Heroes Not Zombies

In the A to Z of Becoming, H is for Hope.

I don’t know how people live without hope.

Despair and hopelessness are killers. I think one of the worst things a doctor can do is tell a patient they have “x months” to live. Nobody can accurately predict the course of an illness, and nobody can accurately predict how long an individual lifetime will be. (I often think of Stephen Hawking and his “motor neurone disease” or “Lou Gehrig’s Disease”, a disease with an estimated life expectancy of 2 to 5 years, where his diagnosis was made over 40 years ago).

The truth is that with any diagnosis there are three possible future pathways – the patient gets better, they develop a fairly stable chronic illness, or they get worse. The proportions of a population with the same diagnosis experiencing each of these paths varies depending on a host of factors including the person’s prior health, and the severity of the pathology at time of diagnosis. But I think it’s a bit like this –

So, what I usually say to patients is something like “as nobody can tell you which of these directions your illness is likely to take, then what’s the benefit of assuming either of the poorer options?”

At each stage, every day, it seems to me, it’s worth while hoping for the better future.

On “PsychCentral” there’s an article which describes NINE different types of hopelessness, and begins to give hints about how to overcome them.

I know some people say “hope for the best and prepare for the worst” and I’m not sure what I make of that advice, but I can see some sense in it. What I dislike is how fear is used as a tool to control us. Whether it’s about diseases from influenza to cancer, or about terrorism or crime, or the financial future, again and again we are bombarded with messages to make us afraid and make the choices based on assuming that terrible outcomes are just around the corner.

I don’t want to live my life that way. And I won’t live my life that way.

I’m sticking with Nelson Mandela’s advice “May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears”

What might you hope for this week? What might you hope for this month? And what choices will you make to reflect those hopes?