The Five Stages of Grief

To go along with yesterday's post, I'm going to post an article I wrote many years ago for a support group that I belong to on MDJunction, where they have online support groups for just about every medical condition under the sun. I joined this group when I was first diagnosed with fibromyalgia, though it's been a wonderful support and resource for me through many other illnesses! This article has been posted in several different groups, and I thought it might be helpful to have it here as well.

07 April 2010

You've not been feeling well for quite some time now.  At first, you tried to ignore it, then finally realized that you couldn't put it off any more.  You make an appointment with your doctor, who schedules a series of strange and intimidating tests: blood work, CAT scans, MRIs and stuff you probably never even heard of.  After waiting for what seems forever to get your test results back, your doctor calls you into the office.  Then you get the news: you have a chronic illness, something that cannot be cured and that you will carry with you for the rest of your life.  You sit there, perhaps still in the exam room, maybe in your car in the parking lot, and you wonder, what now? Now is the time when the five stages of grief will step in and rule your life for a matter of time.  It could be days, weeks, months, or even years that you will spend going through the process of grieving, but every person who is diagnosed with a chronic illness will go through this process, the same as you would if you had lost a loved one.  You HAVE lost a loved one: the old YOU.  You must grieve for the person that you were, so that you can move on and accept the person that you are. The first stage of grief is denial.  Each and every one of us goes through this process.  We may say to ourselves, "Oh, it can't be!  That can't be right!"  We may even go to another doctor, to try and find another answer, perhaps one with a "cure".  Most of us will go home and do some research, whether on the computer or at the local library or book store.  We may even KEEP that appointment with the other doctor, just to see if maybe this one will come up with something we like better.  When we go home, we may tell our loved ones and friends that the tests were inconclusive, that the "quack" we went to see doesn't know what's wrong with us and that we're going to keep trying to find an answer.  Once you've made your way through the denial phase, the next step in your grieving process is anger.  You may become increasingly angry at the world, your job and coworkers, your family, and even yourself.  You will probably want to yell and scream, and possibly even throw things.  You will declare to yourself and to anyone who will listen about how life isn't fair and you got the short end of the stick.  At this stage, it is important to remember that your anger is an integral part of your grieving process, and that it is completely normal.  However, if your anger turns to violence toward you or others, it's time to seek professional help. The third stage of grief is called bargaining.  If you are a person of faith (no matter what that faith is), you will probably find yourself trying to bargain with your deity; "Oh please, if you'll take this away, I will _________" (fill in the blank).  This, too, is a normal phase of grieving that everyone must go through before they can become completely comfortable. Depression is the fourth stage of the process of grieving for your lost self.  This stage is easy to get into and difficult to get out of.  But again, this phase is completely normal, however, if your depression is so serious that you are having feelings and/or thoughts of hurting yourself (or worse), please seek professional help!!  You may become depressed because you can no longer do some of the things you used to do, or be the person you used to be.  You may feel as if you are "broken" or that there is something wrong with you.  You may isolate yourself from your friends (or they may do it for you--but if they do, they weren't true friends), slow or completely stop your social activities, and spend hours or days at a time in bed crying.  You are grieving over the loss of your self. The final stage of grieving is acceptance.  This is where you finally get to the point where you say to yourself, this is where I'm at, and I can accept it.  You have come to terms with your illness, learned about it, and learned how you yourself can cope with your condition and make your life a bit more livable with that condition.  You may slowly pick up your social activities and come out of your shell more and more.  A big step toward managing your condition, no matter what it is, is the acceptance of that condition.  Once you are no longer fighting the inevitable, you will be better able to listen to your body as it tells you what it needs. You may not necessarily go through these five stages in the order listed, and there's no time limit for each one.  You will remain in a stage for as long as YOU need to.  There's no right or wrong answer here.  You may even go back to a stage you have already been through, because there is something there that is still unresolved in your mind.  However, there is one thing to remember through all of this: the stages of grief are necessary to your physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual well-being, not only when you grieve the loss of a loved one, but when you grieve the loss of yourself as well.  Do not be ashamed, but rather embrace your grieving process; once you do, you will find that you manage a lot better!**The five stages of grief information was taken from: Recover From Grief.

