A Second Chance

A Second Chance

1990 2 February 8-9 A Second Chance (523) “After a few days in bed 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.”

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 Sranac, 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’Neil 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 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 and run skulkingly away.

Some patients were interviewed in a hospital. They said that they have discovered secret depths in 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.” 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.

(Be Glad You’re Neurotic, by Dr. Louis E. Bisch)