Diagnosis Quotes

“If your loved one is done fighting, respect that, let them go.”
― Lynda Wolters, Voices of Cancer: What We Really Want, What We Really Need

“The word cure is often misconstrued as remission and, conversely, remission is often thought to mean cure. Unfortunately, those words are mutually exclusive and can be painful when misunderstood or misused.”
― Lynda Wolters, Voices of Cancer: What We Really Want, What We Really Need

“I have another scan this week," I say lightly, hoping to reassure my loved ones that it is safe to rejoin my orbit. There is always another scan, because this is my reality. But the people I know are often busy contending with mildly painful ambition and the possibility of reward. I try to begrudge them nothing, except I'm not alongside them anymore.
In the meantime, I have been hunkering down with old medical supplies and swelling resentment. I tried— haven't I tried? — to avoid fights and remember birthdays. I showed up for dance recitals and listened to weight-loss dreams and kept the granularity of my medical treatments in soft focus. A person like that would be easier to love, I reasoned.
I try a small experiment and stop calling my regular rotation of friends and family, hoping that they will call me back on their own. _This is not a test. This is not a test._ The phone goes quiet, except for a handful of calls. I feel heavy with strange new grief. Is it bitter or unkind to want everyone to remember what I can't forget? Who wants to be confronted with the reality that we are all a breath away from a problem that could alter our lives completely? A friend with a very sick child said it best: I'm everyone's inspiration and and no one's friend.
I am asked all the time to say that, given what I've gained in perspective, I would never go back. Who would want to know the truth? Before was better.”
― Kate Bowler, No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear

“Cancer can change your body, and it can surely take your body away, but it can't have your spirit.”
― Lynda Wolters, Voices of Cancer: What We Really Want, What We Really Need

“I am angry that everyone else gets to have a normal life.”
― Lynda Wolters, Voices of Cancer: What We Really Want, What We Really Need

“A diagnosis is comforting because it provides a framework—a community, a lineage—and, if luck is afoot, a treatment or cure. A diagnosis says that I am crazy, but in a particular way: one that has been experienced and recorded not just in modern times, but also by the ancient Egyptians, who described a condition similar to schizophrenia in the Book of Hearts, and attributed psychosis to the dangerous influence of poison in the heart and uterus. The ancient Egyptians understood the importance of sighting patterns of behavior. Uterus, hysteria; heart, a looseness of association. They saw the utility of giving those patterns names.”
― Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

“There is wisdom in always exploring the counterpoint- sometimes a silver cloud has a dark lining too.”
― Gyan Nagpal

“It takes two squares, for the circle not to feel normal.”
― Monaristw

“The USA health care system really sucks!”
― Steven Magee

“Relationships continue even when they are radically changed by death, divorce, diagnosis, or another loss. Grief continues, too. For as long as we continue to live, we continue to grieve.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Permission to Grieve: Creating Grace, Space, & Room to Breathe in the Aftermath of Loss

“There was a time when the public had an unquestionable faith in biomedicine and the practitioners who translated it into everyday patient care—and physicians believed that the public's trust was justified based on their educational qualifications and training. But today, many patients believe that individual clinicians must earn their trust, just as a close relative has earned it through shared experience.

...Gallop polling over the last several decades that demonstrates how much the public's confidence in most US institutions has deteriorated. Confidence in the medical system in particular fell from 80% in 1975 to 37% in 2015. Statistics from the General Social Survey confirm this troubling trend. Baron and Berinsky explain the historical reasons for this shift in attitudes, but the more pressing question is: How can individual clinicians, and the profession as a whole, regain the patients' trust? ”
― Paul Cerrato, Reinventing Clinical Decision Support: Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Diagnostic Reasoning

“A journey into self diagnosis and treatment was required when the medical profession left me suffering for years with mental illness and chronic fatigue.”
― Steven Magee, Hypoxia, Mental Illness & Chronic Fatigue

“While many autistic people face great challenges as children, things become even harder once they reach adulthood. Suddenly, society expects you to be “an adult” and behave and function as such. It is such a shame that exactly at the point in their lives when they need it the most, the support they receive from organizations and resources often stops. Because I was diagnosed at 21, I never received any support as a child. After I received my diagnosis, my mother tried to find all kinds of resources, but she soon realized that I was too old for much of anything.”
― Casey "Remrov" Vormer, Connecting With The Autism Spectrum: How To Talk, How To Listen, And Why You Shouldn’t Call It High-Functioning

