There are few things in life more intractable than a stubborn heart patient. Or rather, someone who should have been a patient, but isn’t too keen on the idea of being admitted into the hospital. While for any other ailment, concerned friends and family members might cajole and coerce their loved one to receive the proper medical treatment, or at least check if such treatment is necessary, ones methods are severely restricted when the illness involves the heart. After all, if the potential patient is dead set on digging in his or her heels on the matter, angry words and repeated insistence might serve only to drive his or her blood pressure up, exacerbating the heart ailment, if not causing it if it was not actually there in the first place. That indeed would be the height of irony: trying to pull at your loved ones heart strings for their own good, and in the process those heartstrings rip open a valve or bunch up in an artery.
As much consternation as such stubbornness brings to those who care for an ill individual, I certainly am not in position to cast any stones: My preferred universal remedy is to huddle under my blankets at home, and use the pain or sickness as a refuge from work or school. A hospital visit, with me as a patient, ranks about as high on my list of favorite things as does a visit to a wake, with me as the ‘guest of honor’. Irrational, I know, since the former is clearly a way to prevent the latter from happening anytime soon. Yet the reluctance remains.
Why is it I wonder, that so many of us try so hard to keep ourselves healthy – eating less of the wrong food, making time for moderate exercise – and yet, evince such reluctance to seek professional help when we just might need it. Its almost as if we’re more comfortable dealing with health issues such as heart disease when they are future risks than when there is an actual chance that they are happening, right then and there. Why else would we deprive ourselves of lechon because of our family’s history of clogged arteries, yet continue on with our day despite chest pains and the occasional vomiting – both of which could be symptoms of an on-going heart attack?
Perhaps we’re just loathe to admit that all our healthy-living sacrifices had been in vain, or had come too little too late. There are few things that cause greater chagrin after all, than missed opportunities for pleasure. We would however, miss many more pleasures if we were buried six feet underground. Or maybe its simply the possibility of spending a lot for a check-up that proves unnecessary – yet that’s hardly a good reason. A check-up’s goal after all, when you think about it, is to ascertain whether or not you are in fact sick – and if the results answer that question in the negative, then you’ve still gotten your money’s worth.
Maybe in the end, I and others like me have to admit that this reluctance in the face of possible sickness is exactly what it seems to be: an irrational, often destructive impulse that stems either from (a) a deep seated denial of our mortality, or (b) a fatalistic acceptance of it. I am unsure which is worse honestly.
Kübler-Ross model lists five stages through which people deal with grief and tragedy: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Perhaps people like me are jumping the gun on these stages, even before the tragedy occurs, either by denying the fact that we could have a life threatening illness, or by accepting deaths inevitability before it even stops becoming preventable. Those of us who tend to ‘harden our hearts’ may be well served to remedy these attitudes soon: if not for our own sakes, then for those who love us… If we want to keep them from going through the five stages in the proper order.
No comments:
Post a Comment