Just Take a Pill! Everything Will Be Fine!

Just Take a Pill! Everything Will Be Fine!

Well, you always hope it will be something easy like, “Oh, I can see why you can’t pee. Brice. You just need to go get a back massage once a week for a year and you will be good as new!” Thanks, doctor! NO! Or…

“Oh, I can see why your motor is making that noise. There was a little stick that got up in here, but now it is fine.” Wow, how much do I owe you? “Nothing, that was fun to work on!” Or...

“Sure dad we won’t fight when we are together 24/7 even though we are only 2.5 years apart and really enjoy picking at each other’s weaknesses to destroy the other person until they finally submit to do everything we say, but since you asked, dad, we would be happy to stop…” (Sorry for the run on sentence but that’s how my kids talk.) “FOREVER!” NO, NO, NO!

I could keep going but I am really afraid the next one would get me in big trouble at home. I went to the doctor and he gave me a pill and said try that. Wow, thanks Doctor! So, I went home thinking the problem was solved. I took the pill every day like a good boy and went about my business—or at least tried to. It’s what the doctor said to do so it must be okay. I didn’t know what was wrong but if this pill fixed it, honestly who cares. So I did what I was supposed to do, but nothing changed.

So, I got another appointment at the Urologist’s office and hoped no one would recognize me this time when I came in. (Go back and read the last post if you are confused right now.) Insert card. Pull out. Enter Pin. Yes, this is the right amount. No, I don’t want cash back (I didn’t even know Doctors did that). Sign. Yes, I would like a paper receipt please. No my insurance hasn’t changed. Yes I still live at that address or at least I did yesterday. Sit and wait.

“Mr. Early”? I go back again and he wants me to pee into the “cone of shame” (Read my previous blog). I figure if I can get a little more build up before I start to go this time, I can at least get a fast start. I have always been more of a sprinter than a marathon runner in life anyway, so this ought to work out great. So here it goes (or at least I hope it goes). Waiting… Waiting… Waiting… AND GO!!!!! I start singing a twisted version of one of the songs from Frozen, “Let it flow, let it flow”. However, it came out as a trickle and that may be exaggerating. It was like a waterfall during the dry season. Or like a leaky annoying faucet in the middle of the night. Or maybe like when you know you turned the hose on high, but one of your kids (the one you convinced that he was adopted just for fun) is standing on the hose so you just shake it hoping it will make it go faster and wondering why it won’t come out. Ugh!

Okay. My score went down and then to make it worse the doctor comes in and tells me where my score should be and his score was so much higher. I was like, “Dude, you need a new hobby.” I mean if he stands around and pees in buckets to make his patients feel inferior there is something seriously wrong with this guy. But in a weird way, I felt like I had lost and this might actually change the trajectory of my life. “I got to get my pee back on!” (Say that with some attitude now.)

After a bunch of medical jargon and more questions, get this, he doubled the dose of the stupid pill I had already been taking. Seriously! A copay, humiliation, losing my second pee competition in my life, and you tell me to take two pills instead of one?! Okay, thanks doctor--maybe this will fix it.

NOPE! Two months later I am back doing the exact same thing, but this time he wants to run a test. I was hoping it was an essay test because I am great at those, but he wanted to do a flow test. I wasn’t sure what that was but I was told that it might be a little uncomfortable. Well, that statement would be the understatement of the year. Political debates proved to be more truthful than that statement. There was nothing little about it! It was majorly uncomfortable, unnatural, and unwanted. If you want to google it for pictures, be careful that you didn’t just eat a meal and your children are in bed and you are not at work in case they search your computer and think you have some weird fetish disorder.

Basically, what they do is insert a catheter in both ends, stick a bunch of electrodes on you, make you drink a bunch of water to pump you full of fluid, make you hold it until you cross your legs and it hurts, and then tell you to empty it out where once again they check your speed and quantity. Good times! And to make it worse you are in a chair that lays back and the only thing it is missing is stirrups! (Ladies you get the picture.) Of course the doctor does not administrate this, but instead he sends in two nurses: one to perform the procedure and the other one to watch (as if that’s not awkward).

Here’s the good news, I survived the test even with the public humiliation. Here is the bad news, I flunked! Big time! F---! I couldn’t hold as much as I should have been able to and my flow was like a waterfall in August three months after the rainy season has ended (drip, drip, drip). To make it worse my bladder only emptied half way out! The nurses did not look impressed and seemed a little embarrassed for me. The head nurse said, “Don’t worry about it, Brice. We will figure this out together. I think the other mouthed to me, “You still matter!” I would have preferred them to say, “Suck it up, buttercup, and get in there and make it happen!”

So, what did we learn from the test? What we already knew! I have to pee all the time because I can’t pee! So, guess what the doctor said we need to do? Try a new pill to see if this one works. We did this pill routine about three more times until the doctor finally got to a place where he said he was running out of options except a surgery that he only usually did on 70-80 year old men. (I won’t bore you with those details.)

Easy answers are usually never the best answers, at least in my experience. A pill has never fixed any issue I ever had, except an aspirin when I had a headache. But emotionally, spiritually, relationally, and mentally speaking, if I just do this one simple thing I find that I actually regress instead of progress. It takes hard work and causes me to have to roll up my sleeves and dig in. I have to get creative and think outside the box. Or, I have to get accountability and support to help me think through things differently. Sometimes I have gone to a counselor to get an outside view and see things in me that I can’t see for myself. I have found if I want to be transparent, I usually can’t do it by myself. I have to be willing to allow others close enough to me to help see what is blocking the view that I need to see. Many times it is my pride or my selfishness (there is not much difference between those two, by the way).

Sometimes it is shame or even unwillingness to want to change or grow. Be honest—it’s easier to stay right where you are in all the areas of your life, even if it doesn’t feel good. The pain of the present is safer than the unknown freedom of the future. At least I know what I am dealing with if I stay right where I am. But as leaders we have to LEAD! That is a word of movement and action. People who are LEADING cannot stay stagnant. If you do stay stagnant for too long, you have to relinquish your title as LEADER and take on a new title as SITTER. That is not nearly as sexy of a title either.

If anyone gets it, it is ME and that can be a scary proposition. For so many years I went two steps forward and three steps back, but at least I was moving right? NO! I found people who like to be led don’t like to go backwards. They like to advance the ball down the court so we can eventually score!

Let me encourage you to take a 360-degree look at yourself and your leadership and see if there are areas that you need to move forward. Look and see if there are areas that you have been ignoring and that have gone stagnant. If so, it is probably in areas of your life you don’t like dealing with or that are in the past that you want to stay in the past. Again, I get it, but I also know that those are some of the most critical areas of your life and leadership that need to be dealt with. AND when you do, they will be some of your greatest areas of influence with those that you lead!

Take a risk—that’s what leaders do! Move! Lead! A pill is not going to fix the problem, but hard work, your leadership, and your team can! The flow test was humiliating, uncomfortable, weird at best, and I failed. But the information that would eventually be taken from it would lead to my healing to allow my future to have a new purpose and for me to “be able to get my pee on”. (More about that in the next chapters.)

At first glance not everything we lead through looks like it will bear fruit. At first glance the painful things we have to lead through don’t appear to benefit anyone. But keep pruning, watering, working, and amazingly new buds will appear. Your season is coming! I promise! How much growth you experience in your new season will be determined by how faithful you are during this winter or this desert you are leading through now.

A pill won’t fix it. A test won’t fix it. But every time you try something that doesn’t work, you have come closer to the answer of what WILL work. So, stick in there and keep looking for answers no matter how frustrating or how lonely it is. You have got this and you are closer today to seeing those new buds of leadership in your life than you ever have been.