How to be Healthy While Sick

Last week I presented my ludicrously long list of ailments. I've been coping with them far better than I'd expected, and feeling pretty healthy, having baked a little limping, a little pain, and a little vigilance into my expectations. I've accepted a few limitations while happily doing the myriad things I can still do. Since medical issues have been flowing at wholesale levels, I've developed a procedure, which I'll share.

Really, we're all (per the title) "healthy while sick". Even if you have a clean bill of health, you most likely have a few issues back-burnered — plantar fasciitis, hay fever,, myopia, tennis elbow, lower back pain, ad infinitum. And since you've already learned to back-burner them (even though they present as very real and needful issues), then, great! You don't have to learn new tricks! Just use that same function for literally anything that comes up. Even if it's scary-sounding.

All your issues were scary at first, though you've forgotten, having handled, normalized and back-burnered them. So I'm suggesting you consciously keep that same process up and running, despite the 20th/21st century conviction that we must constantly torture ourselves over every suboptimal circumstance until we've thoroughly and maturely accepted it, lest we (yeegads) repress.

Acceptance doesn't require you to be thrilled with the situation. That will never happen, nor does it need to. Acceptance is an easy toggle. "Ok, that happened!" is all that's needed to proceed blithely.

If you're in such perfect health that you can't name any back-burnered condition, good news! You're actually a wreck! If you had the cash to image and test every part of you, you'd see a frightful array of worrisome problems.

None of us drives a gleaming perfect car off the dealer lot. You carry undiagnosed defects and malformations, plus a wide portfolio of dormant propensities. You, my friend, are an absolute mess. But if you're having a perfectly nice time in your fantasy of excellent health, I won't disturb that. In fact, I'm urging the opposite. Learn from how great you feel despite how bad it is! That's solid gold!

The mechanics of coming to feel like a “Sick Person” are far more complicated — and fluffy — than we imagine. We feel compelled to inhabit the role circumstance seems to suggest. But should a medical issue have the power to alter our sense of identity? Circumstance can't force us into role-play. We can choose our framing — it's volitional! As the Buddhists say, "pain is inevitable, but suffering is by choice", and we have ample unrealized freedom to tinker with parameters.

But even if you can't escape the urge to respond to circumstance by playing some new role, the remarkable thing about circumstance is its extreme richness. It can support a vast range of role-playing options. Ample reasons to feel sick or healthy. To paint ourselves as tragic or triumphant; victimized or unduly blessed. No matter how we slice it, it's all about pretending. So why not pretend better?

Enough philosophy. Here's the gritty how-to for making yourself a factory for the conversion of medical bad news into a sensation of wellness and balance.

Something new is happening, health-wise, that's strange and/or scary. Here's my flowchart, refined from a bewildering amount of experience:

Is this an emergency? If yes, handle it. If not, move to next question.

Does it require medical attention? IYHI;INMTNQ

Does anything need doing right now? IYHI;INMTNQ

Does anything need doing soon? IYHI;INMTNQ

Is there anything I can do to relieve symptoms? IYHI;INMTNQ

Is there anything I can do to hasten recovery? IYHI;INMTNQ

If I'm stuck with this long-term, can I do anything to shave off some pain and symptoms? IYHI;INMTNQ

If doctors have little to suggest, are there any self-healing moves I can try? IYHI;INMTNQ

Can I rearrange aspects of my life so the condition affects me less? IYHI;INMTNQ

Can I change my framing so the condition affects me less? IYHI;INMTNQ

What do I need to vigilantly watch for? Loop this one, and back-burner it, and enjoy your life. Seriously.

Notice what's absent: Absolutely everything else. All the gratuitous fuss. Cut that stuff to the bone and be like a jet pilot. Flinty, frosty, efficient. Just work the checklist.

And other than that, enjoy your life without footnotes or asterisks. Even if you're limping, drooling, and/or wheezing. Put away your cosplay props for playing "The Sufferer" and be stubbornly yourself, regardless of how it looks. Every human has that right! For me, to be out there tearing down sidewalks, regardless of stride elegance, is a badge of honor, regardless of how others view it. Work within limits. That's what life is. That's what they're all doing, and you can boast of working at a higher difficulty rating!

Every moment of your life has been lived within innumerable limitations. You've always played an imperfect hand. We can't fly, or run time backwards, or pass more than a couple of days without fainting for umpteen unproductive hours into snoozy oblivion.

So you've added another one to the zillions of limitations you were scarcely aware of because you'd settled into them so smoothly. So settle smoothly into this one! The only obstacle is the temptation to welp about it, or to weave dramatic narratives around it. You don't need to laboriously trek through all the Kübler-Ross levels. You can skip right to "blithe." Opt out of juicy potential attention or sympathy, and short-cut straight to a sensation of health and balance. Come on in, the water's fine!

Every word of this has been obvious common sense. Yet the number of people I've seen follow this course is approximately zero. I, myself, spent decades not doing it. But after being pummeled by a crazy profusion of maladies, I had to find higher perceptual ground. And now I'm virtually untouchable.

Ironically, I feel more stable now than ever before, at least in the current moment. It occurs to me as I write this that it comes at the expense of any expectation of ongoing stability. In the next moment, anything's possible. I've traded an illusion of ongoing stability for the reality of present stability. Which is actually the good stuff.

So while I'm not in perfect health, I do have perfect framing. And this leaves me with an impression of great health...at least during the long stretches where nothing's beeping or throbbing! :)