Caring for People With Medically Unexplained Symptoms: Kron's "Well"

Do you need to permission to be ill even when you have a brain tumour? A Year to Live, A Year to Die tells the difficult story of Stewart Selman and his wife, Rebecca Peterson, who cared for him. We pick up the story after Stewart's catastrophic diagnosis of a brain tumour. Rebecca admits that there were low-points during which she threatened to send Stewart away because of his behaviour.

The juxtaposition of compassion, grief, anger and love in A Year to Live, A Year to Die will be familiar to many carers. This may be particularly true for people who are caring for someone who does not have permission to be ill. Both the caregiver and the person with the medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) live with ambiguity and uncertainty. They may be caught in a dispute with employers, medical advisers, or benefit assessors because they lack the 'legitimacy' of a diagnosis. It is possible that the burden of this ambivalence adds to the impact of the severity of the symptoms. It is a common finding in research literature that people with MUS have more negative views about their symptoms and the impact that these have had on their lives than do patients with a clearly defined and potentially disabling medical condition.