I’m sure I’ve done this in smaller, day-to-day ways before, but I can think of one time that I was in denial in a very big way.
I was 17 and very sick. I was trying to decide if I should start taking a new medication that could help me, but also had a scary list of possible side effects. I was scared and was procrastinating making the decision, and in the meantime I was getting sicker. Finally my gastroenterologist called up our house and basically said, “I’ve scheduled you a consultation with a colorectal surgeon. I think you need to hear what he has to say.”
I went to the appointment completely not understanding why I needed to go. The surgeon didn’t sugar-coat anything. He wanted to remove my entire colon. He said it was almost a certain fact that I was going to get colon cancer at some point in my life, and I was going to lose my colon then, if not now. I started crying, completely not understanding why he was saying all this morbid stuff. I did not think I was sick enough to be even considering surgery at that point.
I went home and chose pretend I had never had that consultation.
The one thing the consultation did accomplish, was I finally decided to try out the new medication. On it, I got well pretty fast. A doctor told me that this medication was very rarely a permanent fix. He referred to it as “the bridge to surgery.”
I chose to believe that the medication would work forever.
It wasn’t until I got really sick again a year and a half later, despite being on the meds, that I couldn’t choose to deny my situation anymore. Surgery was the only option I had left.