Did you know that if you boil a pot of water and throw in a live frog that that frog will hop right out, saving his life to croak again another day (ha, ha:). If, on the other hand, you place a frog in a pot of cold water and turn the heat up slowly, that frog will stay in the pot. He will not jump out but slowly acclimate to the increasingly hot water until it boils to death. Truth or urban legend? To prove it I’d have to cook a live frog and that’s not going to happen. It sounds true and so should be because of what it teaches us.
A women comes to see me for help. She tells me her story, sighs, and then says, “Really, it’s not that bad.” Oh, yes, it is! She’s sitting in a pot of very hot water. If she had been dropped into her intolerable situation all of a sudden she’d be saying, “Holy Cow! Get me outta here!”
This happened to me when my mother and father came to live with us when she was undergoing chemotherapy at Roswell Park. It wasn’t like I was alone, but I had a full time ob, two small kids and my siblings were hundreds of miles away. All four of them would check in often and I’d say, “Really, it’s not that bad.” One day my younger brother flew in for a visit. It didn’t take him long to sit me down and say firmly, “You’re about to drop
dead and you don’t even know it. This is what we’re going to do, you are taking a leave of absence from your job and one of us will be here with you from now on.” I didn’t see what he could see clearly since he was the frog that just dropped in the pot that I had been in for a while.
If you are tired, stressed and feeling low you may be a slowly cooking frog. If you think you are, talk to friends, family, a counselor, reach out, get a reality check, ask for help. Don’t be a martyr frog.
