– by Wood Institute travel grantee Annemarie Jutel*
The moment a serious diagnosis is named marks a boundary. As Suzanne Fleischmann wrote: “It serves to divide a life into “before” and “after,” and this division is henceforth superimposed onto every rewrite of the individual’s life story” (p. 10). The power to cleave one’s sense of self in two is what Fleischmann referred to the “transformative power of the diagnosis.” The illustration accompanying this post paints a picture most of us can immediately recognise, so often the power of diagnosis is referred to in popular culture, in medical and patient accounts of illness.