December Contest!

I'm holding a contest from December 1 through December 15, and the prize will be a PDF copy of Once Upon a Western Way. All you'll need is Adobe Reader or similar PDF reader software. No cheating and starting before December 1! (Just kidding, it won't let you anyway!) This is sort of a test to see what sort of response I get, but the winner will still get a prize! Have fun! a Rafflecopter giveaway

Thanksgiving Day Has New Meaning This Year

Today is a major holiday for those of us living in the United States (and possibly other places as well; I don't mean to exclude anyone!). It's the holiday of Thanksgiving, where, among other things, we think back upon the past year and give thanks for what we have. We usually cook massive feasts of turkey, ham, dressing or stuffing (and YES, as my mother will continually remind you, there is a difference! Dressing is not cooked inside the turkey like STUFFING is.), mounds of mashed potatoes, gravy, cranberry sauce, and more pies than we can stand to look at. Most people don't have to go to work, kids don't have to go to school, and it's a major family occasion, sometimes one of the few times a year that whole extended families might see each other. This ritual may seem odd to those in other countries, but at its core, it's intended to show that we're prosperous enough to make such a meal for a single day.

But beyond the Hallmark version is the real truth behind Thanksgiving: that of giving THANKS for what we have (or in some cases, what we don't have!). There has never been a single year in which I was more grateful and thankful than I am this year. At this point last year, we weren't sure if I was going to be home for the holiday, or stuck in a hospital 3 hours away from those I love. Even, some months before this time last year, whether I was going to live or not.

Going back over your past year can sometimes be painful, and I think about the long journey I've walked over the past 365 days. I went from a person paralyzed from an autoimmune condition called Guillain-Barre syndrome over Christmas 2012, to a healthy and active young woman who went to work every day, played with dogs, and rode and trained my horse. Just 5 months later, that recovery had done a complete 180 and I was again ill, and finally, on July 27, 2013, I was diagnosed with leukemia. At the time, we were sure it was a death sentence.

Before being sick, I'd worked at Auto Zone, a local auto parts store, in Poplar Bluff, Missouri (yes, and I can change my own oil and brakes too!), and I'm grateful for the kindness and support of all my coworkers there. Thank you, my friends, for just being you! I wish I could return, but at this point...well, who knows what the next 365 days will bring? The Auto Zone corporation even gave me a donation, something they do for employees in situations like mine. Thank you, too, Auto Zone.

While I was sick, my family was making the long drive to visit me one weekend, and they were in a car accident. They're all okay, but the vehicle was a total loss. My husband arranged to purchase a vehicle from a coworker of his, and she was nice enough to let him make payments on it. But unknown to us, they were secretly collecting donations and raised enough money for him to pay off the car, get it inspected, and registered, and even had a little left over for gas. Thank you, everyone at Gates Refurb Plant in Poplar Bluff, for your generosity.

Also, my sister, Dana Jordan, who lives in Michigan, organized a fundraiser. My brother, Matt, and his girlfriend Maria, my other sister Becky Rottenbucher, my parents, Dan and Coy Jordan, and Maria's parents, all pitched in to help. Maria's parents allowed the use of Colonial Lanes in Flushing, Michigan, and they had a bowling fundraiser. They collected donations of services from local businesses, or items to raffle off, designed T-shirts, and much more. To each of them, as well as the sea of faceless (to me anyway) strangers who participated or donated, I say thank you very much. They raised a bit over $4,000 that night, and my family needed it desperately.

