A talented artist in his premature 60s, the patient was a liver transplant candidate who learned he had hepatitis B some 20 years previous. Even though the degeneration fatigue that accompanied his liver failure, he threw himself into preparing for his transplant. He read everything he could about the procedure and the postoperative care, drilled doctors with endless questions and continued to drag himself to the gym each day in the hopes of being better prepared to withstand the rigors of the operation.
The only reservation that he mentioned was the same one all the other patients had — he feared that death would come before the perfect organ.
But during one visit just before he finally got the transplant, he confessed that he had been grappling with another concern, one so overwhelming he had even considered withdrawing from the waiting list. He worried that he would not be strong enough mentally and physically to survive a transplant.
In desperation, he told me, he had contacted several patients who had already undergone a transplant. “That’s what made me believe I’d be O.K.,” he said. “You doctors have answered all of my questions, but what I really needed was to hear the stories about transplant from people like me.”
“We learn through the above stories, and we use them to make sense of our lives. It’s a natural extension to think that we could use stories to improve our health.”
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