Turn your Disadvantage into an Advantage

Turn your Disadvantage into an Advantage

1989 10 October 18 Turn your Disadvantage into an Advantage (334) Thousands have actually found themselves for the first time during sickness. 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 laboured until his dream became the great sanatorium at Sarance, near New York, that has helped thousands of tuberculosis patients. Trudeau’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 twenty-five. 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 any 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, look after 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 of health but of life itself!

Illness knocks a lot of nonsense out of us; it induces humility, cuts us down to our own size. It enables us to throw a search light upon our inner selves and to discover how often we have rationalized our failures and weaknesses, dodged virtual issues and run sulkingly away.

*By Louis P. Bisch, M.D. author of Be Glad You’ve Neurotic