Facing Terminal Illness
Death as many know of it is the conclusion of someone’s life. It’s a conclusion that no matter what or who, theirs no way of shying away from it. No one truly understands or expects themselves to be close to death or be dealt with a terminal illness. Especially as your young, you feel as if you’re superior to it. We never come to the realizations that were not young forever and as we get older we become more vulnerable to these illness and sickness. A measly cold or ankle injury as a youth may seem like something but as you get older and become vulnerable to a terminal illness. You would wish to be in that state of sickness that you once were in, instead of something that’s fighting with your mind and body.
He did not cry until days later. Still, his fathers death helped prepare Morrie for his own"(pg.139). Morrie in Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom. Morrie’s father being faced with a terminal illness prepared him and gave him a glimpse of something that would later happen to him. Having seen a terminal illness with his own eyes, gave him more acknowledgement and preparation for his situation. This was crucial because he worked around the illness, used it to benefit him and others. Most of all it didn’t eat him alive as it does to others. Where as Beth, our guest speaker's husband was faced with a terminal illness, in which she didn’t know how go about it. Basically thinking on her feet at a crucial time. Having to lie to her children, looking to religion and listening to her husband’s positive tongue to provide guidance for her. To become more vibrant to the situation and terminal illness she was dealt with.
Isolation
Society has driven many to isolate themselves as well as others. It’s obvious that when someone’s sick or faced with an illness there brought to a hospital. Isolated to receive treatment to be considered like the rest, healthy and normal. Or you’re left in a nursing home. Both places where you’re barricaded in as if you’re in a prison. The sick are isolated from the rest of society because they do not fit the "normal" that many fight to be. In Stigma and Social Identity by Erving Goffman, he speaks about the spoiled identity that people have become to worship. The social isolation that we create through different types of stigmas. Erving Goffman presents to us that the 1st stigma is abominations of the body like physical deformities. Secondly blemishes in an individuals character and lastly tribal stigma of race, nation and religion. If someone doesn’t fit the requirements of being normal we exercise varieties of discrimination. That person being looked at and critique because of their stigma. Than crawled over, madly glared at because their supposedly inferior.
The process of dying
A line that stood out to me in ... And a Time to die by Sharon R. Kaufman states: " When death is near, it is a place of bureaucratic logic without logic purpose, a place where everyone muddles through regulated- yet improvised, routine yet disquieting arrangements of medical algorithms, professional relations, and strategies for getting patients through the system"(pg.26). Sharon Kaufman talks on the culture that hospitals have built which consists of a time line where at the end, the patient dies. A place that consists of logic, giving medicine for the patients needs, surgeries and visits to help and regulate the sick. Getting patients through the system where there having to treat them with countless strategies of curing and helping the sick. That sometimes isn’t even needed. But it’s done, because that’s what hospitals are known to do, it’s their job. Their job is not to totally care like the average patient might think. Patients rarely have informed sense of what is actually best for them, so they go with whatever sounds best.
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