Illness Experience Quotes

And one day, this thing happened to me: I coughed, and the blood just came gushing out of my mouth. ... I still can't believe that that happened to me, but I sat there, and I said to God, 'Well, if it means I'm going to die, that's OK.' I don't think I've ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.

Life for the unwell is discontinuous and unpredictable. Things just come out of nowhere. People try but mostly do a lousy job of taking care of you.

I had polio when I was 13. I started feeling stiff, my joints ached, and over a two-week period I lost my coordination and 20 pounds.

Back in the old days, a man could just get sick and die. Now they have to wage a battle. So my Uncle Bert is waging a courageous battle, which I've seen, because I go and visit him. And this is the battle: he's lying in the hospital bed, with a thing in his arm, watching Matlock on the TV.

To be diagnosed was the hardest thing because I didn't know what they were talking about... And the doctor said, Don't worry, in three months you'll know. So I went about my business and then, one day, it jumped me. I couldn't get up... Your muscles trick you; they did me.

When you're sick, you're not thinking 24 hours a day about your suffering, about dying. You want to talk and laugh and think about other things. In the midst of trying to live your life normally, the fear and dread, the realization that it might all end, rises up inside of you.

Going through chemo is a monster. You literally feel like you're dying every day.

Here in the hospital, I say,that is not my body, not my body.I am not here for the doctorsto read like a recipe.

Chemotherapy isn't easy. I felt very fortunate I wouldn't have to go through that.

Cancer, like any other illness, is a bore.

I was a healthy young man, and I thought I was invincible before I was diagnosed with kidney disease.

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body.

Sickness and disease are a change in awareness from comfort to discomfort.

Dad's cancer experience included periods of relatively good health as well as bouts of hospitalisation as he coursed his way through a variety of different chemotherapy treatments.

My mother has had breast cancer twice. And my mother has always been this very positive human being: a glass-half-full type. Like, when she was in treatment and feeling really bad, she would always talk about some nurse that was particularly nice to her.

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality.

There's something universal about illness... Whether you like it, at some level all patients are saying, 'Daddy, Mommy, help me, tell me it's going to be alright.'

People naturally want to know about what happened, about my leukemia. They ask the same questions again and again. And there have been so many positive conclusions, even through the bad times, that I don't mind at all to be reminded of my struggles.

I used to visit kids with cancer all the time. Now I'm in the club. I understand what's happening to these little kids with brain cancer, and I ask myself, 'How do they make it through the day?' So you see a little 5-year-old and you say, 'If she can do it, I can suck it up.'

But I enjoyed getting sick, I didn't mind it at all. So in that short amount of time, I did actually go from 121 right back up to 180, which is way too fast obviously. And that resulted in some doctors visits to get things sorted out.

Some people say you have to fight cancer. But it was fighting me. The cure was worse than the disease, and it left me totally exhausted and depressed. I just hid myself away in my daughter-in-law's flat.

Telling a story of illness, one pulls a thread through a narrow opening flanked on one side by shame and the other by trivia.

At the time I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, my doctors told me that I had an incurable illness and they didn't know much about it.

It is so important to talk about your cancer and the feelings you have about it.

Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.