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A Painful Example of How American Healthcare is Cruel to Sick People
My friend’s dwindling energy is spent navigating a broken system
My friend Jeff told me about the “spoon theory” over dinner last summer. It’s a concept coined by Christine Miserandino in 2003. She was trying to explain to her healthy young friend what it was like living with lupus, an autoimmune disease that causes inflammation throughout the body.
The idea is that everyone starts the day with a finite number of spoons. A healthy person may have 150 spoons, but someone with lupus or cancer or any number of debilitating conditions may have half that number (or less).
Every single action we take, from sitting up in bed in the morning to taking a shower to sending an email, costs at least one spoon. Once you use a spoon, it’s gone until the next day. If you’re lucky (and healthy), you wake up with roughly the same amount of spoons every morning, but sick people aren’t lucky. Spoon availability varies greatly.
When you have fewer spoons to begin with and when simple tasks like getting ready in the morning burn through spoons at a higher rate than the average healthy person, you need to choose your spoons wisely. In her essay introducing the concept, Miserandino writes:
