HW 17 - First Thoughts on the Illness & Dying Unit

I find dieing to be a scary concept because what happens to us when we die. Its really the biggest uncertainty in someones life because there is no way to avoid it. The biggest problem is when it happens, what will happen to you? What happens when our heart stops beating? Do you dream? Is everything just black? There is no way to ever know until you are there, and if you don't like it, there is no going back. That is scary, that is something to quite literally, live in fear of. As a person i can say i am scared of uncertainty and the unknown, and death is no exception. All i can relate it to is sleeping, and i relate sleeping to darkness.

Jim Morrison of the musical group The Doors said: “I wouldn't mind dying in a plane crash. It'd be a good way to go. I don't want to die in my sleep, or of old age, or OD. I want to feel what it's like. I want to taste it, hear it, smell it. Death is only going to happen once. I don't want to miss it.” We quite literally live to die. It is one of the most important things about life, is dying. He wanted to experience it, and that was ironic because he ended up dying of a drug overdose. Dying is something that you do only get to do once, so it seems fair to want to experience it. To want to, as weird as it may seem, really live death, isn't something that is to far fetched to want. I don't think that if i was given the option to know when i was going to die, i would take it. I don't want to know. The point i am trying to make is that death is something that each person only gets once, so the mystery around it is what makes it so interesting and scary. We only know what it brings to an extent, we don't know what happens to us, only what is left.

The other day i woke up and i had a sore throat and a stuffed up nose. I don't remember how i got sick, but i just was. I hate being sick because it doesn't happen often and it makes me really uncomfortable. I have never been seriously sick though, i have never had any illness that caused me to go to the hospital. So what do we do when we are told there is something really wrong with us. What happens if we went to the doctor and he told us that we had a disease that would ravage out bodies and leave us gaunt and frail bodies when we had once been strong and well built people. How do we accept that these sicknesses are real and can have real consequences. Every day there is a new report on the news about how a certain action can increase your risk of cancer or decrease it. So do we live in fear and try our very best to avoid sickness so we can live healthy lives in hopes that we can avoid death for another year? What happens to the people who don't smoke but got lung cancer from the dust from 9/11, and the people who have been smoking for years, but still have a mostly clean bill of health. What causes that? I have been taught by my family that what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger, and that the body has a tendency to work its problems out. So if i hurt my wrist, but it isn't debilitating pain, then i will wait it out until it goes away, or gets worse. I can accept this and respect this because it does make me feel stronger as a person to not have to go to a doctor all the time to tell me what is wrong with me. I adhere to my own health standards, but i am worried because i don't know if my cell phone will give me brain cancer, or the sun can give me skin cancer, or ground zero having some other negative health effect on me. I don't live in complete fear of it though. Some people are scared of getting sick because they don't want to die and they don't want to be faced with the news that they might me. What i do know is that the unknown scares me, but it doesn't rule me.