Sarah Schnitker

And we do have data showing that people can grow in their patients over the course of years, not just months.

But I also am struck by the challenges that a diagnosis like MS can bring to a person's life.

And it

It seems to me that part of the ability to maintain patience in this kind of circumstance would also be really selecting well goals that are still important and optimizing towards those goals and that by

Homing in on what is really critical, it allows you to keep your patience and not to become so dysregulated by all the things that are really challenging, but to be able to focus in on

And I think finding that key purpose and really selecting what it is you care about and what you're going to try to do with your more limited resources as a human is really essential for helping that patience to grow.

Yes, Simon's story is really astounding in many ways, and I think is such a great illustration of how patience and courage work in tandem, right?

He describes these moments where they had to hustle, where they had to get paperwork filed, where they had to move very, very quickly and probably have some sleepless nights, right?

to get things done.

But then there were other times in this eight-year journey where they had to just wait and probably weren't getting no news and could easily become frustrated and so disheartened that others would have given up and said, we'll just stop this fight.

But I think

he really exemplifies that patience and courage work well together and that sometimes we really do have to be fast.

And so patience does not mean we're always slow, but that we have the wisdom to move slowly when it's necessary and to move quickly when it's not and to just be properly oriented to the speed at which things need to move.

Yes, I think this is common that people describe struggles with bureaucracies as more challenging than just with other individuals.

We are beginning to study parents of adolescents with disabilities, and they report this as well, that they're okay being patient with their own child, but they get really upset and really struggle when it comes to navigating all the systems that are supposed to support their child and their family.

I know I experienced this struggle when I dealt with my own health issues during grad school.

And it's, I think, very helpful to have a specific plan of how you're going to move forward so you don't have to be ruminating on it.

So I know for myself, I was trying to get a certain procedure to figure out what I was sick with back when I was throwing up all the time in grad school.

before I got my acyclic vomiting diagnosis.

And what I did is I said, okay, I'm going to set my timer every day for 8.03 a.m.