Choose Your Own Adventure

Today after clinic, this oft-repeated patient comment left me thinking about the old “Choose Your own Adventure” books.

Real life is, of course, the ultimate “Choose Your Own Adventure” – but in this version, we can’t go back and take a sneaky peak to see what would happen if you had made the OTHER choice. What are the stories, the endings that DIDN’T happen?

We don’t always get reassurance that we are making the right choices, whether it comes to parenting or health. Those boring, everyday, routine things that matter. We don’t see the tragedy we avoided.

The safe sleep and stairgates and vaccinations, and the seat belts, the helmets and the wintertime Vitamin D and going for those walks and eating the fibre… Those cancer screening appointments and those really hard-to-have conversations with our teens…

What happens if we didn’t?

How much easier would it be to continue to do those things to look after ourselves – and our families – if our real life Choose Your Own Adventure was more like the book – and we got to have a sneaky peak to the OTHER ending? What if you knew those OTHER stories that didn’t happen (oh, you know they happen to other people – but that’s not your story, right?)

What if you could skip through the pages and see all the accidents and illnesses and tragedy that didn’t happen because you are, of course, always so sound and sensible?