“Doctors treating sickened university students will need to factor in radio wave sickness to reach an accurate diagnosis.”
― Steven Magee

“Categories make for efficient communication and statistical recordkeeping. They also satisfy the human lust for making things seem simpler than they are. We have been trying to map the landscape of mental disorders by drawing lines around clusters of symptoms as if they were island, but mental disorders are more like ecosystems...defying crisp boundaries.”
― Randolph M. Nesse

“I am reverse engineering my disabling sickness into the medical diagnosis of High Altitude Observatory Diseases (HAOD).”
― Steven Magee

“While it would have been easier to jump off a cliff, developing the diagnosis and treatment of High Altitude Observatory Disease (HAOD) was a problem that needed to be solved.”
― Steven Magee

“If the government was a human, it would have a Serious Mental Illness (SMI) diagnosis.”
― Steven Magee

“Stop being a two-bit doctor from ten minutes of googling.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World

“Developing the diagnosis and treatment of High Altitude Observatory Disease became my priority in my late forties as my health was drastically failing.”
― Steven Magee

“While the doctor promised me I would feel better once on CPAP, the opposite happened. I was more fatigued than ever and I was now falling asleep while driving! I was sent on more sleep studies and given more diagnosis of sleep disorders.”
― Steven Magee, Magee’s Disease

“It took me seven years to develop the diagnosis and treatment for Magee’s Disease from the point I became disabled with it.”
― Steven Magee, Magee’s Disease

“Self diagnosis using affordable devices saved me from a horrible decline into premature death.”
― Steven Magee, Magee’s Disease

“I found my correct diagnosis in books and on the internet.”
― Steven Magee, Hypoxia, Mental Illness & Chronic Fatigue

“A journey into self diagnosis and treatment was required when the medical profession left me suffering for years with Shift Work Disorder.”
― Steven Magee, Night Shift Recovery

“A journey into self diagnosis and treatment was required when the medical profession left me suffering for years with Summit Brain.”
― Steven Magee, Summit Brain

“She was diagnosed with leukemia when Lily was six months old.... Diana and I had looked at each other, no clue, nowhere to begin, certainly no answers, other than the largest answer, that is, the answer that emerged in how, despite or maybe in lieu of the terror of the situation, our bodies had involuntarily gravitated toward each other, how our petty grudges and growing disagreements—all the fissures and loggerheads that had been emerging in our marriage—had given way.”
― Charles Bock

“You'd have to ask Leyla if you want to know more. She's a psychologist. One of a dozen on board. We don't just want our passengers to survive—we want them to be OK. We're dealing with a lot of trauma. So if you ever need to talk..."
"I'll pass."
"Bad experiences?"
"Sort of."
"What happened?"
I shrug. "It took a long time to diagnose me."
"From what I understand, autistic girls often don't run into trouble until a later age."
I bark out a laugh. Oh, I ran into trouble, all right. I barely said a word between the ages of four and six. I hit three of my preschool and grade school teachers. In a class photo taken when I was seven, my face is covered in scratches from when I latched onto a particularly bad stim. Therapists and teachers labelled me as bipolar, as psychotic, as having oppositional defiant disorder, as intellectually disabled, and as just straight-up difficult, the same way Els did. One said all I needed was structure and a gluten-free diet.
When I was nine, a therapist suggested I might be autistic, at which point I had already started to learn what set me off and how to mimic people; within two years, I was coping well enough to almost-but-not-quite blend in with my classmates. It's funny when people like Els have no idea anything is off about me, given that my parents spend half my childhood worrying I'd end up institutionalized.
At the time, I thought the diagnosis was delayed because I was bad at being autistic, just like I was bad at everything else; it took me years to realize that since I wasn't only Black, but a Black girl, it's like the DSM shrank to a handful of options, and many psychologists were loath to even consider them.”
― Corinne Duyvis, On the Edge of Gone

“If you can't say what is happening in the brain, nobody will care.”
― Suzanne O'Sullivan, The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness

“Question everything. Get a second opinion (or more). Push for what you need. Don’t take no for an answer.”
― Lisa Manyon, Spiritual Sugar: The Divine Ingredients to Heal Yourself With Love