Recovery from a patient's perspective
Having a catastrophic illness (the term gives me a slight thrill) is an interesting experience if it doesn’t see you off, albeit one you wouldn’t wish for. You learn a lot: about yourself, about your friends, family and colleagues, what matters and doesn’t. But mainly you learn about the grind of illness and recovery. If you’re the sort of person who has only ever had to deal with colds and cuts, food poisoning and the odd virus that sends you to bed for a week of groggy dozing, what strikes you most is the glacial pace of recuperation. You drift through weeks of seemingly changeless days, with only tiny incremental improvements. I had a bad few months with tonsillitis and glandular fever in the 90s, but it was nothing compared with this. A cancer survivor warned me that recovery does not run in a straight line. I now think of it like a stockmarket chart after a crash: the line of health rises from the trough in painfully slow, uneven jags, it plateaus and slips back. Look at the weeks and you despair; only a graph of the year shows a positive picture.
This article came up on my tumblr radar. It turned out to be a great read. It’s about a man who developed a rare brain abscess and his struggle to recover after surgery. Interesting that he uses the stock market analogy. I often tell my patients the same thing. Sometimes recovery is 2 steps forward, one step back (or slower). I encourage a lot of my patients to keep a journal of their symptoms over the course of a few months- whether recovering from surgery or doing physical therapy for the first time. Often recovery is occurring but at too slow a pace to keep up with our modern fast paced expectations.
