Michael Whitley

“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.”
― Rana Awdish, 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.”
― Rana Awdish, In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope