The Tyranny of Health

OK—if I’m alive today and writing this, it’s all because of a legend, though a legend who has escaped the fate of most of us: Having our first mention in a Google search be “Helen Whitman is on Facebook!”

Or was her first name Helen? Because I had it in my mind that her name was “Ernestine,” but that Whitman appears to have been a flutist whom I knew in the music school, not the Mrs. Whitman I knew as a head nurse at UW Hospital and Clinics.

It’s fitting, really, that I don’t know—did I ever?—her first name, since she was very much not on informal bases with anybody, much less her nurses. She was Mrs. Whitman, and everybody else was Miss or Mr. or Doctor whomever, and she applied the rule as rigidly as she applied her white nursing cap.

She ran her ward in a way that made Mrs. Thatcher look like a slacker, and no, it’s not true that she applied starch to her uniform. Rather, any uniform that Mrs. Whitman chose to wear was expected to comply with her own high standards: No creases or wrinkles ever appeared. Nor was it the case that her name was ever spoken: Rather, it was whispered.

She appeared one spring day with serious scratches on her legs: Obviously I couldn’t ask her what had happened, but a senior nurse whispered the news to me. Mrs. Whitman had “awoken” her rose bed for the season, and was I surprised? Of course not: I was gardening myself at the time, and passionately involved with heritage roses: Wonderful shrubs with tremendous French names—Madame Alfred Carriere or Souvenir de Malmaison. True, they tended to bloom only once, and they could be unruly. But Mrs. Whitman? No, she strode into the world of modern roses, much as she strode onto the unit each morning, with an appetite for errant medical students, one or two of which she would consume for breakfast (she munched steadily through the day on anyone at hand….) So of course she would have tackled the reigning hypochondriacs of the garden, with all their wilts and rots and mildews and mites. Had she been an animal lover, she would have had Siamese cats, and had them lining up in order of seniority for roll call each morning and night.

Nor was it true that no patient ever dared die on Mrs. Whitman’s unit. What can be said is that they all—terrified into obedience—waited until after Mrs. Whitman had relinquished her ward to the PM or night shifts.

Detour—my mother had three children. After the eldest child was born, in 1945, my mother spent a month in the hospital, on strict bed rest, with a long, wonderful backrub at the end on the day, and plenty of rejuvenating rest, since look—the lady had just had a baby, for God’s sakes! Anybody could see that she’d been through a hell of an ordeal!

There was a problem, of course, since after a month of lying in bed? Well, those ladies were weak, and then being sent home to care for a newborn. So for the second child—born in 1950—the month got chopped down to two weeks. And for me, born in 1956?

“Dr. Thornton strode into the room and said, ‘get up, Mrs. Newhouse, and walk!’ just hours after you were born. And I never did get a decent back rub….”

I tell you this because I had a second—and last—cataract surgery on Tuesday, and now, three days later, what has my doctor told me?

“You can do anything but bungee jumping!”

Yeah?

The surgery was not without a wrinkle or two, since it appears that the operation can be rough on the cornea. And what that meant was that the eye was swollen, painful, and mightily inflamed.

“Soak your eye in prednisone,” said the doctor, so I did. And what else did I do?

“I’ll be OK to give class on Thursday morning,” I told my newest student, who looked skeptical. Right so then I cancelled on Wednesday afternoon, and then cancelled Friday’s class as well. Why? Because it wasn’t the pain or the inflammation that was the problem: I was utterly exhausted.

I went to bed and felt guilty: I should be up and doing something about the weed trees growing in the back balcony. But wait—did I really want to be out there sweating, with my hands in the dirt, and wiping my brow? Look, I wasn’t supposed even to be reading!

I twitched, I jittered—I fell asleep and woke to guilt / shame staring me relentlessly in the face. And then I had the revelation….

Mrs. Whitman!

“You’re not to leave this bed under any circumstances,” she said, “and I’m sending Miss Porter in to attend to those hospital corners.” She sniffed, and then paused at the door. “I’ll be right outside, at the nursing station.”

Bliss!

Well, I mused about her, since I had been reading a book by Robert Whittaker: Here’s what one writer had to say:

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (Crown 2010), by the journalist Robert Whitaker, is one of the most disturbing, consequential works of investigative journalism I’ve read in a long time. Perhaps ever. Whitaker has persuaded me that American psychiatry, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, may be perpetrating the biggest case of iatrogenesis—harmful medical treatment–in history.

Well, my brother had recommended it to me, and my brother—unlike me—does not suffer depression. Shouldn’t it be “suffer from?” No, I meant that my brother, along with so many others, thinks that if I just got myself together, took a good long walk, and thought positive thoughts, all would be well. Am I being fair to my brother? No, of course not. But until you’ve been seriously depressed, it’s hard to imagine the peculiar hell of the noonday demon.

Well, I had read enough of the book to overcome my initial irritation. Then I had had my surgery. Then I pondered the fact that, with all our wonderful treatments for depression, the incidence of the disease is soaring, not dropping. So what gives?

It’s the tyranny of good health, I concluded. Because at no time in history have we been more healthy, and isn’t it time to speculate that sickness has a place in our evolutionary history? Even the most dreaded disease—cancer—is no excuse to take to your bed for extended periods of time: You have your chemotherapy one day, are sick as a kitten the next day, and are back peering at your computer screen at the office the next day. Repeat week after week until remission.

Consider the cancer of the 19^th century: Tuberculosis. Anybody reading Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain will know the story. Here’s Wikipedia’s telling sentence:

In the opening chapter, Hans is symbolically transported away from the familiar life and mundane obligations he has known, in what he later learns to call "the flatlands", to the rarefied mountain air and introspective little world of the sanatorium.       

Well, a serious blogger would look into it, would see if anybody has proposed the theory: Robbed of the illnesses that would take us to our beds, isolate us, force us to look inward, put us in darkness, we have created depression, and are suffering vast amounts of it. Man spent most of his existence working outside during the day, and sleeping during the night. Now we are chained to our devices, and outside, for most of us, is the walk from office to car. So I should look into all this, except…

…Mrs. Whitman is ordering me back to bed!