Who is brave?

Let's think about three appointments I had in a row last week. Let's call them 10, 11, and 12.

10 is a woman in her early thirties who has been seeing me for several months because she had a series of bad panic attacks. She doesn't have too many full-blown attacks any more but she is constantly afraid that she will. This makes her afraid that she has lost control of her mind and that she is about to go completely crazy. She won't, but she thinks about it much too much, and with too much intensity.

She had been telling her husband about her fears, but after a few months of trying to reassure her, he just tells her to get over it.

I want her to take some medication. I think it would really help. But she is afraid that once she swallows the pill she has no control of what it will do to her mind, and that the pill will push her over the edge. She is a brave, tough young woman and she fights her fears all the time. You would never know that she is constantly fighting off thought of a mind explosion.

11 is a man I have also been seeing for a while. He is finally beginning to make progress battling a terrible depression. He has spent months in his house, mostly lying in bed trying to find the energy, and in his mind, a reason to get up. He has a lovely wife and a beautiful daughter and he stares at them, knowing he should do more to take care of them. He has been taking many pills, and they have helped a little.

He lost his job months ago. He is behind on his bills. He feels like a failure and is just beginning to get passed hating himself for it. There are some very complicated and involved reasons why this all descended upon him, but no one can see those. People look at him and wonder why he can't just go back to being what he was two years ago.

He is making progress. The thoughts of suicide are less frequent. He is bravely fighting through the dark clouds that have filled up every room of his life.

12 drags herself in on crutches. One leg is worse than useless to her, as it also causes her almost constant pain. Her ankle is not only busted, it is deteriorating, as are several of the bones in her spine. This deterioration has put pressure on her spinal chord and caused seizures. The seizures have caused her to fall and re-injure her ankle, as well has her knee and her wrist.

The pills she takes, and the devices she has implanted in her serve to somewhat diminish her pain. She can take more pills, but then she will sleep all day and all night and not be able to finish a sentence. She does that some times.

There are things she can have done to her that could help. There is a list of three more surgeries. They could relieve most of the pain, or they could paralyze her, or even make her heart stop.

She has one hand and arm that works without pain. She uses it to bravely kill hordes of zombies that attack her through a video game.