RA (Rheumatoid Arthritis) Sucks

Suffering

I'm an odd duck. My degrees are in chemistry, clinical psychology, and theology. The rational part of my brain always seems to be in conflict with my emotional and spiritual side. Although I've learned to live with this oftentimes uncomfortable dichotomy, I've never really been able to embrace it.

But that may be changing.

Recently, I've been working my way through an interesting book called "Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian" by Paul Knitter (who happens to be the Paul Tillich Professor of Theology, World Religions and Culture at Union Theological Seminary in NYC).

Because the book is so dense and the Buddhist concepts so unfamiliar to me (I was raised in the Jewish-Christian tradition), I find that I read and re-read just a single page at a time, and then need to go and do something else. I need the time to process and mull over the new insights that the book presents to me. Despite my natural tendency toward impatience, I am trying to honor the spirit and the teaching of the book in order to use what I can to better myself. And so, like Roethke, I "take my waking slow."

Anyway, early on, Knitter presents Buddha's first sermon, the contents of which are the "Four Noble Truths." The truths are as follows:

1. Suffering comes up in everyone's life.
2. This suffering is caused by craving.
3. We can stop suffering by stopping craving.
4. To stop craving, follow Buddha's 8-fold path (which basically consists of living a moral life by avoiding harm to others and following a spiritual path based on meditation).

So I tried to apply these truths -- or at least, the first three of them -- to my life as it exists with RA. And this is what I came up with:

1. My suffering comes from the pain caused by RA.
2. I crave/desire/want to be pain-free.
3. I can stop my suffering by quashing my desire to be pain-free. I just have to figure out how to do this. Hopefully, the book will point me in the right direction.

At any rate, from what I've read so far, it seems to me that serenity and a lack of suffering might be possible through "simple" acceptance of what is. I find the idea appealing.

I've been in pain for 4 years and been diagnosed for just two. So RA is still relatively new for me. But I wonder if acceptance gets easier and if suffering somehow loses some of its prominence and focus over time. That's my hope, anyway.

The Beast Within

So, I've mentioned previously that I will read anything (except romance and westerns) depending upon my mood. For the past year or so, I've really been "into" horror novels: zombies, werewolves, vampires, ghosts. You name it: If it's got gore and bodily fluids as part of its narrative, I'm there. Although I think I've always been a bit of a ghoul (I've loved Stephen King from the earliest I can remember), I think I like horror right now for two main reasons:

1. It's at least slightly comforting to think of a world in which I could be worrying about having my arm gnawed off, my brain eaten, or my body besieged by blood-sucking leeches than it is to think about the pain and complications of RA. I mean, in horror, things definitely get worse. So in that situation, who gives a shit if you have RA?
2. In horror, you're always fighting, at the basest level, for survival of the organism -- maybe even survival of the species. There's no "quality of life" crap to think about when life is distilled to its very essence.

Anyway, in my latest horror novel ("High Bloods" by John Farris; it's a werewolf rag), I was sort of caught up by one of the quotations the author uses at the beginning of his novel. From Samuel Johnson: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."

Since reading that quotation, I've been thinking about how "beastly" people with chronic illnesses can, unknowingly, sometimes be. And by beastly, I suppose I mean "bitter, nasty, etc." -- all the things that draw us away from other people and our humanity rather than towards them.

And we all do it occasionally. I know that depending upon my pain levels, for example, I can be irritable, grumpy, vexed, in high dudgeon, and even unapproachable. When I lash out at others and at the world for my inability to interact with them at the levels I desire, I release my inner beast. And in doing so, for maybe just the merest moment, I no longer feel my pain -- I no longer feel the ache of my very human condition.

Afterward, of course, I am overwhelmed by guilt and full of apologies. (It seems to me I spend a lot of time apologizing, especially to Eric. Sigh.) 

But you know, I'm incredibly glad that in the midst of being a person who coexists with the pain of RA, I am able to remain mostly human. I am able to keep the beast -- the monsters of anger, estrangement, alienation, and bitterness -- mostly at bay. 

Yes, I've been "infected" by the RA "virus." But that doesn't mean I have to be a monster. At least not all the time. ;)