In My Chronic Illness, I Found A Deeping

Develop personality, making illness an eventful experience; Forward movement of personality and other ongoing human processes in the direction of creative, constructive, productive personal community living(Meleis,

health is necessary to have when dealing with a life changing disease, most people cannot keep

The Medical Model regards disability as an individual problem. It promotes a traditional view of disability, that it is something to be ‘cured’, even though many conditions have no cure. The problem is seen as the disabled person and their impairment, not society, and the solution is seen as adapting the disabled person to fit the non-disabled world, often through medical intervention. Control resides firmly with professionals; choices for the individual are limited to the options provided and approved by the 'helping' expert.

In Nancy Mairs ' "On Being a Cripple," she deliberates the relationship between the English Language, American Society, and her struggle with multiple sclerosis (MS). Mairs criticizes people for wincing at the word "cripple," and using terms like “differently abled,” because they lack reality and accuracy. She equivalents society’s inability to accept crippledness with death, war, sex, sweat, and wrinkles. Through the usage of ethos, pathos, logos and other rhetorical devices, she effectively tells her story and proves that there is power in words, from which she could come to terms with a new fact of her identity, and to accept the incurability of her disease.

Throughout my clinical experiences, there have been quite a few circumstances I have been placed in that have remained with me whether good or bad. All of them have been learning experiences for me whether it is how to improve and to do better next time from a mistake, for me to learn that this is or is not how a patient should be treated, how to handle family situations, and many others. One experience that I was able to participate in that will remain with me because I had not experienced this before was during my critical care rotation in the fall of 2015. This patient was dying and we were implementing comfort care for him.

Our eyes unconsciously record thousands upon thousands of bits of information every second. Our brain then acts as a filter to sort out what it thinks is useful and what is not. By doing this, the brain guides us into seeing only what is important. We never see the full picture; just what our brain guides us to see. Metaphors act in the same way in that they guide how people view certain topics and issues. A specific metaphor that becomes accepted by a large enough population of community will determine how most people in the community view that issue. In a way the metaphor skews the perception of those who hear it. This was the case for the metaphors of cancer in the late 20th century which we can see through Susan Sontag’s piece, “Illness as Metaphor”. We can also see this manifested in metaphors associated with people diagnosed with Morgellons’ disease in Leslie Johnson’s narrative, “The Devil’s Bait”. Both pieces deal with how metaphors have shaped the outlook of patients of their respective diseases. Metaphors obscure and shift our understanding of disease and pain away from the full truth into a smaller and less understanding perspective. The similarities between the metaphor of cancer as death and Morgellons as a farce prove that metaphors of disease isolate patients diagnosed with those diseases.

When someone is suffering or living with a chronic illness it can have a huge impact on them psychologically and socially. Chronic Illness is a condition that is prolonged in duration, usually more than 3 months and is rarely cured (DoH, 2012). Having to cope with a chronic condition might lead to life changes, such as dependency on others, loss of income, which can cause feelings of loss and reduced self-esteem. They can also report feelings of social rejection, poor healthcare and workplace termination due to their presenting condition (Earnshaw, Quinn, & Park, 2011).

Living life to its fullest capacity was a very important goal for Nancy Mairs. In “On Being Crippled” she examines depression, direction, choice, and family as she went through her battle with Multiple Sclerosis. Not only did she examine her own battle with MS, but she analyses the views that society has on anyone with a debilitating or handicapping disease. For this reason, it is clear that Mairs is speaking to society. She outcasts herself from the rest of society by her comfort with the word “cripple” towards herself. Mairs is able to pull this essay off because she herself has MS and therefore can provide valid evidence on her experiences and those similar to hers.

The chapter "It's Never Just Heart Disease", Foster theorizes how authors can strategically use diseases or other physical ailments as symbols to

Living with MS, Mairs lives and views “everyday [as] a kind of gift [and that she] accepts all gifts” (Mairs 1). Although she is living with a horrible disease, Mairs is able to acknowledge it, as Soyster does, but Mairs then also can accept it and realize that she is alive, and that is better than not living at all. The reader knows her tone is optimistic because she considers living with the disease a gift, and gifts are associative with positive things. Mairs’s positive tone lets the reader know that she is

If pain is inevitable then maybe the best course of action would be to have a reason to suffer. Baldwin’s character Sonny effectively portrays this mindset. In a conversation with his older brother Sonny asks, “‘why do people suffer? Maybe it’s better to do something to give it a reason, any reason’” (44). Sonny’s reason to suffer is from his heroin addiction. He is a musician with an acute sensitivity to the dark environment around him. He feels a deeper, harsher connection to the human’s fate to suffer. “‘I’ve been something I didn’t recognize, didn’t know I could be. Didn’t know anybody could be,’ [Sonny says] ‘Sometimes, you know, and it was actually when I was most out of the world that I felt that I was in it, that I was with it, really, and I could play, it just came out of me, it was there’” (45). By creating a reason for suffering, Sonny seems to suffer more. He reaches a dark, low level and alters who he was, loses his identity. Suffering is what he channeled through his music, because of suffering being everywhere. “It filled everything, the people, the music, the dark, quicksilver barmaid, with menace: and this menace

Visible manifestations of an underlying disability may be misattributed by an observer to other causes (Santuzzi et al. 3). For instance, someone who suffers from chronic pain may not be able to do as much activity as someone who does not suffer, but when the person with chronic pain takes a break, they are labeled as “lazy” or told they are “bringing the team down.” Stigma can make those who suffer from serious invisible disabilities feel as though they are making up their own symptoms, or being a burden on those around them, and these stigmas can have serious consequences on the health of someone with an invisible disability.

A well-known author once said that hurt people hurt people. Likewise, in an individual’s life, when an untimely and unwelcome situation occurs, they feel angry and hurt, and can even act gleeful when someone else gets wounded and suffers. When Billy stayed in the hospital, he struggled to process the thought that he emerged permanently blind from the operation room. “‘Are you feeling better now?’ I heard the blind boy ask me, and I turned and looked at him… I was very worried about you… and I want you to be very careful about your eyes.”(45). Even though Billy experienced pain and hurting, he was far more concerned about consoling the people in the hospital ward, making time to ensure they were healthy and doing well. While most people feel

Imagine a machine in which a person can experience whatever they wish. A person can undertake the craziest things. They can climb Mount Everest, swim in the ocean, and go skydiving without having money or time as a hindrance. Or imagine there is a medicine that causes a person to be much less aware of pain, both theirs and others. The pain experienced with a broken bone, or with healing from psychological hurts would no longer be present. I will be arguing that such a machine or such a medicine would diminish the fullness of life that can be acquired through reality and the experience of pain. I will argue this by looking into fate and how living one’s life in a machine would take away a person’s purpose, by looking into the importance of vulnerability and genuineness in relationships, and lastly by looking into the purpose of pain and why pain is a necessary part of human existence.

Pamela Cooper-White makes an interesting claim of how people suffer and how they should recover from their pain. White claims that suffering is the “meaning that we make or attempt to make our pain.” Then for someone to fully heal, “we must make meaning in relation to our pain.” It is not an easy task to heal from pain and suffering and it takes time to heal your wounds. Sadly, some people do not recover from their wounds, and digress from their lives and society because they cannot deal with the pain. Some people do not have a form of support or no one in their lives to help them cope with their pain. Further, White claims, “we need a witness in our lives to” become aware of our experience. Without this relationship, we will never fix ourselves