Why Me? Life After an Accident or a Disease

By Ximena Tiscareño

Many people confronted with a health loss often find themselves pondering the question: Why me? Unfortunately, the most accurate —at times—, saddest and most painful response is that there are no answers to what transpired. Thus, one embarks on a challenging journey towards acceptance.
Based on true stories, Why me? is a book that reveals that, even in the absence of a direct answer, there is a meaning. It might unfold late, but rest assured, it will unfold. 
Why me? offers a glimpse into the experiences and challenges of individuals who have encountered health losses, compelling them to redefine their lives. Despite the adversity they faced, they underwent a rebirth and soared once more. The purpose of this book is to assist those navigating health losses or similar processes, providing them their own tools and empowering them to take flight once again.

 

Ximena Tiscareño. She pursued a career in psychology and has working experience on the clinical, investigation and educational areas. At present she is pursuing a doctoral degree in the field of health sciences. She has also studied mindfulness thoroughly across various meditative schools. Through them she finds a genuine mean of aiding herself and others to find their own well-being.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Galaxia Literaria
• Release date: Jan 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215976333

Book preview

Why is there a dragonfly on the cover?

There is a dragonfly on the cover of this book since this insect is a symbol of maturity, depth and transformation in the pursuit of self-fulfillment. Furthermore, this insect is an emblem of balance and inner strength, empowering yourself to overthrow false illusions and look beyond your limitations, so you can uncover yourself and reality in its authentic form.

This highlights how the dragonfly stands as the most fitting symbol to represent the entire journey that comprises health loss, a transformative experience that could be transformed into a process of self-fulfillment. Through this book I hope you, the reader, are able to convert your current experience into something positive and, whatever it might be, are able to soar once more.

Foreword

Scientific psychology provides the foundation of psychotherapy. Scientific reports are abstract and unemotional. Therefore, they largely remain pallid and lack being touching. When I once wrote in a paper that we became excited about our research findings, I received the feedback from a reviewer that scientists never get excited. However, we know from research on the vividness effect, that information that is vivid, concrete, dramatic, etc., is the kind of information that captures attention. Vivid information is more persuasive than abstract information and thus more likely to induce emotion, attitude, and behavioural changes. Particularly, if the information is narratively describing what happened to real people.

Ximena Tiscareno’s book tells the stories of people who have survived an accident or a severe disease. These people stand out because they managed not only to cope with but to master the challenges of the adversities they had experienced and move on to live a meaningful life. That includes the author herself. For her, writing the book served two purposes: First, to move on from what she had experienced, and second, to attempt to forge a new work path for herself. Listening to the stories of others with similar experiences is a powerful tool to achieve these purposes. The stories she collected helped Ximena find her way back to a meaningful and successful life. It is invaluable that she wrote down these stories and created a precious resource for many people giving them new orientation after blows of fate to gain courage and strength.

The title Why me? is a central question after having experienced an unpredictable accident or contracting a severe disease. This question is basically a cry for help in the face of one’s own helplessness and despair involving a loss of what Antonovsky called the sense of coherence. Sense of Coherence involves the perception of comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness. All this seems to be lost. Hearing the stories of other people with a similar fate cannot immediately remove one’s own burden but may help a person to regain comprehensibility of life, integrate and handle challenges and demands and eventually to make sense of the experience or disease. Not few people may then even report that they believe to have actually grown because of the experience of adversity.

The books aim is not to give an answer to the why. In therapy, a first step is frequently to overcome trying to find causes for something that happened and entailed far-reaching negative consequences. Rather, it is important to accept and look ahead to find new goals to pursue, goals that provide meaning. Story telling is one tool in clinical psychology that supports this process. Rather than telling people what to do the stories can aid in reorganizing a disturbed system by providing insights. Personal insights have a much stronger impact than any advice. Furthermore, hearing the stories of people who moved on with their lives in spite of severest adversities provides role models that not only give direction but also strengthen courage and confidence. The author is an excellent role model herself who after her own accident did not give up but successfully studied psychology, became a became a psychotherapist with personal knowledge that enabled her to write this formidable book.

The book could be described as a kind of written self support group. I consider it an invaluable opportunity for recovery from an experienced adversity. The recovery supported when reading the stories goes beyond healing injury or disease. This is to some degree reflected in the broad recovery perspective advocated by the World Health Organization in 2019. In this perspective recovery is addressed as a resource that promotes health and well-being. It involves gaining or recapturing meaning and purpose in life and self-determination, resulting in personal empowerment and resilience.

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Beckmann

Technical University of Munich

School of Medicine and Health

Munich, January 2024

Prologue

That afternoon I had a meal with some friends who I had not seen in a long time. I remember it was an uneventful afternoon: we had a good time, like friends who miss each other and who get closer by being apart. We ate, we talked and we parted ways bearing the weariness accumulated over the years that refuse to spare us during sleepless nights.

