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I knew love and pain and sorrow could keep us together, but it could also reduce his life to waste.
“The emotions of patients are encoded in their behavior. It’s an easy task to recognize a crying person as sad. But a compulsively attentive patient, documenting every lab result and asking well-formulated questions about antibiotic choices, is less easy to decode as anxious. I myself didn’t recognize my own anxiety at the time. I believed I was appropriately adapted to my environment. An environment that required intense vigilance and anticipation of some impending cataclysm. The casual complacency I observed in others struck me as horribly naïve. Every solicitation to “just rest” filled me with contempt. I knew what would happen if I left the watchtower untended. I would die. I believed it was entirely up to me to ensure my own safety.”
― In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope
― In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope
“Hope was not, as I had believed, an unrealistic, unfettered optimistic emotion. Hope was an orientation, a way of being in the face of a reality that was not of their choosing.”
― In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope
― In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope
“I am not sure I understood what was motivating my behavior. I know I didn’t recognize that an emotion was driving my compulsive research. I would not have characterized myself as particularly anxious. In fact, I would have labeled it something else entirely if asked. I was advocating for myself. I was educating myself. I was taking an active role in my care. In retrospect, I can recognize that I was also completely terrified and, not knowing how to quiet my fear, took the only option I thought available to me: to attempt to bludgeon the feeling into submission with data. The problem with responding to emotion with data is that emotion doesn’t recognize it. Ironically, I was making the same mistake with myself that physicians make with their patients. I was not naming or tending to my own emotion.”
― In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope
― In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope
Michael’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Michael’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
1,310 books
|
28 friends
2,047 books
|
21 friends
217 books
|
30 friends
1,054 books
|
125 friends
1,692 books
|
84 friends
352 books
|
39 friends
435 books
|
18 friends
196 books
|
111 friends
More friends…
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