Two Pieces of Lettuce

My theory on why people don't get what it means to not be able to do anything except eat and shower (and occasionally spend a few minutes surfing the Web or blogging), is related to how people on a diet say they only ate two pieces of lettuce for lunch and that's the only thing they ate all day. Meaning they also ate two bowls of ice cream for dessert and a piece of pie. Or they had chips and several sodas between meals. And some cookies. Which is a whole lot different from actually eating only two pieces of lettuce in a day.

In everyday parlance, sometimes people say they haven't done anything all day or all week, but really, not doing anything actually means, they went to work, ran errands, cooked, ate, showered, sat around, talked on the phone, read some magazines, surfed the Web, painted their toenails, watched TV, listened to music, paid bills, and did yoga.

Not being able to do anything except eat and shower, in the context of describing illness or disability, is literal. Ie. eat, shower, and nothing else. Scratch out all the stuff in between. Not comprehending the literal meaning, is a perplexing case of not being able to imagine the literal meaning because one is putting too much imagined stuff around the words being communicated.

In addition, the description of lying in bed doing nothing. Sometimes people mean they were actually lying in bed watching TV, movies, reading books and magazines, listening to music or radio, and sitting in bed typing on their laptops. So much that people almost never imagine what it literally means.

So when trying to explain to the GP, I tried explaining many times that I meant completely literally and adding "like a 90-year old in a nursing home," but that still didn't work, because he wasn't taking it literally nor imagining a 90-year old in a nursing home. I think some of the CFS disability assessment forms that I sent him finally helped a little. They spell it out a little more, like itemizing some of the basic things the person can not do, except that it's not possible to spell out every infinite item that a person can and can not do.

I'm confusing myself as to whether the misunderstandings are caused by too much or too little imagination. I'm concluding that the imagined extras are not actually due to imagination, but due to assumptions. And assumptions are often due to lack of imagination.