My sister-in-law, Jacinda Dees, who lives in Florida, also did some fundraising with silicon bracelets from the Max Foundation, and a go-fund-me (or something similar online) where people could go to donate. She also started a Facebook page so that I could post updates (or she or my husband could, when I wasn't able to) in a single place and reach all of the people that I really cared about, all from one place! She also (on occasion) had to edit my posts because I was on so many medications, some of them for pain, that I would often fall asleep posting, or I couldn't focus on what I was posting. Now that I look back, we should have saved some of those posts...we could probably devote an entire blog post to them alone! They would go perfect with all the "text message spell check fails" that are going around everywhere! So to her, and my in-laws Cathy and Darrell Dees, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I need to mention my friend Denise Mercer at this point. She's the one who sent me a simple friend request on Facebook, sort of a "I heard from so-and-so that you're sick, I wanted to check in" sort of thing. Denise is a published author as well, her book is called  My Father's Table, and you can click the link to see it on Amazon. You can also get it at CreateSpace and Barnes and Noble, and for Kindle. Many of you who regularly follow my blog may be aware that I had already published Once Upon a Western Way (in April, 2012), but it was only available digitally at Smashwords. Denise was the one that started "the butterfly effect" in my life, and gave me the tools and knowledge I needed to publish in print. Butterflies hold a special significance to Denise and her family, and that's why I chose the Monarch butterfly for the cover image for My Butterfly Cancer, and part of the reason I chose the butterfly logo to represent my publishing company. Denise, my dear and wonderful friend, thank you with big hugs!

I'm thankful for all the staff at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri, who gave me the very best of care and made sure that I was alive to celebrate another Thanksgiving day. This includes doctors, nurses, social workers, counselors, janitors, and even the people who brought my food. I couldn't have gotten care closer to home, as we're extremely rural here, and they gave me 5 star service! I still keep in touch with some of them, and from time to time I stop there when I'm in town for checkups. And of course, I'm working to donate my books (and hopefully soon, my audiobooks) to the patients there. Thank you, all of you.

And finally, I'm ever grateful for the presence of my family. Being sick brought me and my mother closer together, and that makes me happy. My husband Jay, my kids Ally and Tasha, my best friends Val and Darlene, my (sister-from-another-mother) Michelle, Pam White (her husband had leukemia at the same time I did), all my aunts, uncles, cousins, second cousins, close friends, acquaintances, my pets at home, and anyone else I've forgotten to mention (and I'm sure there are some!): I am more thankful for you guys than ever before!

For my blog visitors (whom I am also thankful for), if you've made it this far in this long post, I'm going to ask you to do something. I'd like you to share something you're thankful for in the comments section. It doesn't have to be today, because I know some people will be very busy (as I likely will be), but take a moment to think about what you're really grateful for this year. And those of you in countries that don't exactly celebrate Thanksgiving (and I know Canada does, but it's not today) can do the same today. Leave a short comment about what you're thankful for this year, then share this post to your Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, or any other social media you might wish to. If I can get enough comments, maybe I can write a follow up post as to what my fans are thankful for.

Featured Author Elora Carmen Shore and book A Road to Count my Days By

 Author Elora Shore lives in the southern USA and is looking for a “day” job as she’s just moved. She lives with a vain cockatiel named Snowflake (though she often calls him “His Lord Grumpship”!) and a Beagle named Buddy. She is a self-published author, whose family introduced her to the possibilities of e-book publishing.

A Road to Count My Days By is a book of poetry. She was looking over them one day and discovered that she had plenty to publish into a book. Rather than have them collect virtual dust in a document folder, she decided to share them instead. This book was released in October of 2013 on Amazon for Kindle readers. She is currently trying to get it available in print as well.

The first piece in the book, Falling Into My Dreams, “opens with an invitations for the other to lose herself in her own dreams, where she will find comfort, and perhaps save a bit of herself.” She hopes to inspire comfort, and hope, and let her readers know that they’re not alone. One Kindle reviewer comments, “A delightful read. I liked this book from the moment I looked at the cover. The author’s vivid observations lead to questions of existence and introspection… …the feeling you get is along the lines of ‘Ah, I am not alone.’” (Amazon review) A Road to Count My Days By currently holds an Amazon 5* rating.

Elora continues to write poems and may eventually release another compilation of her work. She’s also writing her first novel, a romantic comedy about a young woman who wants to escape the rut of trying to survive in the world of part-time jobs and increasingly high living expenses. She’s also working on book one of a trilogy, The Nelessar Legends.

Another book by Elora is called Eloise (a short story): “Day in, day out, the past follows one girl on every side. But not at night. Eloise is the role that defines the longings of her heart. But when Eloise is taken away…the glass structure of her sanity is fractured…” (Taken from Amazon description). This book is rated 5*.

