Tag: loss of self in chronic illness

Adjusting to a diagnosis you do NOT want to adjust to

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 11 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥    @HeartSisters

Like many heart patients, I began to notice that my cardiac diagnosis seemed to alter my own best-before date.  It was almost as if I’d been one person for over 50 years before being misdiagnosed and sent home in mid-heart attack, and then one morning (after flying home to the west coast from Ottawa and two more cardiac episodes on that flight)  – I somehow became a completely different person. Once home, I returned to the Emergency Department (and a different Emerg doc) where I was finally correctly diagnosed and treated.  I had presented with the same textbook symptoms that had been misdiagnosed earlier (central chest pain, nausea, sweating and pain down my left arm) – but this time a cardiologist was immediately called in. 

Turns out I wasn’t alone: the late sociology researcher Dr. Kathy Charmaz called this health-related shift in a patient’s emotional state “the loss of self“.    

For most of us, this strange new state of adjustment is temporary. Temporary, but scary.    Continue reading “Adjusting to a diagnosis you do NOT want to adjust to” →

“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. . .”

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 23 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥   @HeartSisters

“You must go on.   I can’t go on.   I’ll go on!”   These words are from Irish author Samuel Beckett’s 1953 novel, The Unnamable”. The late Nobel Prize winner was describing a reaction that many patients may find familiar, especially when facing the shock of a new medical diagnosis on top of your existing condition.

I wrote here about how overwhelmed I felt as a heart patient (“I can’t go on!”)  with distressing new joint pain, and a diagnosis of osteoarthritis. It was too much! I simply couldn’t bear yet another painful diagnosis piled onto my already debilitating daily symptoms of a coronary microvascular disease diagnosis!

But an amazing thing happened. Continue reading ““You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. . .”” →

Life before diagnosis: not as perfect as we recall?

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 12 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

Like most of us, my time on this earth has been bookmarked by a number of important “before” and “after” experiences: the way I lived my life before key events occurred, and the way my life changed after they occurred. Before and after I got married. Before and after I became a mother. Before and after I ran my first half-marathon. But one of the most profound changes has to be before and after the fateful day in the Emergency Department when a cardiologist told me,“You have significant heart disease”.

Many of us living with a chronic and progressive illness like this often view these periods of life as two parts: the normal and wonderful times before the traumatic diagnosis, and all the not-wonderful days that have been happening ever since.      . Continue reading “Life before diagnosis: not as perfect as we recall?” →

The “loss of self” in chronic illness is what really hurts

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 23 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥   @HeartSisters

People living with chronic illness already know that the triple whammy of ongoing physical symptoms, psychological distress and the discomfort of medical procedures can cause us to suffer. But when the late California sociologist Dr. Kathy Charmaz studied chronic illness, she identified an element of suffering that is often dismissed by health care providers.(1)

As she explained in research published in the journal Sociology of Health & Illness, a narrow medicalized view of suffering that’s defined as physical symptoms only ignores or minimizes the broader significance of suffering in a way that may resonate with you if you too live with a chronic illness like heart disease:    

Continue reading “The “loss of self” in chronic illness is what really hurts” →