Friday, June 21, 2013

Grief and Diagnosis

I posted this in response (slightly edited) to someone on facebook, who felt strange that after years of fighting for a diagnosis, was upset and fearful about the tumor on her pituitary:

I'd imagine that diagnosis is a lot like grieving, in a way. Think of the way having a loved one die unexpectedly is so much the same and yet so different from knowing a loved one has a terminal illness. You know death is coming and you are living through it slowly. In the first, everything hits you all at once and is overwhelming to the extreme. The latter is still overwhelming but you tend to suffer through it slowly and in stages.  Still, everyone does it differently. When death finally comes in the latter, it can still hit you as hard as if you didn't know it was coming, it can be a relief (that their pain is over, for example), or it can be bitter sweet. Diagnosis for us is in essence a finalization of the "death" of the healthy person we once were. We may have known it was coming and expected, even wanted and fought for it, but it is still a big, messy, emotional life event.

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