Illness as transformative experience

We suggest that serious illness is a transformative experience and that Paul's framework usefully characterises central aspects of it. First, illness is epistemically transformative: it teaches the ill person what it is like to receive a diagnosis; what it is like to experience new symptoms. It teaches the ill person what it is like to cope with severe ill health and life-limiting symptoms, or to undergo medical procedures, such as general anaesthetic and surgery. It can also reveal to the ill person, if the prognosis is poor, what it is like to be confronted with one's death in an immediate and pressing manner.