Thorns into feathers: coping with chronic illness

Commonweal, Feb 10, 1995 by Floyd Skloot

As thou hast made these feathers thorns, in the sharpness of this sickness, so, Lord, make these throns feathers again.

John Donne, Devotions III

In the winter of 1623, the great English poet and preacher John Donne was stricken with epidemic typhus. "Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man!" he wrote. "This minute I was well, and am ill, this minute." Typhus, a louse-borne bacterial disease, killed hundreds of thousands throughout Jacobean England. Donne, at age fifty-two, suddenly found himself feverish, tormented by headaches, covered with spots. He took to his bed, where he felt "my slack sinews are iron fetters, and those thin sheets iron doors upon me." Not only were those sheets transformed into iron doors, but the feathers of his bed had become thorns. The situation was alarming enough that King James's own physician was dispatched to Donne's bedside.

The course of Donne's illness was summarized in 1640 by his biographer, Sir Izaak Walton: "God preserved his spirit, and kept his intellectuals as clear and perfect as when that sickness first seized his body; but it continued long, and threatened him with death, which he dreaded not." One enduring outcome of Donne's typhus episode was the writing of a brilliant book, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a seventeenth-century best seller in which he mused passionately on the condition of his stricken body and soul. In what is perhaps the mother of all blurbs, Izaak Walton said the Devotions was "a book that may not unfitly be called a Sacred Picture of Spiritual Ecstasies."

Thinking about coping with my own long-term illness, I find myself drawn in particular to Donne's third devotion. Lying in his feather bed, which fever and pain transform into a bed of thorns, he asks God to reverse the alchemy and turn his bed back to feathers. In my own illness, I am sorry to say, God has not seen fit to keep my intellectuals as clear and perfect as when sickness first seized me--my brain has been scarred by lesions and I have lost approximately thirty IQ points. But, while I have not turned the thorns of my illness to feathers, I have nonetheless found ways to soften their spikes.

If you knew me five years ago, before I got sick, you would not know me now. Some of it is style, of course, or style reflecting substance. Cannot run anymore, so I have hand-carved hazelwood and cocobolo canes in place of running gear. Cannot work, so there is a wardrobe of baggy sweats or wildly patterned, floppy pants instead of the trim three-piece suits and shirts with snug collars. Look down and there are clogs instead of wing-tips, since for years it was a challenge just to tie my shoelaces. I wear a small hematite ball in my left earlobe now and use fingers instead of a brush to manage my hair, which--like my beard--is shot with gray. Though it is no heavier, the lean and hard body that I worked so diligently to sculpt is much softer now. As my wife Beverly says, it seems like my armor is gone.

But it is more than style. A lifelong city boy, I now live in the country and love it, despite the spiders and carpenter ants, despite skunks and the occasional porcupine, despite poison oak or a well that threatens to go dry and its iron-rich water that stains me amber. And I am slow now. I used to move through my world like a halfback, zigging and zagging, always trying for that extra yard, very difficult to bring down. Now I conserve, I loiter, I move as in a dream; because if I don't, I will either fall or smack into something. But of this necessity has come a whole new way of being in my life. This goes for talking too, which I do at a more leisurely pace, interspersed now with actual listening. Something different and vital has emerged. My secret is that I have found the places within me that illness could not touch. I have learned to honor them.

Take music. Before I got sick, music to me was late fifties and early sixties rock 'n' roll. Give me doowop and Top 40 AM, Elvis and the Everly Brothers and Fats Domino. Music was for singing along with the phonograph, or with headphones when I jogged through downtown Portland. As background to dinner, or when company arrived, there was light jazz to show my extreme sophistication.

Obviously, this music was not for listening to all day while lying in bed or on a recliner month after month. This was not the proper stuff for a brain riddled with anatomic holes, for a mind so easily confused by stimuli that I could not sit in a restaurant unless I faced the wall, for a body that needed to rest and heal. In my illness, I did not need the Wall of Sound.

One day my best friend and running partner, Eric Hosticka, showed up with some Mozart. He brought Schumann and Schubert, a Beethoven piano sonata, Bach. Who?

"Nothing heavy," he said. "No symphonies or anything complicated."

I did not know what he was talking about. Classical music was by definition complicated and heavy, I thought, which was why it was discussed in hushed tones and pompous accents. It was written by people without first names, most of whom were cranky and tubercular and had wild hair. Not that I was a philistine; after all, I had read all of Thomas Hardy, even The Hand of Ethelberta. But classical music had remained outside my experience.