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Escalation of Illness

My mother has been a business woman for nearly 30 years now. Her business has been profiled in the local paper because of its rarity. It’s the last of its kind in town, and supposedly one of three left in Canada. It’s a rare hybrid of convenience store with a diner counter and grill - a kind of business that was in abundance in the 1950s up to the 1970s, but slowly disappeared.

In my short fiction, I refer to my mother’s diner as the fictional Buddhist Truckstop. All kinds of people have come through the doors in the 28 years that my mother has had the business. Casual customers often turn into regulars, who in turn like to come in, sit at the counter, and have a coffee or even a milkshake made by the authentic 1955 Hamilton Beach beast of a milkshake maker. When they are comfortable enough, they talk about their lives to my mother or I.

We’ve unfortunately lost a number of customers to diabetes, cancer, heart attacks, and complications after surgery. And several more of our customers are suffering from these and other ailments. For some reason, many of our customers ask us for advice about lesser ailments, and my mother and I dispense our incomplete knowledge about various natural remedies. (Note: my mother comes from a long line of medical practitioners who have practiced various forms of healing, including homeopathy, allopathy, naturopathy and ayurveda. We remind customers that our suggestions are just that, not medical advice. But they return and ask for it anyway.)

It’s likely that other stores get their own fair share of customers with illnesses. But because our regulars feel like family, they’re much more comfortable discussing it with us. It’s the reason why kids in the neighbourhood have grown up being mothered by Ma, then returning with their own kids. It’s a community hangout pretending to be a convenience store and diner. Of course, because of the diner and the available seats, such a comfortable atmosphere can exist.

When I work there on weekends, I see people in different states of mind. Some are rude to me, a mere convenience store clerk in their eyes. It hurts at first, especially because in my mind I’m someone with an education who has proven himself in the past, but has somehow gotten into a long-term rut and is only now climbing out of it. Other customers are, thankfully, kind, complimentary or even humorous, making up for all the people who somehow think that I am stealing their hard-earned money from them, even though they chose to walk in the door.

And yet, I learn something from all of them, especially the ones coping with illness, who sit down and chat, sharing something of themselves. One perspective I gained recently, from one of my regulars, and someone I call a friend, is that news of an illness usually triggers the 5 stages of grief that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross defined - with denial being the first one. (The stages in order, are: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.)

Now while I’ve heard this theory before, it’s still hard to apply it to yourself, when you discover that you’re ill. In my case, I’ve been too afraid for 7 years to get diagnosed, convincing myself that I dislike Allopathic (”Western”) medicine so much that I’m justified not to go see a doctor. I keep telling myself that I’ll heal myself through homeopathic or naturopathic means, but in reality I’m afraid of anyone’s diagnosis.

Had someone told me I was in the first stage of grief (originally called The 5 Stages of Receiving Catastrophic News), I would have disagreed at first, but thought about it later. And I would have saved myself an escalation of illness: illness aggravated by earlier illness that has gone unchecked. In the 1st stage of grief, denial, it’s easy to tell yourself that you’re different, that you’ll get better, that it’s a temporary thing, or that you really don’t have a problem - it just seems that way.

How can you learn any of this if you won’t even go see someone who could make you aware of your grief? Unfortunately, the denial stage can last for years. And by then, it may be too late to do anything, with state of mind precipitating into the anger stage. Unfortunately, the denial and anger states can coexist - the states aren’t mutually exclusive. And this unreleased anger, according to ayurvedic theory, causes further illnesses which may at first manifest themselves in minor forms such as skin problems. Your illness is escalating.

With so many of my customers suffering from diabetes, I’ve heard stories of “stubborn” people who lost first one leg, then another because they wouldn’t change their diet. It’s sad to think that such problems could likely have been avoided, had the sufferer been told that they were entering the 5 stages of grief. Another customer, a friend, admitted to me a few days ago that it took him 5 years before he even touched the prescribed pills to keep his diabetes in check. At around the same time, he was going through the grief of seeing his mother suffer from Alzheimer’s disease.

What’s really the bigger problem, however, is that we often forget that as human beings, we follow the path of least resistance. Unless we’ve taken our destinies in hand, consciously. Those who haven’t determined their own destiny, or those who have temporarily forgotten the purpose they chose for themselves, become like flotsam and jetsam in the universal scheme of life.