Happy Being Sick

George Akerlof said "Happiness is knowing what you want to do and doing it." He is the 2001 nobel prize winner for economics. He wrote something important about the economics of lemons. The link between lemon economics and medicine is immediately obvious. People want to have lemons. However, people don't want to have illness. This is why the people I see here (who have illness) are not happy. The people I see at Nokomis Groves (where they grow lemons and sell ice cream) are happy (sometimes, of course). Then again, lemons (and ice cream) don't always make people happy.
I'm not really sure that Akerlof has it completely right. He has it mostly right. Reading the quote this morning I knew that this was one of the greatest problems facing my practice. "Knowing what you want to do" refers not so much to action in his comment. It refers to adherence to a moral code more than anything. It refers to behavior that generally conforms to one's thoughts of what is appropriate. In THAT context, happiness is possible with illness. We are not wanting to have illness, but we are wanting to behave a certain way under the conditions of illness. This is an important distinction. Many other people have pointed out that our response to the situation is paramount and the situation itself is secondary. My favorite quote on that topic is "Nothing is neither good nor bad but that the mind doth make it so." - William Shakespeare. Victor Frankl who was a concentration camp survivor was also very big on the idea that we choose our response to situations. He wanted to choose to not be too upset about being in a concentration camp (a lofty goal).
We are all going around doing some of what we want to be doing. We are also doing some of what we don't want to be doing. I'm not talking about what we're doing in terms of activity (golfing, etc.). I'm talking about living up to our own ethical code of conduct. Of course, some of us don't know our own ethical code of conduct, in which case we can't live up to it. The blend may favor more of one or more of the other - more doing what we want or more doing what we don't want.
This is the key to our response to illness. This is also the key to our response to dying. Illness are dying are not really different. People generally die from illness. Those patients who are mostly happy with life are mostly happy with illness and death. Those patients who are mostly miserable with life are mostly miserable with illness and death. So the only way to fight against illness is to develop the ability to do what you want to do under whatever circumstances are present.