“What if I had missed an important consideration – that Mrs. S just wasn’t quite ready to accept her diagnosis? Denial is a complex coping mechanism – a universal emotion that almost anyone reading this has dealt with – and which may play a much larger part in people’s ability to understand their own illness than we appreciate.”
Was she aware, he wondered, that she was possibly nearing the last year or two of her life (repeat heart failure admissions do, in fact, predict mortality4)? “I then wondered – maybe it was not a failure to explain on the part of her medical teams, but her own difficulty with acceptance that she was quite sick.”
