Whose high endeavors are an inward light that makes the path before him always bright

Last week I tried to dig in on the dark part of being struck down with a mysterious chronic illness (just low grade fevers and fatigue, that’s it) for years. If the concerned messages from some friends and followers mean anything, I must have succeeded. Chronic illness is a living death of many things you carried, and you must grieve things you can’t have anymore that you held important. But my own path through the day to day wasn’t all terrible, and you learn some things about yourself and about the world. Wisdom while not always worth the price is still wisdom, and golden.

One gift from being a doctor since early adulthood (proceeding on a standard track gets you the MD at 26, the full license to practice/psychiatry specialty at 30) is you see how terrible things happen to good people all the time. You can live the best life and still get cancer or a car accident or suddenly your immune system decides to kill your kidneys or joints. It never occurred to me that my predicament was unfair or unjust. Even as I lived each day just trying to get through work so I could go home and rest, at least there wasn’t any pain. And I wasn’t maimed, nauseated, or dying…at least any faster than I am already. Without a diagnosed illness to treat, you don’t have a whole bunch of doctor’s appointments that suck up all your time and money, or chemotherapy that makes you sick as hell but keeps you alive.

Comparisons to others aren’t always helpful…lots of depressed people think they shouldn’t be depressed because everything could be a lot worse and they punish themselves for being ungrateful. Things don’t work like that, though. Clinical depression is a separate animal that attacks the brain in a way that your world view is shaded with blue-colored glasses. Even a beautiful sunny day can be an affront to the dark trends of depressed thoughts. Another blessing then, to be ill but not depressed, so good old fashioned counting my blessings could help me accept my lot.

And what my weakness accelerated was something I already knew but was forced to confront earlier than I might have. What is important to me isn’t the spotlight or academia or money. I like to read and think, I love my family, I want to spend quality time with my husband and teenaged kids. My life before had at least a little balance, but once I got sick there was only work and rest. So in the ending months of 2021 when I’d been mostly by myself in the empty office that once had all my colleagues and their patients in and out of the waiting room, I sat down with my business partner and told her I just couldn’t do it anymore. Two years of fevers then, my visit with the unexplained fever clinic was still three months away.

She had bowed out of clinical psychiatry years ago and her help with the business/legal side of things was mostly voluntary, so I didn’t need to make too many explanations. She was weary of the whole thing too.

We needed to give our coworkers six months lead time, so we told everyone we were closing the clinic as of July 2022. That started off a flurry of extra work that still hasn’t entirely ended. I still didn’t know what I was going to do. A psychiatrist who isn’t in jail or under license suspension gets about 3 job offers a week and there were some really good opportunities with friends to consider, where I didn’t have the responsibility of a clinic and could make my own hours. I couldn’t offer them much though. I needed rest, a lot of it, so I could spend some of my limited energy with the kids and family.

The ultimate blessing is that I could change my life to make a small private practice, working from home, and still pay the mortgage (more or less). The big responsibilities and large clinics were jettisoned. Instead I spent my extra energy as a band chaperone and caring for a foul-tempered geriatric cat.

In the midst of all this came my non-answers from the unexplained fevers clinic. As near as anyone and my blood results could tell, I didn’t have any autoimmune disease, chronic infection, or cancer. My immune system seemed to be working just fine. No news is good news…

The happier post is more difficult to write. Wisdom is boring compared to the attainment of it. Blessings aren’t shadowed. The happy warrior has transcended death, and fear, and pain. Except that’s not really true, they all exist together, the fear and the hope, the blue-colored glasses and the rose ones, and the choices for the path you are forced down anyway.