Crystal,
I understand. There is a huge difference between getting sick as an adult after a life of normally good health (shock, pain, suffering, denial...) and having grown up sick and in a hospital.
Does it make us a funny sort of egocentric where our lives are centered around ourselves and our illnesses.? Maybe.
Is it that we are used to every single adult asking us about our health, intake, output, digestion, sleep...the list just goes on...so we are not comfortable when it is not 'about us and our disease'?
I don't know...not sure if there is a rule or not...But yes, we are very special.
There was a big scandal about 'nepotism' here (the hiring and promoting of close family members in a business or government)...everyone seemed shocked by it but me.
I found it somewhat normal. You understand better than others what you know or experienced as a child, at the dinner table listening to parents speaking, going into work with them etc.
If your parents had a printer's shop, printing press etc and you grew up hanging around it then it would be most natural for you to either want to 'carry on the family business' or go into something similar...like literature or book editing. It is what you know and therefore you have an advanced understanding compared to someone who 'just decided to get into it'.
As a patient, who grew up in a hospital, 'it is what you know'...what you understand...your references. BP, I.V., anesthesia, surgery...none of these things scare you because you understand them and have lived through them...they make sense to you where the rest of the world may not.
I feel scared and uncomfortable in a nightclub, do not do well in a huge stadium for a game or a concert or camping...I need my comfort zone...bathrooms close by with running water, toilets with clean seats, proximity to a hospital etc.
I do not get the jokes that a lot of people make or laugh at the 'stupid ones' when they use toilet humor...
That makes me different and often an outcast...but I am also the more sensitive one who people call in an emergency, who sees the 'signs' before the stroke or heart attack happen because I know what to look for...over sensitive or just 'used to it'?
So, do not feel bad about feeling more at ease in a hospital than a ballroom...But...And this is a big but...not feeling any emotions whatsoever is not a good thing...you may have had to turn them off in order to deal with what life was throwing at you...or buried them deep to face life but hopefully they are somewhere down there...hiding and waiting to thaw out.
Friends who can understand, talk therapy, group therapy or just a good friend can often help you get past the 'numbness' and into the flow of 'normal' (whatever that means).
In the meantime...I watch Grey's reruns, Dr House and Bones...
Sharon