Emotional Coping

Recently someone posted Pat O'Connor's wonderful writing on how to cope with LE and it's on lymphademapeople, and on SUSO: and Pat is quite ill and it reminds me of how much of a trailblazer he is, and how many people he's helped

http://www.stepup-speakout.org/patoconnorcopng.htm

And, a couple of other articles came up that seem relevant:

From the NY Times, "The Trauma of Being Alive"

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/opinion/sunday/the-trauma-of-being-alive.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

“Trauma never goes away completely,” I responded. “It changes perhaps, softens some with time, but never completely goes away. What makes you think you should be completely over it? I don’t think it works that way.”

And the wonderful Gayle Sulik, of pinkribbonblues, published an article on survivorship in JAMA, ethics edition, and started off with this quote:

“What patients see through the glass is not a world outside cancer, but a world taken over by it—cancer reflected endlessly around them like a hall of mirrors.”
--Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies [1]

http://virtualmentor.ama-assn.org/2013/08/msoc1-1308.html

Just found this quote from Michael J Fox in the Sunday Boston Globe:

"A lot of times when you have a disability, one of the things you deal with is other people’s projections of what your experience is, and their fear about it, and not seeing the experience you’re having. There’s nothing horrifying about [having Parkinson’s disease] to me. It is what I deal with. It is my reality and my life, but it’s not horrible. I don’t think it’s Gothic nastiness. There’s nothing on the surface horrible about someone with a shaky hand. There’s nothing horrible about someone in their life saying, ‘God, I’m really tired of this shaky hand thing’ and me saying, ‘Me, too.’ That’s our reality.” Michael J. Fox, whose Parkinson’s disease will be woven into the story line of his new series, “The Michael J. Fox Show.”