Doença

Critical illness leaves no aspect of life untouched. The hospitals and other special places we have constructed for critically ill persons have created the illusion that by sealing off the ill person from those who are healthy, we can also seal off the illness in that ill person's life. This illusion is dangerous. Your relationships, your work, your sense of who you are and who you might become, your sense of what life is and ought to be - these all change, and the change is terrifying. Twice, as I realized how ill I was, I saw these changes coming and was overwhelmed by them.
So I write to the younger self I was before illness overwhelmed me. I write to a self not so many years younger but a gulf of experience away. In a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the writer, now old, is sitting by a river. Along comes his younger self, out for a walk. They recognize each other and talk. The younger man is particularly shocked that the other is almost blind. The older man comforts him, telling him the condition is nothing to be feared. If my younger self met me now and heard what was to be his medical history, he would be even more shocked than Borges's younger self. In what follows I want to tell my self-before-illness that his fears are legitimate, but he would be a fool to spend his life being fearful. He will suffer and have losses, but suffering and loss are not incompatible with life.
For all you lose, you have an opportunity to gain: closer relationships, more poignant appreciations, clarified values. You are entitled to mourn what you can no longer be, but do not let this mourning obscure your sense of what you can become. You are embarking on a dangerous opportunity. Do not curse your fate; count your possibilities.

Arthur W. Frank, "At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness"