MARIE MURRAY HEALTH PLUSWe face serious illness with fortitude. It does not tear us apart, it unites us
AS WE live our lives, struggle with our own struggles and revel in the joys that come our way, we are often unaware of whole cohorts of people who have to cope with diverse medical conditions, physical incapacities, sudden accidents, serious injuries, emotional trauma and psychological distress.
We know of course that there are people who manage their lives and chronic medical conditions in tandem with the minimum of intrusion for themselves and others despite the ongoing tyranny of their medical conditions.
We know, for example, that there are people who have diabetes who adapt their lifestyles to cope, people with arthritis who try to circumvent the obstructions and limitations these conditions place in their way and people with cystic fibrosis who challenge their condition with robust humour and determination.
There are those with Alzheimer's around whom family and friends gather to protect and support. There are a host of incapacities, irritating skin conditions, eye problems, feet problems, hearing difficulties, major, minor and general impediments that make life harder for those who suffer them than for others.
In the psychological domain many people have depression, anxiety, phobias and fears that accompany them for a time. Many manage to adjust to startlingly sudden acute events or conditions that change their lives overnight, others with the slow drain and energy depletion of chronic medical conditions either caring for themselves or for others through the endless, relentless despotism of chronic ill health.
Life is lived most courageously by us. The longer one lives, the greater the admiration we must have for the multitude of people who adapt to the diverse and demanding impositions of temporary or permanent disability in the widest definition and sense of that term.
One condition that people may not know anything about until they encounter it is "idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis" or lung fibrosis: a condition that is sometimes confused with cystic fibrosis but is different.
Lung fibrosis usually occurs around the age of 50 and is described as a scarring condition that affects the air sacs in the lungs interfering with the normal functioning of taking oxygen out of the air and removing carbon dioxide from the blood.
Its most common symptoms are breathlessness and a dry cough and other symptoms may include painful joints and hands and fingers that are susceptible to the cold. There is reported to be no medical therapy currently which prevents the progression of the condition but lung transplantation, when possible, offers a life-saving solution.
So how do people cope when struck at an important time in later life with this threat to their lives? What courage do they show in the face of their own mortality? What are the relationships, the activities, the things that are important to them when life looks as if it may be foreshortened unexpectedly? How do families respond? How do they manage the medical interventions, the uncertainties?
Stories of those with this lung fibrosis condition are found on the website www.ilfa.ie. There are stories of those who acquired the condition, had transplants and survived.
There are stories of those who acquired the condition and died, but with such prior zest for life, grasping at life even as they gasped for breath, living it fully, gracefully, generously and completely to the end.
There are always people behind medical conditions. The people in these stories pay tribute to significant lives.
There is an indomitable human will. It is often most visible when life is hard. It emerges in those who are afflicted. It is evident in those who support them.
Families come together in a special way when a family member is threatened, when one of their own is suffering, when serious illness occurs. As humans we may be distinguished by our extraordinary capacities to cope and to adapt rather than the opposite.
In essence, we are, as a species, to be admired. We face serious illness with fortitude.
It does not tear us apart, usually it unites us, whatever the outcome, indefinably, together.
To learn more about one serious illness, lung fibrosis and the lives of those who are challenged by it, there will be an information day and launch of a patient information booklet this Saturday in the Education and Research Centre, St Vincent's Hospital, Elm Park, Dublin 4 from 10am to noon.
Speakers will include Prof Jim Egan, consultant respiratory physician, and Prof Freddie Woods from the Mater Hospital as well as other key personnel.
• mmurray@irish-times.ie Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is director of the Student Counselling Services in UCD