What would you want?

My kids went away last week. They had an incredibly wonderful time with my family on the Jersey shore. A week was about as long as I can tolerate being without them. I need them to help me get better.

When they came back we started randomly watching Star Trek the next generation, again. Like any good TV show every episode it had at least two things going on. In Neutral Zone Picard and his crew get to meet the Romulans for the first time in this generation. But they also encountered some 20th-century refugees. Three people who were frozen just after they died. They were easily healed and brought back to life by 24th century science.

One of the undead people was a rich man who was said to find out that the future is socialist. Another was a rock star who abused his body into death and is glad to wake up so he can do it again.(When I first saw this episode in 1988, I'm sure I related to that character). When I watched the show this time I related to Claire Raymond, the homemaker from Secaucus New Jersey. She didn't even know she was sick and suddenly woke up 400 years later.

I'm pretty sure if I lived 100 years ago I would not have survived the illness I have now. Just as I'm sure that if I would've lived in the age of Dr. McCoy or Dr. Crusher I would be fine by now. They would simply wave their medical tricorder at me and it would've regrown my axons in a moment. Even Sheldon could regrow my nerves if he had Star Trek technology.

So the Claire character had an embolism and suddenly died. She was dead. Then she woke up 400 years later and was healthy, but without the family she loved. In the simple world of Star Trek, Counselor Troi helped her find her great great great great great great great grandchildren and all was well.

Well it's a little bit more complicated for me. First of all I didn't die, but I have a rare currently incurable neurological condition (acute motor axonal neuropathy) that I am recovering from glacially slow.  So here's the question that I really can't answer.....  And I ask you to other people who've been injured or have otherwise had their vitality stolen from them... 

If you can just go to sleep, and wake up healthy in the distant future but without any of your loved ones, would you? Would you?