Turn
Your Sickness Into an Asset
By
LOUIS E. BISCH, M.D., Author of “Be
Glad You’re Neurotic”
Only yesterday you were marching in health and vigor, sickness was a
far-off shadow. Then suddenly illness
unhinged your knees, brought you limply to bed. And now you are a horizontal citizen of sickroom, an unwilling
initiate into the fellowship of pain.
Your reaction is to rail fretfully against fate, to
recent bitterly such untimely interference with life’s routine. Yet your illness can confer substantial
benefits—and not just in the realm of job-like piety, either. An enforced holiday in bed blamelessly
releases us from a too busy world, sharpens our mental and spiritual
perceptions, and permits a clearer perspective on our lives. An illness should be regarded as an
opportunity to gather dividends and generate energies that mere health cannot
possibly bestow.
I am not speaking of those chronic sufferers whose
illness dooms them to a life of invalidism, and whose heroic readjustments lift
them above the rank of ordinary men.
The American historian Francis Parkman is a triumphant prototype of all
such conquerors of pain. During the great
part of his life, Parkman suffered so acutely that he neither could nor work
for more than a half hour at a time.
His eyesight was so wretched that he could scrawl only a few gigantic
words on a manuscript. He was racked by
major digestive trouble, crippling arthritis and agonizing headaches. Physically, everything was wrong with him,
yet he contrived to write nearly 20 magnificent volumes of history.
But our interest here centers on the ordinary mortal
stricken less harshly. These
sic-chamber casuals rarely learn to make the most of illness, regarding it only
as a visitation of bad luck. Yet
thousands actually have found themselves for the first time during
sickness. The ‘beloved physician,’ Dr.
Edward Livingston Trudeau, was sent, as a young doctor, to the mountains, where
he expected to die of tuberculosis. But
he did not die. As he lay in bed he had
a vision of a great hospital where he could rebuild other sufferers. Flat on his back at times, he examined
patients not as ill as himself. He
raised money and labored until his dream became the great sanatorium at Saranac
Lake, New York, that helped thousands of tuberculosis patients. Trydeay’s affection turned an unknown doctor
into a physician of worldwide fame.
Engene O Neill was an utter drifter with no plan of
life until he was 25. A serious
illness, tuberculosis, gave him the requisite leisure, he said later, “to
evaluate the impressions of many years in which experiences had crowded one
upon the other, with never a second’s reflection.” It was in the sanatorium that had he first began to write his
plays.
Like any other major experience, illness actually
changes us. How? Well, for one thing we are temporarily
relieved from the pressure of meeting the world head-on. Responsibility melts away like snow on an
April roof; we don’t have to catch trains, tend babies of wind clocks. We enter a realm of introspection and
self-analyses. We think soberly,
perhaps for the first time, about our past and future. Former values are seen to be fallacious,
habitual courses of action appear weak, foolish or stubborn. Illness gives us that rarest thing in the
world—a second chance, not only at health but also at life itself!
Illness knocks a lot of nonsense out of us; it
induces humility, cuts us down to size.
It enables us to throw a searchlight upon our inner selves and to discover
how often we have rationalized our failures and weaknesses, dodged vital issue
and run skulkingly away. Mistakes made
in our jobs, marriage and social contacts stand out clearly. When we are a bit scared the salutary effect
of sickness is particularly marked. For
only when the way straitens and the gate grows narrow do some people discover
their soul, their God, their life work.
Florence Nightingale, too ill to move from her bed
reorganized the hospitals of England.
Semi-paralyzed, and under the constant menace of apoplexy, Pasteur was
tireless in his attack on disease.
Innumerable illustrations might be cited. And the testimony from humbler sources is just as striking. A young man in a hospital for two weeks
discovered that he had always wanted to be a research worker in chemistry. Until then he had been ‘too busy’ as a drug
salesman. Today he is making a splendid
to of his new job. While recuperating
from scarlet fever, a woman in her 40s vanquished the terrors she had felt
about approaching middle life. “I am
not going to return to my former state of feeling superfluous,” she
resolved. “My children are married and
can take care of themselves. I’m going
to start a millinery shop and make then like it.” She did, and needless to say, they do.
In talking with patients, I find that many who have
sojourned in “the pleasant land of counterpane” say that for the first time
they learned the true meaning of friendship, often undecipherable in the
complex pattern of this modern world.
They say also that they discovered secret depths of their own
life-stream. “After a few days in bed,
“writes one of them, “Time becomes an unimagined luxury. Time to thin, time to enjoy, time to create,
time at last to express the best and deepest part of human nature. Illness is one of the great privileges of
life; it whispers that man’s destiny is bound up with transcendental
powers. Illness pares and lops off the
outer parts of life and leaves one with the essence of it.”
Even pain confers spiritual insight, a beauty of
outlook, a philosophy of life, an understanding and forgiveness of humanity—in
short, a quality of peace and serenity—that can scarcely be acquired when we
are in good health. Suffering is a
cleansing fire that chars away triviality and restlessness. Milton declared, “Who best can suffer, best
can do.” The proof is his ‘Paradise
Lost’ written after he was stricken blind.
In illness you discover that your imagination is
more active than it ever has been; unshaken by petty details of existence, you
daydream, build air castles, make plans.
As your physical strength returns, your fantasies are not dulled; rather
they become more practical, and you definitely decide upon the things you will
put into action when you recover.
Your concentration improves tremendously. You are astonished to find how easly you can
think a difficult problem through to its solution. Why? Because your instincts
of self-preservation are speeded up, and nonessentials are eliminated. It is interesting, too, that your reactions
to what you see and hear are more acute.
A robin at the window, a fleeting expression on a friend’s face, are
delicately savored as memorable experiences.
Illness sensitizes you; that is why you may be irritable. You may even weep at the least provocation. But this sensitivity should be turned to
better uses. Now is an excellent time
to develop yourself along a special line, to read widely of to create orginal
ideas. Contrary to an old belief, a
sick body does not necessarily make a sick mind, except in those who try to
make their illness an excuse of laziness.
No one honestly can use an ordinary illness as an excuse for
ineffectualness.
If you have never been sick, never lost so much as a
day in bed—then you have missed something!
When your turn comes, don’t dismayed.
Remind yourself that suffering may teach you something valuable,
something that you could not have learned otherwise. Possibly it may change for the better the entire course of your
life. You and those around you will be
happier if you can look upon any illness as a blessing in disguise, and wisely
determine to make the most of it. You
can turn your sickness into an asset.
