This is the fourth post in our series on the five stages of grief model

A natural response to receiving a devastating diagnosis is bargaining. You may be wondering what that means. According to chosingtherapy.com, bargaining feelings can consist of:

• Anguish
• Shame or Guilt
• Self Loathing
• Anger
• Resentment
• Betrayal by a Higher Power
• Desperation
• Insecurity

Oftentimes, in this stage, one often tries to make deals with an unknown force to take reality away. Sometimes, we even make bargains with ourselves in hopes of changing reality. For instance, if I promise to do 20 hours of volunteer work every week for the rest of my life, this thing must go away. We can also see it in the desperation for a cure or a treatment. If I send this random internet person a load of money, they promise to cure what ails me. As you can surmise, this can be a dangerous place to be. All logic escapes us, as we bargain our way to a brighter future.

The sad fact is that no deal or bargain will remove Hypertrophic Olivary Degeneration or any chronic illness from us. This is a powerful stage of the grief model, because it will eventually lead us into depression. Upon realizing that there is no treatment or cure, only magical thinking, we will eventually come to grips with the fact that there is nothing to undo what has been done.

How Can I Use Bargaining to My Advantage?

Just as with all of the Stages of Grief, you can choose to use them to your advantage. Armed with knowledge of your health complication, you can still make deals with yourself to be in good health for as long as possible. This is a good place to set goals and intentions, and stick with them! A change of diet, a plan to exercise, a commitment to physical therapy are all healthy bargains. Maybe this is where you finally take serious the goal to be nicer to yourself and stick with it! If you are like me, you set an intention to be less rigid and be able to ‘go with the flow’ more in life. Maybe you are ready to reevaluate what is truly important to you and what is not worth fighting over.

Bargaining doesn’t have to be dangerous. If you are aware that con artists and hucksters take advantage of people in any of the stages of grief, but especially in bargaining, you are better armed to protect yourself from false cures and scams. It is truly a shame that some folks prey on the chronic illness and rare disease communities to extract their already limited supplies of resources in a particularly vulnerable time. Unfortunately, this is a way of life that has always existed. Better to arm yourself with facts from reputable sources than to fall for an expensive fairy tale.

Moving Forward

So, how can you move forward from bargaining? The first step is coming to really understand reality. Hence, depression following bargaining. One must come to terms with the fact that not every medical problem has an easy fix. HOD is not like strep throat. There is no magic pill or therapy that will reverse it or make it go on its merry way. At this point, you have a choice. Work with the HOD or work against it. It is completely up to you how you choose to move forward. HOD has made its choice, and it chose to be stuck with you for the duration.

As we have mentioned before, these stages may or may not be a linear or cyclical path for you. Each person deals with grief differently. However, we are addressing each stage as it appears in the graphic above. Our next stop will be at depression. We have yet to meet a single person who enjoys talking about or living through depression. However, it is an important piece of the puzzle that must be discussed.