The first time I read this I was angry at the author. The second time I thought I might have misunderstood: Maybe there is some sense to this. What do you think?

by Louis E. Bisch, MD. Author of "Be Glad You're Neutoric"

copyright 1937

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 the sickroom, an unwilling initiate in the fellowship of pain.

Your reaction is to rail against fate, to resent 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 lives. Any serious 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. Our interest here centers on the ordinary mortal stricken for the first time. These sick-chamber casuals rarely learn to make the most of illness, regarding it only as a visitation of bad luck. Yet thousands 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, he examined patients not as ill as himself. He raised money and labored until his dream became the great sanatorium at Saranac that helped thousands of tuberculosis patients. Treudeau’s affliction turned an unknown doctor into a physician of world-wide fame.

Eugene O’Neill was an utter drifter with no plan of life until he was 25. A serious breakdown gave him the requisite leisure, he says, “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 hospital that he first began to write the plays that revolutionized American drama.

Like many major experience, illness actually changes us. How? Well, for one thing we are temporarily relieved from the terrible 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, or wind the clock.

We enter a realm of introspection and self-analysis. 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, it seems, gives us that rarest thing in the world—a second chance, not only at health but at life itself.

Illness knocks a lot of nonsense out of us; it induces humility, cuts us down in our own 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 issues an run skulkingly away. Mistakes made in our jobs, marriage and social contacts stand out clearly. Especially when we are a bit scared is the salutary effect of sickness particularly marked; typhoid and pneumonia have reformed drunkards, thieves, leers and wife-beaters.

If a stiff bout of illness brings us near to death’s door—perhaps so much the better. For only when the way straitens and the gate grows narrow, do people discover their soul, their God, or 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 attach 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. Till then he had been "too busy" as a drug salesman. Today he is making a splendid go of his new job. While recuperating from scarlet fever a woman in her 40's vanquished the terrors she had felt about approaching middle life. "I am not going to return to my former state of feelling superfluous," she resolved. "My children are married and can take care of themselves. I'm going to start a millinery shop and make them 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 think, 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, and understanding and forgiveness of humanity—in short, a quality of peace and serenity that can scarcely be acquired by the “owner of pure horse flesh.” Suffering is a cleansing fire that chars away much of the meanness, triviality and restlessness of so-called “health.” 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 your imagination is more active than it ever has been; unshackled by petty details of existence, you day-dream, 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 easily you can think a difficult problem through to its solution. Why? Because your instincts of self-preservation are speeded up, and all 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, or to create original 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 for laziness. No one honestly can use his illness, whatever its nature, as an excuse for ineffectualness or failure.

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 be dismayed. Remind yourself that pain and 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.



August 5, 2012

The first time I read this article I was angry!

How can this guy say that a “serious illness should be regarded as an opportunity to gather dividends and generate energies that mere health cannot possibly bestow.”

What if you DIE from the illness? Not much of an opportunity for anything in that case.

But on the second reading, I thought, maybe he has something here. In 21^st Century America we seem to think we can live forever---if we eat right, exercise right, get vaccinations, take our antibiotics, wear our seat belts, and get all the early warning tests for cholesterol, cancer, and heart disease.

It’s not true, of course. We are all going to die. From a stroke, cancer, heart disease, infection, an accident, or something. I’m thinking, maybe Dr. Bisch’s attitude is more healthy than mine. If I woke up everyday knowing it could be my last, I wouldn’t be surprised or shocked by a life-threatening illness. And if I survived it maybe I would be truly grateful and not simply annoyed by the interruption.

In addition, I have to admit that for the first time I “learned the true meaning of friendship” after having a kidney stone in my 20s. Friendship and French fries that is.

Then the next claim, that pain “confers spiritual insight, a beauty of outlook, a philosophy of life, and understanding and forgiveness of humanity,” made me angry again. Hey, I’ve suffered from chronic pain for 30 years and it just made me miserable!

 But thinking about it some more, during the pain I didn’t gain anything from it but once a got some relief, I did find a compassion for people that I didn’t have before and perhaps wouldn’t have developed without it.

I big part of learning to living well with my condition was getting rid of self-pity. It took a long time but group therapy, pain management classes, sharing with friends and family---they all led me to see that everyone has a cross to bear. Like the tale of the mother and the mustard seed, there is no life without sorrow.

With that came something of an “understanding and forgiveness of humanity.”

Dang! I really did not want to agree with Dr. Bisch but now I might even order a copy of his book, Be Glad Your Neurotic, from Amazon.com. Goodness knows I am.





Traveler's Lament

A six-year-old was motoring to the West Coast with his family. The weather had been bad, the traveling rough. After a particularly hard day they stopped in a Texas town, took the only available hotel rooms and sank wearily into their beds. Suddenly the silence was broken by the six-year-old. “Mommy,” he wailed, “why don’t we just go back home and live happily ever after?”

Claire MacMurray in Cleveland Plain Dealer