By Katherine Kam
Hospice differs from palliative care, which serves anyone who is seriously ill, not just those who are dying and no longer seeking a cure.
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CLEAR ALL
With each diagnosis, knowing her life hung in the balance, she was “stunned, then anguished” and astonished by “how much energy it takes to get from the bad news to actually starting on the return path to health.”
Individuals with disabilities are at a greater risk of experiencing fatigue than the general population, and this risk increases with age.
Studies of dying patients who seek a hastened death have shown that their reasons often go beyond physical ones like intractable pain or emotional ones like feeling hopeless.
My Feb. 5 column, “A Heartfelt Appeal for a Graceful Exit,” prompted a deluge of information and requests for information on how people too sick to reap meaningful pleasure from life might be able to control their death.
After 15 years of chronic illness and even after writing a book titled How to Be Sick, I still can feel sick of being sick. (When I use the word “sick,” I’m including chronic pain.) If you’re as intimately familiar as I am with sick of being sick, you know how unpleasant it feels.
To celebrate the release of my new book, How To Live Well with Chronic Pain and Illness: A Mindful Guide, I’ve made a list of 20 tips to help with the health challenges all us face at one time or another in life.
A calm mind and even temper can help make peace with life’s difficulties.
1
In the end, I fall back on one statement that I repeat to myself pretty often. “We are not given the burdens we deserve, we are given the burdens we can bear.”
2
I’ve been disabled and intensely ill with the degenerative neuro-immuno illness myalgic encephalomyelitis (formerly known by the misnomer “chronic fatigue syndrome”) for 30 years.
Learn to communicate skillfully with others so you can get the help you need.