yes, I absolutely made the conscious decision to fight for my life. There came a moment when surrender and perseverance stood facing one another, and I chose perseverance.
But determination alone is not enough to heal a human body.
Willpower cannot start an IV.
Courage cannot interpret lab results.
Hope cannot perform surgery.
Faith cannot replace years of medical training.
Healing, real healing, requires people.
It requires teams.
It requires knowledge gathered over generations.
Doctors who studied while the rest of the world slept.
Nurses who carry impossible emotional weight with quiet grace.
Specialists who dedicate their lives to understanding one tiny piece of the endlessly complicated human body.
Researchers.
Therapists.
Caregivers.
Technicians.
Pharmacists.
Family members who sit awake in the dark listening for every change in breathing; carry us when we cannot walk, and are our strength and courage when we feel weak and defeated.
And love.
So much love.
My husband has walked this road beside me step by step, appointment by appointment, fear by fear. There are moments in illness when another person becomes part lighthouse, part anchor, part oxygen tank. The weight of survival is simply too heavy for one pair of hands.
And maybe that is not weakness.
Maybe that is exactly how humanity was designed.
We were never meant to carry suffering alone.
I think about that now when I look at the injured owl being cared for by the Blackland Prairie Raptor Center.
That owl cannot heal itself either.
It cannot set its own fractures.
It cannot administer medication.
It cannot build a rehabilitation enclosure or understand nutritional recovery or monitor infection.
That owl could not even flap a wing to wave for a kind young woman to pull over and show him (or her) kindness and compassion – to rescue him (or her).
That owl survives today because human beings chose to intervene.
NOT to “play God,” as some might argue, but perhaps to reflect the very best qualities God placed within us to begin with:
Compassion.
Wisdom.
Stewardship.
Mercy.
Curiosity.
Responsibility.
To heal.
To improve.
To restore.
To care for creation.
To extend quality of life.
To reduce suffering.
To help one another rise again.
The Blackland Prairie Raptor Center is doing exactly that for this owl.
And I made a similar decision to do the same for myself.
Some people speak about medical science and faith as though they stand on opposite sides of a battlefield. I do not see them that way anymore. To me, medicine is one of the ways human love becomes tangible. It is compassion with training. Mercy with textbooks. Hope with a heartbeat monitor.
If a wild owl deserves every available chance to heal, how could I believe I deserve less?
So yes, I chose to fight.
But I did not fight alone.
A village fights beside me every single day.
And maybe that is the greater truth hidden inside healing:
not that the strongest survive alone,
but that survival itself is often a communal act of love.
Like careful hands lifting an injured owl back toward the sky.
