From Dr. Jane's Notebook

Getting Well After Being Sick

Getting sick has never been fun, but it used to be a little less complicated. These days, you never know whether your health insurance will approve your health care provider, the treatment, or even the particular brand of medicine being prescribed. However, when we get sick, we are not only at the mercy of the insurance companies and busy medical schedules, but also, we begin to think of ourselves as sick. This is a more insidious source of change. Here are a few thoughts on the matter.

Getting sick changes our personality. If you doubt this, ask your friends and family. It is said that people usually talk about one of three things: ideas, objects, or other people. When we get sick, we talk about our health, disease, treatments, and how we feel. This is natural. However, once the healing process is underway, it is important to develop other topics of conversation and become attentive to others again.
Getting sick changes our physical body. Again, it is natural that when we get sick, the focus of attention becomes our body. Suddenly, we begin to feel things we never felt before, and it is very scary to not be in control of our own body. Unknowingly, our postures may change in response to pain, and we may become more conservative in our movements. Again, all of these changes are natural and normal reactions to pain and illness. However, later on, we may not wish these physical accomodations to become permanent physical features.
Getting sick changes our relationships. While it is true that getting sick is one way to find out who your friends are, we must acknowledge that even our best friends tire of our being sick. An older friend of mine recently realized that as the result of caring for an ailing friend during a two-year illness, she had lost touch with nearly all of her other friends. Sadly, when one person is ill, relationships tend to become caretaking relationships. While this arrangement is very functional when one is sick, it is also important to re-establish a mutually-supportive relationship as health return.

Getting well takes personal effort. One of the problems with being sick is getting caught up in the medical system. When this occurs, our lives begin to revolve around apppointments and medications. Again, this is usually necessary in order to restore health. However, along with our medical goals, we also must focus on returning to a healthy state of mind. We each have a concept of ourselves when we are healthy. However, that self-concept often changes when we become sick. Medicines and treatments can only remedy disease. Once the disease is gone, only the individual can bring his/her personality and lifestyle "back to normal".

Wellness is a state of mind and body. Let's face it...no one should force another to act well if they feel fragile as the result of illness. However, we can choose to help our own minds and bodies to recover. Our unconscious mind tends to follow the "roadmap" we choose. If we create a negative roadmap for ourselves by thinking only in negative terms, it is easy to become depressed and continue to feel badly even once the disease is stabilized or cured. If, however, we fill our minds with positive thoughts and vividly imagine our bodies returning to health, this roadmap also becomes possible.

Restoring health seems to be a partnership between one's self and one's health care providers. Thinking of one's self as "well again" is a task we can only accomplish for ourselves, although counselors are frequently called upon to assist in regaining that healthy self-concept. In short, there is no doubt that illness changes us. Hopefully, however, being sick is just a "temporary detour" on the way back to health.

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Last Updated February 27, 1999 by Gary M. Grandon, Ph.D.