Hiccups are bizarre, aren’t they? They seem to arrive completely out of the blue and can be the hardest thing to get rid of. In hindsight, they’re a blip on the radar, but as soon as we realise we have them – they’re annoying and become almost all we can focus on. But… we get through the episode.

Life, as it turns out, is full of hiccups. We call them hiccups, but they’re actually far worse. When diagnosed with a critical illness, we struggle to focus on anything else at the time and the feeling that we won’t be able to get through it can be overwhelming. Hardly an environment in which to thrive!

Now – add to this the stress of financial strain. Not a conducive combo for comfortable recovery…

Critical Illness Cover (CI) is a type of insurance that was specifically developed to reduce this financial strain. First created in our own country in 1983, it is now sold around the world.

If you suffer a severe health setback, this cover could help with unforeseen medical and life expenses. It’s profoundly useful and not too expensive.

So why do so few people use it?

We all have a bad habit of trying to avoid unpleasantness. Anything that’s considered bad – like a brush with death or being critically ill – is put into the box of ‘happens to other people’.

This is unfortunate, because nowadays most health problems that qualify as CI are not the end of the road, and it’s more common to survive them than not. If you’re told you have breast or prostate cancer today, chances are you have a 90 percent chance of recovering from that cancer.

This reduces things like cancer from the ‘end of the road’ to a ‘life hiccup’ – something that need not dilute your dreams and floor your future.

There are three methods to dealing with the reality of life’s hiccups:

  1. We can pretend they won’t happen to us
  2. We can live in fear that they may happen to us at any moment
  3. We can plan to deal with them in the strongest possible way and live our lives normally

At Wellsfaber, we help you choose number three, every time.

The real reason we need critical illness cover, that no one tells you about, is because of the way we humans view and process trauma.

Critical illness may not mean the loss of life, but it will certainly impact our lifestyle – it is the loss of life as we know it. Whether this is temporarily or permanently, it significantly increases the trauma of being critically ill. Being sick or having had our health fail us in a major way can detrimentally affect our psyche. The former extrovert may feel uncomfortable going out and meeting strangers, a chilled-out person may start to lie awake at night worrying. It’s a side effect of coming into contact with the uncontrollable in our own physical body – we long for security, peace-of-mind and safety.

What a good critical illness cover will do is ensure that life remains as close to unchanged as possible, allowing the space to process the trauma, and focus on recovery.

In the end, taking out critical illness cover is more than just a practical safety net. It’s moving into a wisdom that acknowledges that you are not, nor should be, expected to be invincible, that life is what happens when you make other plans, and that it’s possible to prepare for unpleasant possibilities without being negative.

So, do you really need Critical Illness Cover? Well… if you want the security to thrive, then we believe you do.