 

Elora says marketing is difficult for her, as she realizes that “poetry is a small, tough market.” But she welcomes teaming up with others and has learned that, even if a relationship with another author, for example, doesn’t net any extra sales, the networking alone is worth it to her. She can be found on GoodReads, in their “I poetry” group, and many others. You can find her on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Elora-Carmen-Shore/e/B00n6H2AOJM/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1 , her blog: http://elorashorependragon.blogspot.com , on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/elora.shore , on Google+ https://plus.google.com/u/0/107132215954495827545/about and on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/elora-shore/82/237/456 .

 

**Disclaimer: This interview is not an endorsement of the book in question, as I haven’t read it and can’t vouch for its contents.**

Worse Than Writer's Block!

I've recently become aware of something that could potentially damage myself as a writer, more than likely a side-effect of the chemotherapy I've recently endured. It's something that I'm not sure medical science can fix or repair, and I'm not sure if I myself can do anything about, except for just watching closely for it to occur and correcting it when it does.

I've discovered that I have some type of writing disorder. Oh, I've not been diagnosed with it by a medical doctor, but if it hadn't been for my new-found writing career, I may not have ever noticed it. I was just typing a post on one of my social media networks, and I typed the word many as "namy", which of course my computer's spell checker alerted me to. This was when I began to think back about numerous other times I've done something similar in the past few months. I thought about all the times I'd written the word with the correct letters, but oftentimes in the wrong order.

I guess this goes hand in hand with the times when I'm either speaking or writing where I have to stop and think for a good long time about the word I'd intended to use. Often, it's on the tip of my tongue (or my fingers), and I just can't pull it out of my brain as fast as my hands can type. Sometimes, I never can come up with the word and I'll have to go ask someone, "What do you call it when [fill in the blank]?". I remember recently I was trying to use the phrase, "Sometimes a spade is just a spade," and I just couldn't pull out that last word! I finally had to ask my family, "Sometimes a spade is just what? As in something that is exactly what it appears to be?" It was dad who finally came up with the end word of the phrase.

At first I thought this might be a type of dyslexia, but I've read a little about that and it seems that dyslexia is more of a reading and learning disorder. Whatever it is has made me curious enough to bring it up to my doctor the next time I see him. It may simply be that there's a misfiring of sorts going on between my brain (that says type the word many) and my fingers (which ends up typing the word "namy" instead). Today isn't really the first time I've noticed this, and it seems to occur more often when I'm typing on the laptop with both hands, as opposed to when I'm typing on my phone screen using only my thumbs.

As a writer, I've never relied completely on the technology of the spelling or grammar checker that comes with word processing software on a computer. Often, I ignore some of the grammar suggestions it makes because I actually intended to say what I typed. Sometimes, whether in novels or non-fiction, we tend to use poor grammar, for example, in a dialogue (using less formal language lets the dialogue seem more believable), and we don't need it to change. I've always been a stickler for proper spelling and grammar myself; I even have difficulty not capitalizing names, for instance, in web addresses, or using text or Twitter shorthand. So I've relied more on my own knowledge of proper grammar to get me where I am today.

With this kind of condition, I'm going to have to watch myself even more closely. Generally speaking, my computer alerts me to spelling errors even when I'm posting to Facebook, or writing a post here. And that's a good thing that it does; it has caught me several times transposing letters in a word. But I don't want to get into the habit of letting my computer do all the work for me. Sometimes the spell check won't alert you; in other words, if you had typed the word "if" but left off the letter "I", it would be nothing but a letter f. So you can see why it's important to have human eyes to help you edit and proofread your work. Often a fresh set of eyes will catch a typo like mentioned above, where your eyes (because you wrote it) may well just skip clean over it!

I'm by no means suggesting that you turn off your grammar and spell check on your computer software. Absolutely, use it in your writing. But just take what it tells you with a grain of salt, and if you can get someone else to proof your work, by all means, go for it! As indie authors, we often can't afford to hire the services of a professional editor, but there are other ways to get your work edited. If you know other authors, offer to exchange editing for editing. You send them a chapter or two for them to look over, and you do the same for them. Maybe you can even find readers in your area who would do it for you, and you could email them an excerpt that you'd like edited. Even if you don't change to their suggestions, it will make you stop and take a look at your writing from another perspective, and that will help to improve your writing.

