I’m realizing, sometimes to my surprise and occasionally to my chagrin, that I can be quite stubborn. The stubbornness is rarely publicly displayed among my friends and family, and even when it appears, it is most likely in the context of some spirited debate on substantive issues — rather than through general interpersonal stubbornness.
The stubbornness reveals itself in my own quiet and private company far more often, and I am just beginning to understand some implications of this newfound revelation. For instance, last week I had a severe headache, starting in the mid-afternoon, just as rays of sunshine were beginning to shine through the long columns of windows on the west side of the library. The headache grew steadily worse as the sun cast longer and longer shadows, but I pressed on with my work and mentally waved away the pain. I went through dinner with my double cousin, and an entire evening of studying at home, all the while feeling worse and worse — until finally I went to bed (at the usual time, and not a minute earlier).
I woke up at several points during the night because my head hurt so badly, and only when I got up in the morning did I finally dig out a bottle of aspirin and throw back two small white tablets. The medicine took a while to kick in, and in the meantime, I went on with my morning routine and went to the gym to run several miles. My head hurt like it hadn’t hurt in months, and as I made my way to the gym, I wondered to myself — why am I going to the gym instead of sleeping this headache away? Why didn’t I take medicine last night, or yesterday afternoon? Why did I repeat the exact same mistakes I made the last time I had a headache like this?
Surely no one paid attention to me as I plodded along the sidewalk that morning; the street was relatively empty at such an early hour, and I was a bleary-eyed, unshowered, miserable sight to be seen anyway. So no one saw me blush to myself as I pondered these things — as I mulled over my curious habit of avoiding self-help whenever headaches strike. This is a stupid, senseless habit of mine, and necessarily a product of nothing other than pure stubbornness. But every time I get a severe headache, I suffer through the night and when I inevitably wake up with a head that has since acquired a built-in jackhammer overnight, I finally break down and take medicine. Then I marvel, just half an hour later, at how much better I feel. And I wonder what took me so long — and why I didn’t just pop the aspirin sooner. It sure would have saved a good twelve or sixteen hours of misery. And then I move past wonderment and I contemplate my stupidity in letting history repeat itself, over and over again.
It’s not just my headaches. Last fall (over a year ago!), I developed a rash on my wrist that itched like no tomorrow. Over the months, it got worse and worse, but instead of going to a doctor, I just … kept scratching. There were many times when the scratches would produce tears in my skin and subsequent welts. And those hurt! The rash spread until the entire region of my wrist was affected. In the meantime, I didn’t go see a doctor; I asked my dad what he thought it might be, but he’s not a doctor, so he didn’t know… and instead of scheduling an appointment, I just lived with it.
In the spring, the rash expanded to other parts of my hand, and as spring gave way into summer I realized something was definitely wrong with my skin. Only after multiple urgings from friends did I finally go see the doctor. By the time I saw her, I had had this skin problem for about nine months. That’s about 270 days of itching, scratching, rubbing, hurting, sometimes bleeding. And it took her all of five seconds to tell me it was eczema. Within five minutes, I had a prescription for ointment all ready to go.
Of course, then — it wasn’t enough to have a diagnosis; my stubborn self took an entire two weeks to get itself to the pharmacy to fill the prescription. It wasn’t because I’m lazy. I just tried to convince myself that I would be okay; I just kept praying that the thing would go away (the same prayer…for nine months), because I didn’t want to need the meds. Don’t ask my why; I don’t know why I’m like this. I just am. Anyways, after two weeks, the eczema continued to spread and I realized that whatever I was doing (or more like, whatever I wasn’t doing) wasn’t working.
I went to the pharmacy, got the meds, and… heh. Just like I marvel at aspirin’s power to take away pain in my head, I’ve been amazed by the magical powers of this ointment to draw down the effects of eczema within just days. Already I can feel my skin gaining a far more normal texture — something I haven’t seen or felt in almost a year. And I see how ridiculous my stubbornness is. I mean, really. I’ve been stupid.
I do wonder about why I’m so stubborn, and I’m curious as to where that comes from —Â is it some feeling of power or strength, or independence, or… what? And at the same time, I surprise myself at my strange approach of non-care for these physical ailments, since all the while I have learned (the hard way) not to be stubborn in non-care for their emotional/mental corollaries.
* * *
During my first year in college, I became very ill during the last week of October. I distinctly remember going to a Halloween party dressed up as a ghost, and then sleeping through my alarm the next day. My friend Erik went to my dorm room to retrieve me for church, but when I answered the door, I couldn’t speak. Random rasps came out, but all he heard was the occasional syllable that managed to survive the vocal static that emanated from my throat. It was the weirdest thing, and I thought it would pass.
