When a child has a chronic condition, the whole family has a chronic condition. Other family members are often faced with making their own lifestyle adjustments – diet restrictions, limits on family vacations and other cost-cutting, and coping with looks and insensitive comments from others. It is important for family members to all acknowledge the ‘elephant in the room,’ which is their own sense of helplessness that can result when a family member is ill.
Society has taught us to look at the aging process as a series of losses and, ultimately, physical decline. But are we experiencing loss, or change?
When we define ourselves as diminished, we reduce ourselves to a set of biological process that requires the intervention of the medical establishment to maintain. It’s as simple as that. This is the end product of taking stock of our lives and placing all of the checkmarks under the heading of “Deleted.”
There is an excellent Website for young women facing chronic health conditions. It is called www.ChronicBabe.com. It contains a wealth of information, including a huge library of links to other resources like newsletters, patient stories, articles, and an excellent blog. If you are facing a chronic illness this is a good site to check out. While developed for women, there is a lot of great information and resources for men as well.
There is nothing more gratifying than doing as much as you can to take care of yourself. At the risk of sounding like an Internet junkie, research the disease or condition you interested in so that you are armed with facts and not scare tactics. In these days of managed care, it is increasingly the responsibility of the patient to be their own healthcare advocate. This begins with learning how to make informed decisions about your own treatment. The Internet has become the repository of both good and bad information on health and medical treatment. So beware.
There is nothing more gratifying than doing as much as you can to take care of yourself. At the risk of sounding like an Internet junkie, research the disease or condition you interested in so that you are armed with facts and not scare tactics. In these days of managed care, it is increasingly the responsibility of the patient to be their own healthcare advocate. This begins with learning how to make informed decisions about your own treatment. The Internet has become the repository of both good and bad information on health and medical treatment. So beware.
If you have watched or read the news over the past few days, you were probably ‘exposed’ to the story about the Andrew Speaker, the man from Atlanta with a rare form of TB. From what I have read so far, he was faced with a frightening medical diagnosis at a very inconvenient time in his life – right before he was leaving for his honeymoon. And then while in Europe, he was hit with the news that not only did he have TB, but it was also a rare form. I expect we will hear a lot more about who said what in this situation once all of the facts are in.
If you have recently been diagnosed with a medical condition, you have probably been asked this question over and over: How are you feeling?
The January 8, 2008 issue of the New York Times included an article, “For Cancer Patients, Empathy Goes A Long Way.” I’m all for oncology developing a more caring and psychologically sensitive method of delivering devastating news. But I think we’re missing a major point. That is, hospitals need to be more responsible for having the proper staff available for dealing with serious diagnosis.