Getting Help

Cover of C.S. Lewis

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, but she phoned just then to tell me that a family friend, a woman my age, had that day been diagnosed with a late-stage terminal disease and had no more than days left (she died two days later).  My concerns about arthritis seemed petty by comparison.

Still, I am upset. Someone has painted a slogan 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 hip and joint-mobility exercises, and I fell into flat despair.  I imagined every possible worst-case scenario at once,  thinking, why am I even bothering to do these exercises? It won’t make any difference.  We're all going to die anyway. 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. (For some reason 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, or guilty if I don't feel lucky when I should. Luck isn't the question. 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.

The other thing I realised was that here as so often, C. S. Lewis has some good advice.  In Letter VI of Lewis' Screwtape Letters, the demon Screwtape is describing a young Englishman's anxiety and distress during World War 2 as he awaits possible military deployment.  The young man is busy imagining all the mutually contradictory ways he could be killed if he is called up, 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.  The sufferer's real cross to bear was not some possible future disaster; it was his present terror.  And if he prayed for help with that, said Screwtape, he was likely to get it.

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 is that right now I'm lying on the floor. Right now, I'm terrifying myself by imagining all these things.  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.