Writing is a Work in Progress, and that process doesn't have to stop at the printing press. As indie authors using a print-on-demand service like CreateSpace, or digital services like Amazon's KDP or Smashwords, we have full control over our work and how it looks. I've already released 2nd editions of all my books, print and Kindle versions. The changes I made weren't to the book content (except for a couple spelling errors), but were purely cosmetic, such as page number styles and location, working table of content hyperlinks in the Kindle versions, and so on. I'm continually striving to make my writing be the best it can be.



Cover Art for Audiobook
 

And I'm going to use this post as a way to introduce the cover art for my audiobook version of Once Upon a Western Way, just started in production today! I'm using the same castle as I did on the 2nd edition print cover. Mind you, the requirements for the cover art on ACX is that the picture be square, unlike that of CreateSpace or KDP, where the art has to be rectangular, taller than it is wide. I've always loved the castle photo for this story, as it's told during a time of kings and queens and royalty. It's the same image I used when I originally published this book with Smashwords in 2012, and when I first worked up the cover for it at CreateSpace, I couldn't get the resolution quite good enough, so I chose the cover I used for the 1st edition. Now, I'm glad that my 2nd edition has the castle image again. It always was close to my heart!


The Other Side of Me

I don't usually post twice in one day. In fact, I don't think I've ever done so. And I certainly don't want to take the spotlight off my featured authors (I had one blog tour post today and will have one of my regular featured author posts tomorrow.)! But, I've been sitting here watching the movie Regarding Henry with Harrison Ford, and I just felt absolutely compelled to write a post.

I literally broke out in tears when I watched the scene where Henry and Bradley (the physical therapist) were sitting in Henry's kitchen drinking a beer. Bradley told the story of how he hurt his knees and told Henry to ask him if he minded having bad knees. The moral of the story, of course, is that Bradley would have never become a physical therapist if he hadn't hurt his knees playing football, and so never would have met Henry, and so on and so forth. And then Bradley tells Henry not to listen to anyone else tell him who he is, that he'll figure that out himself, eventually.

Before June 27, 2014, I was Henry. I was a hugely busy, type A personality, always challenging myself physically and mentally to be the best that I could be. Likely a result of my poor self-esteem; I was always trying to be better (not even really knowing who I wanted to be better than, or FOR who). And like Henry, disaster struck rapidly in my life.

For me, the tragedy was cancer. At 37 years old, a diagnosis of cancer sounded like a death sentence to me and my family. The fact that I had to be hospitalized alone so far away from home for my treatments didn't help any. And over eight months of intensive treatments, some of which almost took my life, I've returned home to begin my journey to figure myself out.

I'm no longer strong enough to return to my before cancer job (I was a manager at an auto parts store, requiring lifting, moving, and sometimes installing heavy parts, climbing up and down ladders, and so on), and I may never return there. I have good days but I have bad days too. The post-chemotherapy fungal infection that took nearly a year to treat has left scar tissue deep in my organs, and this scarring causes intense pain, sometimes preventing me from taking a full breath. I'm still underweight, still get chilled easily, and don't sleep well. I have a constant ringing in my ears, the thundering sound of a thousand cicadas. This is part of who I am now.

But ask me if I mind having suffered through cancer. Because you know what? I'm learning that I really don't! After all, had I not been sick with cancer, my dear friend Denise Mercer Blackwell might not have friended me on Facebook. If that hadn't happened, I may have never published in print. (I'd already published Once Upon a Western Way through Smashwords in April of 2012, and it was only available digitally.) Had I not been encouraged to publish by Denise, I likely wouldn't have written my other two books (My Butterfly Cancer certainly wouldn't exist if I'd not had cancer), or even started this blog, which has come a long way in a short time. I wouldn't have had the time if I still had my "regular" job to go to.

So, here I am, with you, my readers. I'm still learning who I am now, and at times I have a hard time letting go of the woman I used to be. Sure, I'm not a best-seller (though no one can know the future), and I don't expect to be a best-seller. But stories are written to be told or read, and as long as I know I have readers out there, I'll keep doing what I'm doing. I love writing! I love reading, too! Eventually, I'll learn to love the woman I am now!