668 Quotes About Illness

A newly diagnosed person with access to the Internet is information’s incubant. Data visits like a minor god. Awake, we pass the day staring into the screen’s abyss, feeling the constriction of the quantitative, trying to learn to breathe through the bar graphs, head full of sample sizes and survival curves, eyes dimming, body reverent to math.

If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath - our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us.

The cancer pavilion is a cruel democracy of appearance: the same bald head, the same devastated complexion, the same steroid-swollen face, the same plastic chemotherapy port visible as a lump under your skin. The old seem infantile, the young act senile, the middle-aged find all that is middle-aged about them disappears.

A sick person in bed is the ward of love, if she is lucky, and the orphan of action, even if she is not. All the accumulated gorgeousness of life in bed can be eclipsed by gravity there, and dreams, too, become occluded by pain. Every pleasure of a bed can, during illness, disappear behind fresh architectures of worry.

The perverse need for illness — both in patients themselves, and sometimes in those who are close to them — must be a major determinant in causing relapses, the most insidious enemy of the will-to-get-better:

TALKING ILL ABOUT OTHERS IS A SEVERE ILLNESS

The AVP often has intestinal issues. The intestines are indeed a second brain and need a significant amount of support. It may be interesting to note the polyvagal theory of Steven Porges (2011), who wrote about the tenth cranial nerve, which runs from the brain to the gut. Negative responses in the gut can occur when flight/fight/freeze responses are automatically activated.

If you begin to accept your illness, or even to love it, you worry that you might want to keep it around. You think, when you feel bad, that you will never long for it, but in truth you do, since it provides such clear instruction for existing, brings with it the sharpened optics of life without futurity, the purity of the double vision of any life lived on the line.

Though I knew I'd lost weight and was a bit pale, I never considered myself all that sick. I thought of myself as separate from them because of what I'd gone through, but it didn't occur to me until then that people might actually pity me. The idea appalled me.