Courtesy: Medical Miracles, from Readers Digest 1981.
November.
From the frontiers of science and the far horizons of
personal courage, these stories of medical triumphs and miracles will reaffirm
your faith in the awesome powers of the human spirit. Dramatic victories and
human triumphs.
Selected and edited by the editors of Readers Digest
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.
