The Limits of Human Emotions

Yesterday I found myself feeling cheerful. A very strange thing, how can one possibly feel cheerful when the life of one’s child is hanging from a thread? At the time I was walking over to the McD house to move some stuff around and this gave me some time to ponder the subject. It struck me that if one considers that Quality of Life can be measured on a scale of 0 – 10, where 10 represents the very best things that we can experience and 0 the very worst, then the “reach” of human emotions (or maybe just my emotions) is about 3 wide.

In other words, it’s possible to be (very) unhappy while having essentially a very good Quality of Life (“money doesn’t buy happiness”), but equally it’s possible to be cheerful when Quality of Life couldn’t be worse. This theory also explains why it’s so difficult for me to tell people how I feel. In normal life (eg Quality of Life 5), someone might ask how I feel and my reply might be “tired”. But in our current circumstances ( QoL +/- 0), the same word “tired” refers to a depth/sort of tiredness that is entirely other.

I’m not doing a very good job of explaining myself. Let me try to put it differently. In the past I’ve had panic attacks, usually business related, usually at 3am. They tend to feel like being electrocuted by mains voltage and usually the primary effect lasts maybe 5 minutes. I’ve had periods of huge stress that have lasted maybe an hour or so and I’m able to recognize the symptoms. In the last days I’ve had panic attacks and I’ve had periods of huge stress. The thing that I’ve noticed is that the feelings and the effects that go with them are no stronger than in the past when I’ve had them for other reasons. The major difference is the frequency of the attacks, not the intensity. So my conclusion is that, at least as far as stress and panic attacks go, I have reached (and thoroughly explored) the limit of my ability to respond.

But this is not necessarily what I’d expected. With my child on the edge of death I’d expected to feel more intense emotions. With my child on the edge of death, I’d never expected to feel cheerful. And this leads me to conclude that we (or maybe just me) have a quite limited capability to emotionally respond to our circumstances. I’d always thought that our feelings would run proportional to our circumstances so it’s a big surprise to discover that that is not the case. Also, it kind of leads me to feel that I’m short changing Kay, that the fear of losing her is actually not greater than other extreme fears that I’ve had in the past, whilst the circumstances are far worse than anything I’ve ever encountered. But I guess that that’s compensated by the frequency of the panic and stress attacks.

There’re other consequences too. We have been talking quite a bit to the mother of a child who’s in the IC for a serious but not life threatening problem. I have often seen the mother, for whom I have a lot of respect, with tears in her eyes struggling not to breakdown during the last days. I’ve felt quite a few times like pointing out to her that she has no reason to be in tears, her kid is going to be out of here and fine. But of course, while her circumstances are better than ours, she’s at the lower extremity of her emotional response, which puts her into the same bracket as us emotionally whilst being in an entirely different league circumstantially. A damn good reason not to chastise her.

Anyway, Kay’s room is now full of “white people” (Kay's words) who have come to do the procedure on her lungs. I need to pay attention. And I need to be prepared for another round of massive stress and potential panic attacks.