Quotes About Struggle

But now it seemed to me that Hamlet was moody and irascible in no small part because he is grieving: his father has just died. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the days while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed.

After all, a terrible anxiety attends chronic illness. Over time, it becomes difficult to untangle the suffering from symptoms like pain from the suffering inflicted by the anxiety over the possibility of more pain, and worse outcomes, in the future. This does not mean that the illness is in the mind; rather, the mind—that machine for making meaning—makes endless meanings of its new state, which may themselves influence the experience.

How to describe intermittent severe pain on the same scale as constant middle-range pain, which I found more debilitating?

what happens to patients who don't have the energy or the means to persevere in connecting their disconnected doctors, he said, "They fall through the cracks, and they suffer in their own world, alone.

To become chronically ill is not only to have a disease that you have to manage, but to have a new story about yourself, a story that many people refuse to hear—because it is deeply unsatisfying, full of fits and starts, anger, resentment, chasms of unruly need. My own illness story has no destination.

When I got acutely sick, I could only dream of such a scenario! Instead, I laboriously made my many appointments, trundling from doctor to doctor, trying to get them to share information and offer treatments.

don't believe I will get better," Daudet wrote, ". . . yet I always behave as if my damned pains were going to disappear by tomorrow morning.")

I got sick the way Hemingway says you go broke: "gradually and then suddenly.

You cannot muscle your way to health when you are chronically ill. Rather, one way of coming to terms with an amorphous systemic disease is recognizing that you are sick, that the illness will come and go, and that it is not the kind of illness you can conquer.

Alphonse Daudet observes in In the Land of Pain. "Everyone will get used to it except me.

As the surgeon Atul Gawande wrote of the medical profession, "Nothing is more threatening to who you think you are than a patient with a problem you cannot solve.

So challenging was living with an unidentified illness that she welcomed the terrible news with what sounds like excitement.

could imagine what it was like to give up, to feel your mind go as wobbly as your body, reconciling yourself to the idea that death would really be a relief—a respite from lonely suffering.

Without quite noticing it, I had slid downward to a place where, as Styron put it, "all sense of hope had vanished, along with the idea of a futurity.

A doctor's job, like a gambler's, is intimately tied up with failure; the house always wins over time.

Without answers, at my most desperate, I came to feel (in some unarticulated way) that if I could just tell the right story about what was happening, I could make myself better. If only I could figure out what the story was, like the child in a fantasy novel who must discover her secret name, I could become myself again.

But as more and more "small things" went wrong—endometriosis, hives, the labral tear in my hip, the arthritis in my neck, the thyroid disease, the failure to get pregnant, the fatigue and brain fog—I had started to see my body differently, not as a collection of parts but as an entangled system.

My narrative is not a neat one. Which version of the story of my illness I tell depends on what month, what day, even what hour I do so, and whether my symptoms are in the background or the foreground.

As the chronically ill know, to be alive is to be in uncertainty.

I was not myself, but if I was not myself, how did I know that? It was as if the old me, the authentic me, were inside, struggling to break free of the forces that had inhabited its body. The ghost within.

Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes.

Some people climb mountains, others get to have heart surgery.

*Every man's life is a train made of straw which tries to move on a track made of fire! The very next stop is ashes and dust.

A horrible night might be hidden in a beautiful morning!