Illness As A Way To Get Happiness. Travel To And From Hospital

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Getting sick is not healthy. It hurts, it hurts, it’s uncomfortable. It's helpless, irritable. This requires a lot of effort, it is costly for the body, it costs money, it ruins plans, puts the whole family on alert. And yet, one day we find ourselves here - in an illness and in a hospital.

A year passed before I was able to return to this article.

I started writing it in the hospital. Trying to collect my thoughts, I wanted to find answers to the most important questions for myself: “Why am I here? What life tragedy am I losing now?"

It seemed to me that my future life depends on finding these answers - whether I will get sick further and more seriously, or will I stop there. I wanted to stop.

My body gave out strange symptoms, I was scared. The symptoms were similar to the manifestation of fatal diseases, my body was changing, I was even more scared. One hospital was replaced by another, the staff of specialists involved grew, the bundle of my studies no longer fit into the plastic bag that I carried to every doctor. My head was spinning. The feeling that my body had gone crazy did not leave me. Suspicions of terrible diseases were not confirmed.

I am grateful to my psychotherapist, who was with me all this time. She did not let me escape into illness. I did not miss a single session, for one of them I came straight from the hospital - angry, exhausted, confused.

The symptoms did not become disease. The vector of my movement towards “get sick and may even die from the disease” has stopped. At some important moment, I made a choice - to live. I am very grateful to myself for this choice.

I came back to this article when my mom got sick. Once again I saw how illness helps to organize my life so that it is very difficult to get what it is very difficult to get in an ordinary "non-ill" life.

Disease is an infant paradise

Getting sick is not healthy. It hurts, offensive, uncomfortable. It's helpless, irritable. This requires a lot of effort, it is costly for the body, it costs money, it ruins plans, puts the whole family on alert. And yet, one day we find ourselves here - in an illness and in a hospital.

All the time I was sick, the feeling that there was some wild underground plan, which I do not know about, but knows very well some other, childish part of my personality, which creates all this chaos, leading me through the horrors of the hospital, to get something of their own, very necessary and necessary so much that even a fatal illness is a low price for it.

The personality controls the body, not the other way around.

But at some point it seems that the body is simply mocking an intelligent, conscious person. As a person, I have my own plans, and I know for sure that they do not include a hospital.

I fight to the last. I work when I already feel bad. I try to solve all the problems myself. I try to stand my ground - "all this is nonsense, I cannot be taken to the hospital." I know what I want!

But one day I get so scared of the symptoms of the disease that I decide to go to the hospital.

A hospital is a completely different world, a parallel reality, a looking glass. At least we have, at least the hospital in which I was lying.

Painted concrete steps, peeling walls, battered handrails with peeling paint. And the smell … the smell of hopelessness, poverty and despair. But in all this there is a glimmer of hope that all this is not forever, that somewhere there is a world where there is no terrible pain, where it smells good, where people have their own ordinary lives.

Narrow hospital corridors; frightened, embittered and at the same time wary-indifferent faces of nurses and doctors. Daily routine work. Indifference and alertness are two emotions through which it is not clear how to break through. If indifference goes away, alertness appears. When alertness is released, indifference, alienation and formalism emerge.

Hospitals are familiar to me. As a child, I spent a month in the hospital every year. I remember these walls, these shabby concrete steps. My memory replaces narrow corridors with wide ones, plastic doors with tall wooden ones, painted with a thick layer of white paint, with windows at the top. The nurse's post was on the right, not the left, and the enema at the other end of the corridor. Yes, I remember this place.

So why am I here? Why did I come back here thirty years later? What am I looking for here?

Your childhood experiences.

Persecuted by the childish part of my soul, I came here to meet and experience. Again.

Impotence

The disease is so frightening that it is completely disorienting. What's happening? What happened with me? What can I decide here and now? What is under my control and authority? I cannot control the manifestation of symptoms, I cannot control the pain, I must completely trust the doctors. Once in the hospital, I again feel like a child who is not responsible for anything, decides nothing. I am experiencing my complete impotence. I have to completely trust the doctors. "Hear what they say." But the more I listen to what they have to say and follow their recommendations unconditionally, the worse I get. I start to fight and recheck. I'm not ready to turn my life over to doctors. The absurdity of what is happening, when one diagnosis is replaced by another, not a single drug helps, and it keeps getting worse, makes me think that drugs alone cannot be dispensed with. We need to figure out what is happening to me.

