Customer Reviews

A Delicate Balance: Living Successfully With Chronic Illness

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an incredibly well written book with a balance between narrative insights and valuable technical information. The author is quite candid in her personal experience with chronic illness and the resources at the end of the book are excellent and not the usual "run of the mill". I love her quote about the importance of first person narratives. "For those of us who are ill, chronic illness sets us apart. But when we read about the experiences of others, we realize we are not alone and that healing is available to all of us, regardless of our disease."

While Wells includes the usual information about good doctor/patient relationships and the importance of spirituality and alternative methods of healing, her real strength lies in her incredible ability to get the emotional heart of the various aspects of being chronically ill. I found her chapter "From Denial to Acceptance and Back Again" to be amazing in its clear articulation of the emotional stages of chronic illness and the profound isolation that can result from that experience. Everyone with a chronic illness should read and keep this book in their personal health library.

If you have a chronic medical problem, and you want to prove you can go on working, get this book; if you need to get a disability retirement and you want to prove that you are entitled to it, get this book. If you just want to know that somebody understands, get this book.

Like most people with chronic illness, I read every book about chronic illness with the hope that it will contain the magic advice to make living with chronic illness easy and endurable. This book comes closer to providing effective advice than any tome I've worked through. The only criticism I have with the book, is the same one I have with every book about chronic illness: the inclusion of a chapter on how chronic illness has enabled individuals/authors/etc. to grow from the experience, that in the illness there are blessings of awareness of life that the sufferer didn't see before. Well, d'uh! Before this misery wrecked my life I experienced a whole lot of stuff I can't experience any more. I was too busy living a different life to notice this other stuff. I miss the stuff from my old life a heck of a lot more than I enjoy the new stuff.

Part of the message, of course, is that spending your "new" life mourning for the loss of the "old" one isn't an effective way to use one's time. That surviving chronic illness means getting more out of what little life you do have. But I am so tired of the "Well, it depends on do you see the glass half full or half empty?". For me, all I can share with other people is: "You got a glass. That's better than no glass. If you're lucky, you'll be able to put something in it. If you're unlucky, you're wondering: glass? What glass? The worst thing is, you may not have a glass, there may not be one coming and there may not be anything to put in it."

Then it's time to call the waiter. . .

This book is an excellent read for anyone with a Chronic Illness. I like the way it references different illness's and the way that the author takes an entire chapter to talk about how having a chronic illness affects our lives to the highest degree and that we have to go through a period of mourning our old lives and self because we are different now, however, there is no reason we cannot go on to live successfully. I read this book in one day. Awesome!
Lynne

I was not terrible impressed with the book. I found it a difficult book to get into and didn't find a lot of information helpful.
I did find some suggestions helpful, but not as much as I expected.

I picked the book and put it down several times, thinking I would find something I missed in the first reading. I was disappointed to find I didn't learn anything new.