The Myth of Normal 82

“Doctors,” she writes, “become masters at stuffing their emotions. We can’t cry when we’re grieving or when someone has hurt our feelings, or when we are sad.” I recently spoke with the California-based physician. “In medical school,” she told me, “I was being sexually harassed by my surgery professors all the time. All the time. I just had to tolerate it . . . I never went to the medical school director, I never told anybody, or asked for protection, because that was part of my wounding: I wasn’t allowed to ask for help, to be ‘needy,’ to complain.” When she was twenty-seven, Dr. Rankin was admitted to the coronary care unit at her hospital for an episode of distressingly rapid heartbeat that did not respond to the usual noninvasive measures. After receiving electrical shock treatment to restore her normal heart rate, she was sent directly back to work. By age thirty-three, she was taking multiple medications for a number of conditions, including three drugs for high blood pressure and palpitations, antihistamines, and a steroid—which, again, is a stress hormone—and weekly injections for allergies, which, she was told, she’d have to stay on for the rest of her life. She was also treated for a cervical abnormality, a precancerous state that reappeared soon after the procedure. All the while— and this will sound familiar—no physician asked her what stresses might be weighing on her, promoting immune problems, and potentiating malignancy. Today Dr. Rankin is fully healthy and taking no drugs at all. In her case, healing owed nothing to conventional medical treatment and everything to the personal transformation she was guided to undertake—a journey she began when, at age thirty-five, she was nearly suicidal. “Within six months of quitting my job I was off all my medications,” she reports. She is now a mother, a healer, a seminar leader, and the author of several books. Her key insight was to recognize her entire life as the ground for her several illnesses, physical and mental; not separate entities but dynamic processes expressing her interactions with her world. “I had been a stereotypical good girl, overachiever, top of my class, always pushing to develop my talent and intellect, not to satisfy me but to be accepted by others,” she told me. That relentless pressure, she learned, manifested in her medical conditions. She had to let it go.

As Lissa Rankin realized, much good can come from an open-minded engagement with the process that disease represents. It may not be the guest we ever desire to see, but a modicum of hospitality—welcoming the unwelcome, so to speak—costs us nothing. It may even lead to an opportunity to find out why this particular visitor has come to call, and what it might tell us about our lives