The helplessness and power of a sick child

My family was alarmed around me. I need special food, my mother feeds me steamed diet meals. Every day everyone calls and is interested in my health. They have long, heartfelt conversations, as if only from the hospital you can talk about the most important things - and who knows, if this is our last opportunity to talk? At the first request, they bring the necessary things - who dares to refuse a seriously ill loved one? They support with money, providing financial rear. I feel protected, cared for and very important. Everyone loves me and is busy with me. Compared to my Sickness, nothing else matters. “The main thing for me is to put Ira on her feet,” says my mother. Somewhere in my heart I know for sure that I am on my feet. But God, how nice it is to be the center of the universe.

"I'll always be with you!" Depth defense activation

As a child, I had a friend who survived all my hospitals. It was a large, long red fox. She was a part of my world, a piece of my home and home life and protection from all external adversity. You could bury your nose in it, hug it tightly, calm down and fall asleep. Psychologists would call this toy a "transitional object." That important and valuable that replaces mother's warmth and gives mother protection when mother is not around.

One night I had another allergic reaction to medications - my face was swollen, covered with crimson spots, a monster was looking at me from the mirror. I was very scared, but there was nothing to do but wait for the morning and the doctors' arrival. Before that, in the afternoon, along with the saucepans from my mother, there was a small terry towel, white with an orange stripe. On that terrible night in the hospital, I tightly hugged a terry cloth to myself and instantly fell asleep. My Fox is always with me. Whatever happens in my life and with me, I will always find support within myself.

Shoulder of a friend

A hospital is a place similar to a children's pioneer camp, just a little different. Only in the hospital can you put together your own "gang" - a girl's company, real, cheerful, strong, honest and frank, where each has its own difficult life story and its own strange and terrible disease.

Thawed patches on the surface of being

For a long, long time to look at the tops of the trees, when a flock sits on them and takes off. See squirrels jumping from top to top. Endlessly watch the wind blowing the clouds. Meet the first snow. Anything you can do from a hospital bed.

To relive powerlessness and loneliness, horror and hope of salvation again

Stay awake at night, go out into a very long empty hospital corridor. Where there is nobody. Everything is "somewhere." In the meantime, it is dark and quiet here. And very scary, painful and lonely. But somewhere there are “good aunts”, they just need to be called, and they will save, give a pill, medicine, pay attention, and then only after that the pain will subside and I will be able to fall asleep. They will rid me of this hospital nighttime horror.

******

My mom called today. She was discharged from the hospital. She's clearly sorry. The hospital is good, well-groomed, modern, and properly fed. The night before she was discharged, she had a seizure. No, they didn't leave the hospital. Mom is very sorry.

*****

Disease is the way. A way to organize your life differently, to satisfy your needs for care, warmth, unconditional love, support, attention, to increase your value, to shift your financial obligations onto someone else.

But it only seems so. A couple of weeks pass, and relatives get tired of considering you the center of the universe, they return to their own life. After an even shorter time, your illness becomes only yours, and not the concern of the whole family and close friends.

It turns out that no one will take care of your children, and these idiots are not as conscious and responsible as they thought at the beginning. That even with a dad, the absence of a mom makes a big difference in their lives. That there is no one to close financial holes either. There are fewer bonuses, and more and more difficulties. In fact, you have to fulfill all the obligations of a healthy person, but at the same time get sick.

And yes, the disease leaves marks on the body. It is reflected in the appearance. The disease does not become more beautiful, younger and more attractive. But, in one year to grow older by five is welcome.

In addition to the fact that illness is a way to satisfy some of your needs, diseases have a deeper meaning, and each one has its own.

As with the help of dance, music or artistic creation, a person conveys his message, so he can speak through symptoms and illness.

A symptom is one of the creative ways a person can get their message across. And often this message has an addressee. The symptom is for someone specific.

There is one more purpose for diseases - with the help of bodily symptoms, a person transforms mental pain into physical pain.

Illness is a way of not being aware of mental pain and experiencing it as physical.

Another way is awareness of mental pain. And living this mental pain.

People often choose to get sick - as a modern way of satisfying their needs, experiencing mental pain, as a way to convey something to loved ones and to solve their internal problems

This is not the best way.

Finding other ways is hard work.