These Difficult Times

What good can we glean from medical burdens? Is there any kind of value buried inside suffering? If so, what is this value and do we need to actually suffer to gain it?

Many people — myself included — are harassed by an array of relatively small medical irritants. The general public in western societies, however, enjoys such a high level of base comfort that an interesting dynamic occurs whenever medical problems arise. We become myopic: we see small medical problems as big ones, and we over-react.

On the flipside of over-reacting to medical issues, there’s the danger of under-reacting. What are the dangers of this? Sometimes a small medical problem grows and spirals out of control, accumulating into something much worse. Need an example? Meet Huang Chunsai, a Chinese man who survived a record tumour surgery. The tumors afflicting him since he was a boy presumably must have started out relatively small and grown slowly, slowly enough to not impel medical action. Or, more likely, his family was too poor to afford it. But as the years went by, the tumor grew and grew to the point where he had problems walking and was too embarrassed to leave his house.

Is there a moral to this story? I think there are several, but here’s one: Medical burdens must be watched very carefully and respected for what they are — Chances for a medicinal problem to fly out of control and become literally and metaphysically a huge burden, as it was for Huang Chunsai.

Small medical burdens, such as those Ms Chunsai’s started out as being, can accumulate over time and must be periodically eliminated, just as river bed silt must be dredged from the delta of a busy river.

But, is there beauty in Mr Chunsai and his plight? If so, where is it and how can we appreciate this?