The doctor didn’t say it unkindly. He was matter-of-fact about it, the way doctors are when they’ve had to say a hard thing enough times. “Your heart isn’t functioning as it should.”
Unfortunately for me, my doctor was a bit of an idiot and told me to look on Dr Google to find out more about heart failure. While on the phone with him, I mentioned that Dr Google said that 50% of people DIE within ONE YEAR of being diagnosed. He agreed it was possible, and told me to write my will.
My daughter was three months old. I was thirty. A few weeks later, I became a single mum.
I sat staring at my kiddo for an hour while crying, and then picked up a notebook and wrote a bucket list.
Not because I was in denial or pretending the diagnosis wasn’t real. I wrote it because something in me understood, with unignorable clarity, that the story wasn’t over – it hadn’t even begun, and that if I gave up or let someone else write the ending, I’d never forgive myself.
Use the free resource at the bottom of this page: ‘Bucket List Starter Kit’ to begin your journey as I did mine.
What Medicine Gets Wrong
There’s a particular kind of cruelty built into the way serious illness is communicated. It’s not intentional – most clinicians are doing their best inside systems that have almost no time for nuance, but the effect is that they hand people a prognosis and, without meaning to, hand them a ceiling.
“Make arrangements”
“Get your affairs in order”
“Manage your expectations”
These phrases do something very specific to the human mind. They collapse the future and shrink the hope of possibility to the size of what the statistics can currently measure. Statistics describe populations, not people. That research I had seen on Dr Google was based on a decades old study, predominantly on elderly people with pre-existing comorbidities, and before the advances in medicine had made such an impact on prognosis.
No scan, ejection fraction reading, or cardiology letter has ever captured what a specific person will do with what they’re given. Medicine can describe what has happened to bodies like yours, but it has no framework at all for who you are as a person.
What I was never told – what nobody in that system was equipped to tell me, is that the story you tell yourself about a diagnosis can shape your recovery just as much as the treatment you receive. Not in a magical manifestation way, but in a concrete, neurological, behavioural way.
The narrative you accept determines the actions you take. The actions you take determine what becomes possible.
The List
The first bucket list I wrote was scrappy, written in a cheap spiral-bound notebook. Some of it was absurd given my circumstances. I was a working single mother in heart failure, with no money, a prognosis of dying within one year, and a three-month-old baby…but absurd felt important. I needed to reach past the edges of the limits I was given. I had to be here for my child.
I wrote that I wanted a house, a car, a dog…honestly, it was all the things society told me I should want. None of my original bucket list was aligned with my values.
Year-on-year, I update my list (I still do now). I don’t write new years resolutions – I update my list. My guide to life. Only now, it’s an organised and intentional document that I spend time on and get truly excited by.
Over the years, I listed the countries I wanted to travel to and why. I wrote: speak somewhere that matters, write something people will still be reading after I’m gone, help people who are going through what I’ve been through, work for myself. I wrote things I’ve since crossed off, and things I’m still working toward.
I wasn’t being naively optimistic. I knew my heart was damaged. I still know it. I have an ICD and wires permanently screwed into to my heart, a device that will shock my heart back into rhythm if it decides to muck around. This isn’t an article about refusing to accept reality. It’s a article about choosing which reality to organise your life around.
I have now been to fifteen countries, spoken at Parliament, published a best-selling book, won an award for my advocacy, owned a business, worked with over 100 brands as a creator, and coached people who have told me I helped them get back up and find themselves again. None of that was in the prognosis. All of it was on the list.
What’s Actually Happening
In NLP (a field I’ve trained and work in), there is a concept called presuppositions: hidden assumptions embedded in the way we communicate that shape what we believe is possible – before we’ve consciously thought about it. When a doctor tells you to get your affairs in order, the presupposition is that this needs to happen imminently. Unless you actively interrupt it, this framing becomes the map you navigate by.
My bucket list was an unintentional interruption that allowed myself to hope. To believe in continuation. It presupposed a future of chapters that needed filling, not a book that needed closing.
In a nutshell, you can’t plan a route to a destination you don’t believe exists.
When I listed the countries I wanted to travel to and the challenges I wanted to achieve, I wasn’t being reckless. I was giving my brain a direction and hope.
One of the most psychologically damaging things about serious illness (or any major adversity) is the loss of the sense that your choices matter. The diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment plan you’re given are all from outside. Everything happens to you. My bucket list was the first thing I did that happened from me.
The Reframe
To be clear, my bucket list didn’t save my life – medicine did (with significant collateral damage to my body and sense of self), but I’m not here to tell you that positive thinking cures anything, although it definitely helps.
The bucket list saved something else – the shape of my life.
I’ve come to understand that a prognosis is a professional’s best estimate of what tends to happen to bodies in your condition. It says almost nothing about what your individual body will do, or who you will become in the time you do have.
The doctor gave me a ceiling. My bucket list removed it.
The question worth asking yourself isn’t whether your circumstances are hard. Of course they are. The question is whether you are treating this as the ending that it isn’t?
A diagnosis. A redundancy. A relationship that collapsed. A door that closed. We consider these things as conclusions. Sometimes they are, but often (more often than we allow ourselves to believe), they are not the ending, but the place where the interesting part of your story begins.
Your bucket list is not a mindset hack. It’s a decision, made once and then remade every day, that you are not done yet.
Now
My daughter is a little older now – home educated, diagnosed with ADHD and Autism, and the best kiddo in the world! She has never known a version of me that wasn’t living with multiple disabilities, wasn’t facing systemic discrimination or single parenthood, wasn’t managing the particular exhaustion of a compromised heart and nervous system, or wasn’t calculating energy vs output so we can experience life on another level.
She also has never known a version of me that stopped making the list.
Maybe you’ve been handed something that felt like an ending…but you don’t have to accept the ceiling.
Are you ready to write your list? Use this free resource to begin your journey:
Thank you so much for reading. I hope this post helped you in some way. Let me know your thoughts.
Best wishes, Sarah
About the Author
An award-winning advocate, former SEND and mainstream teacher, Ward Panel Chair, and AuDHD parent, Sarah Withers brings a rare dual perspective of lived experience and professional expertise to help people build a life they love through mindset changes. She has contributed insights to policy, spoken internationally, and works to transform understanding into action and empowerment.
