Finding Joy in the Bleachers

Reclaiming Life After Severe Illness, One Small Step at a Time

Ronnie is a survivor of a life-threatening illness and one of the more remarkable people I know. Having spent forty-nine days desperately ill on a ventilator, he’s a little shocked and surprised at times that he’s alive. While grateful, sometimes he’s deeply sad as he contemplates the ways both large and small that his illness has upended his life.

A middle-aged teacher from a Southern town, he is on a leave of absence from work and passes his time at home. His anxiety is never far away, and his symptoms of PTSD often nip at his heels. But perhaps the most constant feature of his new existence is a portable oxygen tank, a tip of the cap, sadly, to lungs that were badly damaged by severe pneumonia and sepsis and that, two years later, have not fully recovered, leaving him easily fatigued. Oxygen tanks can be a lot like Rorschach ink blots. They trigger reactions in people. For a long time, Ronnie’s tank symbolized for him everything that had gone wrong in his life: a dream-filled future permanently stunted, adventures cut short, and family memories never realized. But over the past few months, he started to have a change of heart.

Bolstered by insights from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, he began to understand that he could accomplish hard things even with irreparably damaged lungs and while struggling with his mental health. The idea of taking his first vacation since leaving the hospital started to form in his mind, and he hatched a plan for a family visit to a Minor League Baseball park one state away. I enthusiastically endorsed the trip. It wouldn’t be easy nor absurdly hard but perhaps just right. At first, when Ronnie filled me in on details, his voice was wistful as he talked about the many excursions he and his family had once taken, describing far-flung cities visited and items on bucket lists checked off. A trip to a tiny Double-A stadium on the edge of a cornfield next to a Walmart would never have been his idea of an adventure, and yet here we were, pushing the envelope of what he believed was possible and wrestling with the idea that he could make space for a new normal in his life.

As the day of the baseball pilgrimage drew close, his excitement grew. During our sessions, he worried whether his oxygen tank could run out, what would happen if he fell ill while driving through one of dozens of small rural towns, and whether he would have the stamina to walk to his seat in the outfield. But he didn’t think of canceling. He was determined to make the expedition work. He had come to see that driving a few hundred miles to watch the Biloxi Shuckers play the Montgomery Biscuits might not be the same as flying to Los Angeles to watch the Dodgers against the Padres, but it could be part of a new and satisfying life.

Ronnie’s transformation came through Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a practical approach that helps people stop fighting painful thoughts and feelings and instead make space for them to exist, while focusing their energy on actions that align with what truly matters in life—their deepest values. Instead of trying to eliminate the pain, fear, or sadness, ACT teaches us to accept these experiences as part of being human and then move forward anyway. It’s about building psychological flexibility: the ability to stay open to hard emotions without letting them control you, then taking committed steps toward what gives life meaning (like family connection and seizing the day). In Ronnie’s case, that meant accepting the reality of his damaged lungs and the sadness they brought, rather than trying to deny or eliminate them, and then choosing to take the trip because family mattered more than comfort.

To make these ideas more concrete in my own work with patients facing medical trauma and chronic challenges, I developed a personal framework called ACCEPTANCE.

Born from my own journey, it offers a compassionate, actionable guide to navigating life’s difficulties by fostering resilience and self-compassion. Embrace its steps to find peace and build a fulfilling life amidst difficulties:

A (Acknowledge): Acknowledge that your situation may never meaningfully change even though you might desperately want it to.
C (Cut ties): Cut ties with a highly idealized view of the past that makes your current situation seem dire and unacceptable by comparison.
C (Cultivate): Cultivate an expansive and flexible view of the world and a view of yourself that allows for the presence of difficult and unwanted things.
E (Embrace): Embrace things as they are - not as you want them to be.
P (Pray): Pray for the Holy Spirit to give you grace as you work to learn how to treat yourself with kindness.
T (Try): Try to remember that the struggles that you feel are often temporary and time-limited - that though they seem terrifying and real in the moment, they are usually fleeting if you can choose not to overly attend to them and give them power.
A (As you are able): As you are able, choose to be vulnerable with others - as people embrace you in all of your glorious “mess” you will learn to embrace yourself as well.
N (Normalize): Normalize your struggles.
C (Create): Create a vision for a rich life that can co-exist with difficulties of various kinds, reminding yourself that your life can be full right now - that having a life of wholeness and satisfaction is not contingent on the absence of challenges.
E (Explore): Explore the world around you and realize that you are not alone in your struggles - that there are people you love and respect and aspire to be like who are suffering too.

