C.S. Lewis and arthritis

(Found on http://oakbayunitedchurch.blogspot.ca/2012/10/getting-help.html and reposted)

Cover of The Screwtape Letters

I was told a couple of weeks ago that I have moderate arthritis in one hip, that there is no cure for this, and that I am very likely to need a hip replacement at some point, if not soon.  I have been glum since I heard this.  This is the first thing I have had go wrong with me that can’t be fixed, and can't even be prevented from getting worse. 

I tried to think of someone I could talk to about it.  Could I call my sister, who has had a serious chronic illness all her life?  Or an old friend, who has had type 1 diabetes since her 20s? I was going to tell my mother when she called, but she had phoned to tell me that a family friend, a woman my age, had just that day been diagnosed with a late-stage terminal disease and had no more than days left (she died two days later).  It seemed petty to mention my concerns about my arthritis to any of these. 

Still, I am upset. Someone has painted around a manhole cover down the street from my house “Saying you shouldn’t feel bad because other people have it worse is like saying that you shouldn’t feel happy because other people have it better”.  I would rather not have arthritis. It's not selfish to feel this way, I keep telling myself.  It's normal. 

So I have been feeling my way since I heard this, trying to get my head around the new normal, and not doing too well. At last one morning this week I was lying on my kitchen floor, partway through doing my exercises.  (I'm determined to be the perfect patient; I will do my exercises and take my snake oil and lose weight and if I need a hip replacement it won't be because I didn't fight it every step of the way.) I fell into flat despair, imagining every possible worst-case scenario at once, and thinking, well, what does it matter, since we’re all going to die anyway?  Why am I even bothering to lie on the floor here doing my exercises?  It won’t make any difference.  There’s no point even getting off the floor.  I may as well just lie here all day and cry, what does it matter?

So I lay on the floor feeling miserable, self-pitying and guilty for feeling self-pitying, and it finally crossed my mind that prayer might help.  (Not sure why this always occurs to me last.) So I prayed. God, I said, I don’t even know if you’re there but I sure hope you are.   Please help me pull out of this because I am in a mess. I've got no right to but I feel so bad. 

And then I finished my exercises and got up, still feeling low.  But over the course of the day I realised two things. 

One was that I wasn’t meant to feel lucky that others have much worse problems than mine. The fact is that we are all so terribly fragile - me, my sister, my friend with diabetes, my mother’s friend, another friend of mine who (I just heard) had an emergency hip replacement a few months back. But lying on the kitchen floor despairing does not help. The only possible response to our fragility is to love each other as much as we can and do as much as we can with the time we have together. To celebrate in love while we’re here.

The other thing I realised was that C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters applied here as in so many other issues.  In Letter VI, Screwtape is describing his patient’s anxiety and distress as he awaits possible military deployment, imagining all the contradictory ways he could be killed if he is called up, and trying to resign himself to all of them at once, and praying to be protected from all these prospective dangers that haven't happened yet.  In this effort God is no help at all; because God does not protect or save us from imagined possible future misery and fear. But God is an immediate comfort in REAL fear.  REAL misery.  PRESENT pain.  Screwtape’s patient’s real cross to bear was not some possible future disaster; it was his present terror.  

My real cross to bear, I gradually saw, was not the possibility that a hypothetical hip replacement might not work or might have awful complications or that 15 years from now it might hypothetically wear out and then I might hypothetically not be able to get a new one because hypothetically there might not be enough bone left to do it.  My real cross to bear, as I lay on the kitchen floor, is that right now, at this very second, I’m letting myself drive myself crazy imagining all this.  My real cross to bear is that I am miserable right now, grieving the loss of my perfect hip and my fantasy future in which I climb Mt. Everest at the age of 80, or become an archaeologist on Mars after I retire (but NASA will never take me now that I have arthritis!)  And when I pray for help with that present sadness, grief, self-pity and driving myself into a tizzy, God is right there, as so often before, giving me a hand up off the floor.