HW 18 - Health & Illness & Feasting

    So my Thanksgiving experience Health wise was honestly just as unhealthy as just as everybody else's. An excess amount of carbohydrates from the biscuits and mash potatoes and stuffing. The massive amounts of tryptophan from the turkey that knocks you out into the biggest food coma all year round. So my family pretty much loves to embrace the holiday spirit of unhealthy eating habits of the traditional Thanksgiving rituals. But besides the feasting the immediate health of my was overall good because everyone seems to have lost weight and just overall seemed in a better mood. As well I feel  the good mood was attributed to my little nephew whom had his first Thanksgiving at only a the first few months of his life. I believe that because of Leo my family got along a lot better then they use to have.

    Illness during my Thanksgiving Experience really didn't have a threshold at all on my family. The only person whom is really sick in my family is my aunt whom had a small form of cancer but is successfully beating it and my Grandfather on my mothers side whom is fighting breathing problems and a bad knee from complications of smoking and old age. But since my grand mother and grand father don't get along well they go to separate parts of my families Thanksgivings. This year my Grandfather went to my other aunts Thanks giving feast rather than ours and my Grandmother went to ours. Of course we love our sick family members but we know now that at the moment they are in good conditions so we really don't stress heavily over their possibility of dying because it is highly unlikely.

HW 17 - First Thoughts On the Illness & Dying Unit.

    Personally I have a very unhappy relationship with the topic of Illness & Dying but I do not wish to unravel that mesh of stories right now. Although I'm willing to discuss what I have been taught since my youth about Illness & Dying. I've been taught that Illness is a bad thing and it must be treated very seriously especially in my family. Whenever anyone gets sick even the slightest bit we all do our best to help that person get better as soon as possible. Attention, care, time, and any amount of money required will automatically be found and used to assist that member in my family to get better whenever they are ill. Thats just the way I grew up and it will never change, at least I think so. As for Dying it's a touchy topic for my family. Like any other family in America whenever anyone dies in our family there's an immediate funeral and celebration of their life to and a last chance to honor their life and create remembrance.

    I believe the social norms of Illnesses & Dying are as follows; you get ill we try to make you better, if you die we bury you and have a funeral to honor and remember you; to me the social norms are as simple as that. My own family's approach to these aspects in life is that they take them in and try to make them better by attempting to take better care of each other and trying to further celebrate our lost loved ones through funerals and wakes. As for some unusual perspectives I have about being sick and/or dying are that the actual action of dying is unusual to me. Think about dying period, people die every day but can you really understand it? A life, someone's life just up and ending, can you imagine it, could you endure it? How can people live with the fact everyday that any of us could die at any moment? This is what I find unusual, how death is constantly at our door step and we just accept it in life and attempt to live on like everything is going to be fine. But eventually until that fateful judgment day it won't be. The abrupt act of death is a roll of the dice to me that I believe nobody wants to drop.