DEALING WITH CHRONIC ILLNESS

Ross Douthat has been opinion columnist for The New York Times since 2009. He is also film critic for National Review. I have read his columns and books over the years and found him insightful and stimulating. He became a Roman Catholic from a Pentecostal background. His last book is The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery about his experience with Lyme disease in 2016 and Covid-19 in 2020. It is searingly honest, illuminating and harrowing. His purpose is to be helpful.

“I am writing this story in part for those chronically suffering, more numerous than the healthy ever realize – to give them hope that their condition can be changed even if it can’t be eliminated, that they might be able to save their own lives even if they feel abandoned by their doctors, that they may, like me, be able to get, not fully well yet, but better, genuinely better.

But I am also writing for the skeptical doctors and doubtful experts who are so often the targets of long-suffering Lyme patients’ fury and suspicion, in hopes of convincing them to see more clearly the enfleshed reality of a chronic life-stealing disease.

It’s completely understandable that the medical establishment doesn’t want to endorse any of the various unproven paths that leads patients to experiment with treatments that seem like witchcraft to the modern medical mind. But there’s a difference between declining to endorse a single path and ruling further treatment out entirely, a difference between acknowledging the diversity of case studies and claiming that no lessons can be drawn from the diverse attempts to treat them.

What patients are asking these skeptics is not a new certainty to replace the old one, not the endorsement of any single protocol or theory. What they are asking – what is entirely reasonable to ask in the face of so much suffering – is for doctors not to simply wash their hands of us, but to instead embrace the experimental spirit that chronic sickness seems to obviously require.

We aren’t asking doctors to promise that they can definitely heal us. We are just asking them to try.”

Douthat has lived for six years with invaders in his flesh. He has seen the world from way down underneath. He has fought his disease and he is still alive. His memoir is a testimony to Christian resilience, family life and perseverance.