Sudden health crises can change a life forever, including the life of the analyst. How do the analyst's physical and emotional crises affect the patient? This discussion of Stuart Pizer's paper first considers how the analyst's experience of illness can vary, depending, in part, on aspects of the patient. The discussion goes on to describe Pizer's case as an encounter between two human beings with differing values and histories of emotional experience. In analysis, our core values about life inevitably shape what we focus on, fight for, and fail to notice. This commentary concludes with a description of the active empathy central to Pizer's therapeutic action. More generally, each analysis requires us to grapple with shifts in the balance of our own emotions, as we discover who we need to be, to participate in a particular treatment process.