To summarize again, I am recovering from psychosomatic pain disorder, also called somatic symptom disorder, somatic disorder for short. The symptoms are nerve and muscle pain in both arms and legs, fatigue, heaviness, and weakness. Several specialists and a neurologist combined ruled out any serious physical condition, two doctors concluding this is the diagnosis. I cannot be absolutely certain I have this and not something else, or that I will ever fully recover.
However, based on many tests, several specialists, my own medical history, common sense living with this, as well as a series of clear miracles confirming the diagnosis, my conscience demands I fully accept the diagnosis and expect an eventual full recovery, which clinically is the prognosis in the first place.
At the same time, nobody absolutely knows the future or the mind of God, so I cannot say it is theoretically impossible I don’t recover. On the other hand, I can and must consider it as a practical certainty, especially in light of the miracles revealing this is a temporary condition.
But to accept this full circle is incredibly difficult. For the most part for many months I’ve been in acceptance, but there have been many challenges for several months which have caused me some days to question everything again and feel anxious if I’ll ever recover.
In the Fall I was assaulted, and the police doing nothing about it, resulting in all my symptoms returning at the scene, to this day. And then shortly later the hospital system I was receiving charity care from for counseling, and the counselor themselves, suddenly discharged me without cause or direct explanation, except obviously because my symptoms had returned needing more counseling, which is the main treatment for this, and because they were not making money off of me.
Another crisis situation unfolded weeks later but I won’t go into details about it here.
The good news is there was a period of four months of near total recovery, then later for one month, and still now in January there are days my symptoms are subsiding to a very low level indicating I’m coming out of it.
But I have to admit all of this still from time to time racks my brain, the distress and saga of it all. The pain and other symptoms actually are mostly tolerable. My main cross is letting go of the fear, by now largely irrational, that this never resolves. And I’m very aware now that this fear all along started when the symptoms suddenly started with an outburst of pain and weakness.
Regardless of what name you call it, what the person really is afraid of is it ending life as they know it, resulting in permanent disability and misery. For me that was the question and fear that ran through my head that Friday morning way back when when I woke up one morning with muscle and nerve pain through all four limbs. The day before I had seen our stolen car recovered by the police at the impound lot all trashed. Days before we had bought a new used car I discovered might have a $3000 repair expense. And there had been several other crises around that time that created a perfect storm.
An important fact is that in 2017 I had the same outbreak of symptoms during a perfect storm, from which I eventually fully recovered.
So now my task is to come to full and total peace about my condition, that is the uncertainty of when I will recover, and the possibility in theory that God never allows me to recover. It is a mentally strange task since on one hand I am fully accepting the practical certainty of an eventual full recovery; on the other hand, I am having to fully and radically accept that in theory I could not recover. It is like God telling me I will recover, but that I have to take a leap of faith and trust in Him as the Divine Physician and in His Divine Providence.
For everything there is a time, including a time to be sick and a time to heal, as Scripture teaches. God is saying to surrender to the mystery of the timeline.
So what I am working on is re-framing the residual uncertainty of it all that still surfaces once in a while from a situation of anxiety to a situation of ongoing personal transformation. I can let this get the best of me, or I can conquer it and benefit from the silver lining of it. That is the choice I have to make, and I choose to grab this bull by the horns and let the good overcome evil, rather than evil overcome the good.
But since this condition is very much rooted in thought, the longer I let the anxious worries persist the longer I delay recovery, whereas the faster I come to full terms with this the faster is my recovery. And I see now after all of this time, this is the central task remaining.
To surrender to God in trust and give uncertainty totally to Him, while, in my case, cultivating a child-like trust I will in good time fully recover. I have been trying to do that all along but I feel it in my bones now, in addition to the rehab protocol I am following, this is the area that most needs to be accomplished.
God gives many people, most people at different points in their life, an extraordinary, existential dose of suffering, that challenges them to the very core of their being. And what I have learned more and more in my own case is how much we must see the positive in suffering, to learn and grow from it. On a practical level there is only one choice to fully accept and offer up the cross, because doing so gives peace of mind, and not doing so gives a state of perpetual torment. But on a spiritual level doing this is transformative, redemptive, and elevating to a higher state.
There is the case of astronaut Chris Hadfield who in 2013 had to re-frame his thinking about an annoying sound on the space station, so it wouldn’t drive him crazy. One day he started hearing an annoying, moderately loud humming/buzzing sound from the ship. After much effort, he could not identify the source or cause of the sound. Some of the crew heard it but for them it was a minimal background sound they barely thought about. Other members didn’t even hear it. But he did constantly, and it was moderately loud. Later he theorized he heard it more than others since he was the crew chief whose five senses, including hearing, were more alert and tuned into potential problems with the ship. But this annoyance left him not only distracted but anxious. And this is where his training set in, and he used deep breathing and psychological meditation to cope.
Finally he figured out what to do, and that was to completely overhaul and re-frame how he thought about the sound, to minimize the negative and maximize the positive. So he compared the sound to the idle of a diesel truck parked with the engine running, a familiar sound he found soothing. So as he kept associating the two similar sounds, he was able to stop thinking of the sound as annoying and instead think of it as soothing. By the end of his time on board, it had become a pleasant part of the ambient sound around him.
So that has been my task. Instead of focusing on the theoretical uncertainties about my recovery, associate the symptoms themselves as communicating what God through various means has already communicated to me, and that is that I will recover and one day thrive, and above all else, that is through trust in Him.
Hence the prayer, “Jesus I trust in thee.”