I recall coming home with a high spirit, lying down and promptly falling asleep. It was almost dawn when the sleep started having a touch of a nightmare. I woke up to go to the bathroom and, once the job was finished, I was not able to stand up anymore. I fell, confused and scared due to my sudden discovery: I was unable to make sense with my speech, as if my bewildered tongue sought to communicate in a new language already evolving in my head: the language of a maze.

Initially, my wife thought I had too much to drink at the reunion. However, after a while she discerned a more concerning situation. She was able to manage the cumbersome weight of my body and struggled to put me in the car. At that moment I was a burden, unable to do routine tasks that were once effortless such as walking, saying thank you or opening the car’s door.

Upon arriving to the hospital time became stretchable: each second seemed like an eternity and endless silence followed every question. Finally, we had an answer and we knew our nightmare was not bound by any schedule; I was having a cerebrovascular accident. From that moment on, and until today, our lives changed.

Seen through the lens of time, I recognize that the person I have become is more akin to the individual I once was—a figure my family and friends are able to identify. The rehabilitation journey was long and allowed me to see the prehistory of my life: I went from not being able to speak to be able to do it again, from not being able to walk to being able to do it; it felt like being a primitive man discovering fire and evolving over millennia. However, for some, I was just able to relearn how to walk and talk, similar to a baby.

Progress, in these cases, could be frustrating when we wish for the best possible results in the least amount of time: it is truly difficult for me to do what seems ridiculously basic to most people, however, each step for me is like the little big step of an astronaut on the moon. I am going to be able to, that is how I was raised as a child, it is not possible and I will not let the obstacles defeat me, even if those obstacles are inherent to who I am.

I now understand that if you have an initial setback you must persist until it goes well. It is true that overthrowing barriers, especially those that are invisible and are concealed in our beliefs could be complicated in the beginning, but we can always do it. We have two options all the time: having a bad time your whole life or having a good time; we can cry for five minutes, but in the next five we have the chance of rising, looking and moving forward. Life is very short to waste it being sad and the decision lies with us—getting used to the darkness or getting out to the light of day.

As aforementioned, a small achievement for us who have had a cerebrovascular accident is a big step, many times only perceived by ourselves. Therefore, it is important we are able to value the progress, no matter how insignificant it may seem to others and no matter how frustrating that difference in views may seem. Ultimately, it is easier to value things that we were not able to do a few months or a few years ago, to value what we previously had and recovered and to equilibrate what we have now.

Looking back, I agree with the main argument of Why me? In the context that you can do it, everything is possible if we have the option to restart because there is nothing more human than yearning for a second chance.

The situation can be really painful initially; nevertheless, there will always be something that makes us overcome this difficulty. While our ability to do activities might not be the same, perhaps we have to take a different approach and perseverance remains crucial.

Certainly: I would never have wanted this accident to happen to me. Ideally, one would wish to rewind and avoid such pain; however, we cannot erase history or erase our scars. All we can do is to comprehend that What happened has already happened. There is no way to change the past. There is nothing in going back, but a lot lies ahead.

Nonetheless, it is important to recognize all the effort and the progress one has had over time. Sometimes I have mourned what I lost with the accident; but what is boundless for me is that I am alive and next to my wife and children. The love and support of my family as well as the chance to still develop myself at work have helped me to move on, to be stronger and uplift. My family has been my main motivation; they joined me, wound with wound, pain with pain, but also hope with hope, faith with faith.

Occasionally I get angry for not being able to say what my head thinks or for not being able to express myself clearly because I am consistently having an inner short-circuit. However, beyond these limitations, it is important to lay out and ask yourself: I already have this, what is next? What am I going to do? Being able to recognize a new and improved start point has allowed me to work in the new goals I want to achieve.

It is uncertain how far it will go. My accident happened five years ago and I have made substantial progress. One changes over time, how much? Nobody knows, but the change continues. In this book, based on true stories, you will find life testimonies of people who have had similar accidents and they tell us their undertaken actions which have helped them change the narrative of their stories because something that I learned is that we cannot erase what happened and what we were, but we can for sure rewrite what we will be.

Guillermo Zubiaur Carmona

Director of Entertainment and Specials

Televisión Azteca

Introduction

This book is based on a series of stories of people who have had their life transformed due to an accident or a disease. These events arise unforeseen, inadvertently, without any forewarning and creating major physical and emotional wreckage such as that of a tsunami, a hurricane or an earthquake where the area destroyed is ourselves. The path each person has found to move on with their lives and change their gray picture to a bright scenario can be seen in these stories.

There is no recipe guiding us on how to move on with life after a debilitating accident or disease. Henceforth, it is important that you approach this book with the required discretion and discernment. Take from it what is useful for your growth and improvement and simply discard what you consider is not useful for you. Nevertheless, there are elements to help each person realize that what they are living through is not forever. While it is evident that both mood and physical state change, it is important to understand that each person has to live their story in a different way to rebuild their