I had first met with her a couple of months after my regular dermatologist had started treating me for the bright red scaly spots that were taking over large areas of my skin.
I am grateful to them both—to the first for referring me to the specialist, and to the specialist for what finally worked. This essay is about gratitude.
But first: “healing” is probably too strong a word for where I am right now in relation to psoriasis. Psoriasis is an auto-immune disease in which the body’s immune system, thinking there’s a threat to the skin, attacks the skin. The triggers for auto-immune diseases, as I understand them, can lurk in our bodies long after discernible symptoms disappear, waiting for the next opportunity to assert themselves.
Plus, although I am done with phototherapy for now, I am still injecting my thigh with a biologic medication every twelve weeks. It got at or near the source of the psoriasis, and the creams and ointments and phototherapy treated the symptoms, visible and itchy on my legs, torso, and arms. The injections, the substances that I (and my wife) applied to my skin, and the light box I am where I am today.
Fortunately, the rash never erupted on my face or hands, so most people did not know about my psoriasis unless I told them. That made for a slight credibility problem when I had to schedule appointments around the frequent phototherapy sessions. I did not wear shorts while we were on a Caribbean cruise last February for fear I’d be regarded as one who had broken out of a leper colony. Fortunately by summer’s hottest days, the spots were faint enough that I no longer had that worry.
The prompt for this piece springs from my ruminating on the question, Insofar as I have been healed of psoriasis, to whom or what do I owe thanks?
As a Christian believer, I reflexively begin with thanks to God. But even as I write those words, I want readers to know that I write them with a palpable sense of mystery, and no sense of personal pride or superiority. I thank God for my good outcome because I believe that, despite the theological tension between the notion of a good supreme being and the reality of evil in the world, God is ultimately the source of healing. That’s a statement of faith. I can do little more than just put it out there. And I trust I would say it even if my psoriasis not gone away.
So having thanked God, I must say more. I have experienced freedom from this ailment because I am inextricably part of a web of life that sometimes brings me good and other times brings me ill, over which I have little control and to which I can only give witness.
I am grateful to two fine, caring, persistent, and completely professional doctors, who did did not come out of nowhere. They are products of fine educations that drew upon generations of attempts to heal psoriasis as well as upon the latest medical discoveries and technologies.
One of those two partners with another dermatologist in a small, independent practice; the other works in the immense Cleveland Clinic complex. Both are backed up by and tied into offices and labs far beyond the tiny exam rooms in which I saw them. Both had access to treatments that are the result of years of research in governmental and private institutions and clinics, research conducted by people who would not give up on any even slightly-promising avenue of study until they had wholly exhausted its possibilities.
Push it even further back: what natural substances went into the products that were finally developed so they could help me? Who found them and recognized some medical or other possibility within them through basic research justified only be, “because it’s there”? Who knew what might come to be out of someone’s mere curiosity?
I am grateful that my phototherapy treatments were available a ten-minute drive from home, and that I did not have to schedule them around work. Shockingly, the phototherapy appointments have to be scheduled during daytime, Monday through Friday. What does the average working person with psoriasis do?
One more thing for which I give thanks: I could afford the therapies I was offered. Not that I could pay for them all myself—hardly! This was a costly bout with illness. Some of the medicines I’ve used are by far the most expensive that have ever entered my body. (One costly lotion was actually made in India.)
Crucially, I have good health insurance because generations of Presbyterians have, through our Board of Pensions, made affordable, comprehensive insurance available to me, as part of a generous pension plan. And honesty compels me to write that family inheritances helped make it easier to pay what I had to pay.
I could go on, but I think my point is clear: I did not get through psoriasis on my own power. The thanks that I offer to God does not blind me to the reality of the web of nature and humanity that made restored health possible. I have been able to welcome my reprieve from psoriasis because I am part of a universal network that I did not create nor can fully understand. I certainly cannot claim any such healing as “my right,” as if other human beings do not have exactly the same right, as if I somehow earned it, or as if I am owed it.
The fantasy of being self-made—or even of being dependent upon few beyond immediate family and friends—is a fantasy because in this world no one, no nation, no culture can go it alone and survive in other than the most basic of ways.
Bound together as we are on a web we share with untold numbers of other animate beings, everything we say and do benefits or harms the web and those on it with us. So long as we live, we cannot escape where we are. Never knowing this web’s outer limits, we must make the moves we make on it with caution and all the wisdom nature and nature’s God give to us. And never forget to be thankful.