Ronnie embodied several of these steps naturally in his journey—acknowledging his lungs might never fully recover, cutting ties with an idealized past to embrace the present trip, cultivating flexibility for the road ahead, embracing his limitations while creating space for family joy, and exploring connection through shared vulnerability.

The day of his outing came, and with great trepidation and a touch of enthusiasm, he set off with his family, stopping at a country store or two along the way to pick up supplies. The journey was long and tiring, but when he made it to his seat in the bleachers, his wife and daughter on either side, he leaned back and smiled. He wasn’t thinking about journeys he had once taken or worrying about his oxygen tank. Instead, he munched on peanuts and Cracker Jack and cheered loudly for his new favorite team. His life was happening now.

Ronnie’s story is deeply personal to me as I care about him, but also because, in many ways, his story parallels my own. I wasn’t in the ICU with severe pneumonia, but my OCD is an oxygen tank of sorts, and for a long time I thought its very presence would limit me and prevent my happiness and flourishing. And like Ronnie, who scoffed at the idea of thriving with a damaged set of lungs, anxiety, and PTSD, I couldn’t imagine how I could coexist, much less excel, with a mental illness. Shortly after my diagnosis, I told my psychologist that other people might be willing to live with a chronic mental health condition but not me. It was only later that I realized, with my therapist’s help, that while it felt as if I were working hard, my actions were actually a form of avoidance. Luckily for me, my therapist introduced ACT into my treatment, and when I started to embrace the truth about my illness, instead of running from it, my life started to change.

One hot summer day in Portage, Michigan, in 1977, I was playing baseball with my cousin, Donny. Well, not exactly baseball. We were in a weed-strewn vacant lot across the street from my house, Donny waiting a hundred feet or so away from me with his new Wilson glove while I stood at a makeshift plate, throwing a ball into the air, and hitting it as far as I could with an old wooden bat. After a few pop-ups and a line drive or two, I sent a towering fly ball over Donny’s head (much higher than the glove he hurled into the air), and it landed with a sickening thud against the windshield of a brand-new truck parked beside a building that bordered the field. In my time, I’ve told a few lies and cheated on a Spanish test or two but not that day. There was only one thing to do: to walk to the brown cinder-block building, introduce myself to the man inside, and admit that I had broken his truck window. It was a hard thing to do and even the idea of it caused me great distress, but I did it, propelled by my values.

I’ve thought about this story a lot in recent years, sometimes joking about it with my cousin, but I’ve found it most helpful in moments of discouragement when I’ve doubted that I have the mettle to accept and lean into hard and unwanted things and have thought that avoidance would be a far better choice. I’ll, of course, be the first to admit that my simple story pales in comparison to the difficulties that survivors of severe illness are challenged to navigate every single day. The hard things that you have in front of you, and that I’m inviting you to make room for and accept, are inestimably difficult. But you may find that in being open to the ideas of ACT, it is possible to engage the present situation as it is (not as you want it to be) and make room for distressing thoughts and feelings. Guided by overarching values, you can take committed action to do difficult things and find meaning in the process.

If you’re facing the aftermath of severe illness, medical trauma, or any hard change, Ronnie’s story and the ACCEPTANCE framework remind us: small, brave steps toward what matters can rebuild meaning. What is one thing you can do as you embrace a stance of ACCEPTANCE? I’d love to hear in the comments

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