January 28, 2011
One of the blogs I follow is Belinda Brasley’s, ‘Losing vision, Gaining insight…’ http://losingvisiongaininginsight.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/to-blog-or-not-to-blog/ Her journey with low vision is so parallel with my own that it is at times uncanny…. She puts into words my own experiences, including how she feels about low mobility training, using a cane, and other aids to adapt to losing one’s eyesight. Today, her post addresses how she felt at the news of having lost even more vision after being stable for some period of time. It made me think about how any kind of bad news about our health can drain us emotionally and physically.
In part, we go through a number of stages when dealing with bad news about our health. It takes some time to understand and it can make us angry. We need to grieve about what we have lost. We need to understand what it means for all the other parts of our lives, including relationships and plans we had for the future–work and play. Gilotti, Thompson, and McNeilus wrote about how bad news delivery is perceived in a 2002 article in Social Science and Medicine http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11999499. In short, it is not a good time for small talk. And it is probably not the best time to go into a lot of information about the situation. As I said, it takes some time… Being ready for all of that information will be an important part of managing the bad news.
