Recognizing the difference between Illness & Decease

Illness is the experience of living through a disease. If decease talk measures the body, illness talk tells of the fear and frustration of being inside a body that is breaking down. What happens to our body happens to our life.

Illness should be celebrated. To celebrate is not necessarily to rejoice over an event but to mark its significance. Tears and silence can celebrate an occasion just as kisses and handshakes do.

Physicians and nurses are generally polite about answering questions but their answers is too often limited to decease talk – what is measurable and mechanical. What ill persons really want to know is how to live with illness.

Talking to doctors always makes us conscious of what we are NOT supposed to say. Thus we are particularly silent when we have been given bad news about our health.

Our life does consist of temperature, circulation and other physiological processes, but it is also made up of hopes and disappointments, joys and sorrows, none of which can be measures.

Illness and especially critical illness is a life changing experience and it cannot be managed, it has to be lived. You need to talk to express the changes that illness has brought to your life. 

Simply recognizing suffering for what it is, regardless of whether it can be treated, is care.

It is important to recognise that more is happening to you than you can discuss with most physicians in most medical settings. Most medical staff do not have the time to be therapists or caregivers and many may not even have the inclination. They provide treatment, which is no less important than caregiving or therapy, but it is not all the same. 

Critical illness invariably triggers feelings of fear and frustration apart from the personal changes that are often very painful to deal with. Through the application of Cognitive Behavioural Hypnotherapy techniques I can help you work out new ways of living with those personal changes and associated fears.

Illness is a threat to life, but it also witnesses what is worth living for.

Arthur W. Frank – Cancer Survivor

In the sense of fulfilling life, the ill or impaired may be more free than healthy people. The freedom to wander, to hope and to love do not require good health as we all tend to assume when we are healthy.

What we share as humans is that we are vulnerabile creatures. And it is only when we act in full knowledge of our vulnerability do we learn to discriminate the true value at the core of our activities. When we wonder, hope and love as an affirmation of life rather than as a pursuit of this or that choice, we no longer depend on good health. Good health is something to be enjoyed and not to be made a condition of life.

We are free only when we no longer require health, however much we may prefer it.

Arthur W. Frank