Stephen Osborne – on getting sick, and well.

Vancouver, B.C.
December 21, 2000

Dear Paul:

Let me tell you where I have been. For ten months or so my health had been deteriorating rapidly. New symptoms appeared and never went away: I presumed that I had begun to age too quickly and that I should prepare myself for death.

I hadn’t been to a doctor since 1966 and I thought perhaps I was paying the price for too many late nights: I was urinating every hour, an indication, I assumed, of a collapsing prostate; my eyes were getting weaker, an indication of advancing blindness. My knees and elbows ached and often I was unable to pick up my feet when walking: symptoms of advancing arthritis, surely; and the icy tingling in my fingers and toes I presumed to be “pinched nerves.” I began dropping things: coins, keys, pens flew from my hands. And I was becoming angrier all the time: this was the most disconcerting of symptoms, perhaps because it didn’t feel like a symptom at all: it was a state of mind and I couldn’t escape it. I was continuously in a near-rage, and began to frighten people who had known me for years: I couldn’t laugh at a joke, I couldn’t make a joke. At night I could feel anger washing over me in waves. And I got angry at the anger, because I knew somewhere in my mind that there was no reason for it, and that made me even angrier.

I was depressed and in a fog: I seemed to be continuously hung over. I couldn’t sleep more than two hours at a time. I became afraid of meeting people; I couldn’t bear to make an appointment: the world became heavy and there seemed to be too many things to do. I was losing weight as well, for no reason that I could see (I presumed that an unspecified “wasting disease” was overtaking me). One day in the supermarket, when I could hardly walk because my feet were hurting so badly and my ears were ringing, a friend I hadn’t seen for a year came me up to me and congratulated me on how well I looked (so lithe, so svelte!): I could barely form words in my mouth. A short time after that I woke up in the morning and heard a voice in my head say: “Osborne, you have diabetes.” A simple declarative sentence.

Diabetes was merely a word to me then; I knew nothing more about it. But the directive seemed clear enough and I went down the hill to the clinic where I learned that indeed I was suffering from a condition of the blood brought on by a defect in my pancreas, in the “islets of Langerhans,” to be precise, and that its name was diabetes, a condition described (as I would later read) by a Greek physician in 150 BC as “a melting of the flesh into urine.” So it must have been my pancreas (or perhaps the islets) talking to me early that morning and now I try to include my organs in my thoughts whenever I can (an interesting exercise: try acknowledging your spleen sometime, or your liver, or your pituitary gland).

The doctor prescribed pills and I stopped eating sugar (for months I had been drinking root beer in cans, thinking that caffeine and sugar might get my energy up), and within days I could feel the symptoms leaving my body: the fog in my head lifted, the pressure in my eyes disappeared: I could feel my body beginning to work as it had long ago when I was healthy; the tingling in my fingers went away, and suddenly I could go for half a day without emptying my bladder. I realized that I had never known what health was: certainly I had been unable to remember it during the time of my sickness, which, as health came to me, I understood to have been about four years. Soon I was awash in normality: my eyesight improved and I had to get out an old pair of glasses because the new ones no longer worked. I could lift things, and my keys no longer fell out of my hands. I began walking long distances. My bowel movements became pleasant (I hadn’t even noticed how wretched they had become) and my mind became clear again, which was perhaps the greatest gift of all: I could feel myself returning to intellectual life (my writing projects had gradually stalled out: now I was discovering them again, patiently waiting for me in file folders).

The diagnosis was a gift of knowledge as well as health. Now I knew something of healing, and how ill health makes the world invisible. For a while the doctor who gave me my diagnosis seemed to me to be touched with genius. But when I began to experience turns of breathlessness he measured my blood pressure, which was too high, and prescribed another drug; my legs were hurting again and he prescribed a drug for that too. Now I was dizzy with drugs and I began to remember why I had stayed away from doctors for thirty-four years. I turned to the “literature,” a great sinkhole of medical bafflegab and self-help nonsense (a book in the public library warns diabetics not to smoke marijuana because it is “an illegal substance”), and began monitoring my own blood sugar. Eventually I discovered that the pill I was taking was precipitating episodes of low blood sugar, and the breathlessness that I was feeling was the result of an accompanying adrenaline rush: this was the cause of my high blood pressure. The solution was to cut the dose and change my diet. I was in control again.

The pain in my legs began to diminish, and eventually I started wearing tights under my trousers, to soothe the nerve endings in my skin: now I am walking without pain. These complications made me angry only in a mild way, because I no longer experience rage: instead I make my way into the world a step at a time, patiently assembling a regime. I pull on my tights in the morning and feel like a secret Elizabethan courtier. I am learning to come back into the world, to pick up the many things undone over the last year, and to begin to do them now.

–Stephen