And sure, over the next week, my voice came back, but my health did not. Instead, my health declined significantly — I developed a persistent and severe cough that wracked my body through day and night and was audible all the way across the hallway, through closed doors. Weeks passed before I finally bothered to make an appointment, and I cried when the doctors wouldn’t let me leave, because that meant I would have to miss class. In the end, that class ended up being the only one I missed all semester, because I just kept fighting, even though I was severely ill.
The doctors wouldn’t let me leave that first time, because their tests showed that my lung capacity was so detrimentally affected by the illness that I wasn’t getting enough air. They pumped steroids into my lungs and subjected me to a battery of breathing tests through the afternoon until they were satisfied that my lungs were feeding me enough oxygen so that I could leave.
That wasn’t the end; I was seen by two pulmonary specialists at the clinic at least seven times in the next three months, but I was a medical mystery to them. They couldn’t figure me out — their tests revealed that my lungs were clogged in a manner too severe to be bronchitis, and both were clogged too globally to be pneumonia, which is usually local. What I had was worse — but they didn’t know how to help me. We tried treatment after treatment, and all the while — I kept going to class. In lectures of 500, I would wheeze throughout the class, and people must have thought I had some loathsome disease (and boy, did I), but so it went… that was life.
November and December came and went. One night in late January, as I was home on break, I lay in bed at my parents’ house, and the wheezing was worse than ever before. I recall lying there, and having intermittent moments of inability to breathe at all. Rather than panicking, though — I just gave up. I remember thinking to myself, well — I guess this is how I’m going to go. I won’t make it through the night like this; this is the end. And… I was okay with that. I had my eternal security in Jesus, and I was tired of being sick all the time, and… really, I didn’t think that much apart from that. Nor did I get up and try to seek any help from my parents.The next morning, I was still alive. My breathing had improved through the night, and I slept enough to get me through the day — during which my brother drove me back to school, and I saw the doctor there again. I explained what had happened the night before, and as she took a listen to my lungs, she shook her head — Dr. Wilson just didn’t know what was going on with me. She put me back on the Advair discus again, even though it had failed to help the first time around, but she didn’t know what else to do.
Seven days later, I was completely well.
Dr. Wilson literally laughed and cried when she heard me breathe in and out, in and out, in and out again! Do it again!, she cried. And she called me a miracle child. After three months of trying to solve my medical mystery, she finally heard through her stethoscope what she had been hoping to hear all along. We were all in amazement, and filled with thanks. To this day, we still don’t know what exactly I had — or how, or why, it healed so quickly. Only God knows. Before I graduated from college three years later, I visited Dr. Wilson and brought her flowers, to thank her for taking care of me when I was so sick at the start of my college career.
That wonderful week of healing was not the end, though. Around the same time that I recovered from whatever-that-was, I developed serious sleeping problems. At night, I couldn’t fall sleep, and when I finally did, I woke up ridiculously early. Soon, I was surviving on only three or four hours of sleep a night, for weeks on end. Naps did no good, and I sat through classes feeling as though the world were spinning around me.
As a result, I was miserable, and slipped into a deep funk. Finally, one night, I couldn’t take it anymore. As I battled another sleepless night, I crawled up to my brother’s dorm room (three floors above mine), and knocked weakly at his door. It was past midnight, and God bless his roommate — Chris — who was so kind as to admit my sorry self and wake my brother up for me…
My brother, God bless him, was ever the strong support at my side. At that late hour, I sat on my brother’s bed and he sat beside me, and I told him that I was going to quit college. My health obviously could not withstand the pressures, the homework, the whatever — so I was ready to quit. I told him that three months had passed, and I no longer knew what it was like to be healthy. I was desperate to be well, and willing to give up higher education if need be. I just wanted my life back.
Mom soon caught wind of the degree of my troubles, and forced me to see a psychiatrist over spring break. I cried and cried, not wanting to have to see a “shrink,” and not wanting to believe that I needed any sort of intervention from mental health professionals. I wasn’t crazy, and I wasn’t mentally ill. I didn’t want therapy.
It wasn’t about what I wanted, though. In the end, I was taught to take what I needed — and like it or not, I did need therapy. I only went to the psychiatrist that one time (and he confirmed what I already knew — that I was mentally just fine), but after months of reluctance, I finally signed up for a therapy appointment at the end of the school year. It was so hard to drag my trampled pride into the office every other week to talk and inevitably to cry. I was ashamed to need this kind of help … or maybe I was ashamed to need any help.
I realized soon enough, however, that therapy was a necessary evil. And… gradually I came to understand that it wasn’t an evil at all. So for the next six years, I kept going to therapy. Through it, I was able to work through many problems; to sort through emotions that I didn’t realize beleaguered me; to address and finally put to rest a host of underlying troubles that manifested themselves in destructive ways.
My life is so much better for it — and I count myself extremely blessed to have been put through that rigorous wringer so early in life. I’m glad that I learned, relatively early in life, that it’s not a weakness to need help; it takes strength and courage to realize that we can’t do life on our own.
