Personal Time: The Patient's Experience

4 January 2000 | Volume 132 Issue 1 | Pages 58-62

When a life-threatening or chronic disease is diagnosed, patients may find that their sense of time, the passage of days, and their view of the future are altered. Most of the time, people live in a sense of linear time, or kronos. When illness strikes, they may begin to spend more time in kairos, a sense of soul-satisfying time, such as the feeling one gets when walking on the seashore with a grandchild, working in the garden, or talking with friends over good food and wine. This article comments on two patients, one who explores kairos through a diary that documents her positive attitude toward coping with multiple sclerosis, and one, a young artist with Hodgkin disease, who explores his condition through 96 paintings of his experience of the disease. Rather than "the devouring tyrant of linear time," life can be seen in a circular fashion, the eternal braid of Hofstadter. Patients begin to see life more in terms of cycles of daily events, routines, and the change of seasons. Illness brings one "close to the bone" of the soul's needs, with a reappraisal of the journey of life as a continuous line, to life spread out on a landscape that includes the past and the future.

Author and Article Information

From Dalhousie Medical School, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Acknowledgments: The author thanks the Robert Pope Foundation for permission to publish the paintings of Robert Pope in this issue. He also thanks his wife, Janet, who has added many helpful comments and editing advice but who thinks it laughable that someone who is never on time would write on this subject.

Requests for Reprints: T. Jock Murray, MD, Dalhousie Medical School, Sir Charles Tupper Medical Building, Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4H7, Canada; jock.murray@dal.ca. For reprint orders in quantities exceeding 100, please contact the Reprints Coordinator; phone, 215-351-2657; e-mail, reprints{at}mail.acponline.org.