The Anatomy of Courage
Two years ago, while attending my cousin’s high school graduation party, I was talking to one of my doctor uncles about books and he recommended I read The Anatomy of Courage. It’s written by Lord Moran, a physician and medical officer in WWI, who later became Winston Churchill’s doctor during WWII. Published in 1945, this book called much-needed attention to the effect of war on soldiers, 30 some years before the term “post traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) was even coined. (I believe “shell shock” was the term in use). Soldiers were returning home, with a range of physical injuries, but even if these injuries healed, the humans that remained were severely broken. Lord Moran proposed that these soldiers had run out of *something* akin to mental stamina, drive, emotional energy, courage. The latter is obviously the prime term of interest, but he parses it in a way that it fortunately doesn’t get reduced to some sentimental connotation.
I was six months out from having my colon removed, was living with an ostomy bag, and still had 2 surgeries left, when my uncle recommended this book. I had also just returned from living and working in South Carolina for 5 weeks, but being back in Pittsburgh meant pre-surgery appointments and trying to somehow mentally prepare after hearing my surgeon say, “the 2nd surgery will be as bad as or worst than the 1st.” (The 2nd surgery *would* end up being far worse than the 1st in terms of a long, painful recovery and multiple complications, but they weren’t even predicting those bumps in the road at this point). My uncle and I must have been talking about this, because I was trying to articulate that I felt really spent already, drained of the…whatever you want to call it…mental stamina? Courage? Lifeblood? Ability? To get through it. That even if my body could get through it, some “I” could not get through it. This scared me. A lot.
Everyone is familiar with that maxim, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I unflinchingly believed that for the first few years of my disease, before I started to consider those words in a literal physical sense. The years of disease and medications and treatments? No, they didn’t kill me, but they definitely made me, in terms of my physical body, much weaker. So I proceeded to interpret this maxim, particularly the word “stronger,” with psychological or emotional underpinnings instead. These years made my body weaker, but my mind/spirit stronger. Not in spite of getting through it all, but because of getting through it all. I believed that for a few years too. When my uncle suggested reading The Anatomy of Courage, I had stopped believing even that. I felt weak in the body and weak in the head and was absolutely terrified of *anything* bad happening to me health-related, even something “normal” like breaking a bone or getting the flu, because I felt “done” in my head. Just “done” in the sense of having run out of that *something* necessary for getting through subsequent health challenges, but I couldn’t explain why I felt that way, how I got there, or when it happened. But I felt it.
I cannot possibly imagine what it is to become a soldier or fight in a war, but for what it’s worth, I am fascinated by and in awe of those that do. While there is not comparable physical overlap between what a soldier is going through when at war, and what a person is going through when faced with serious chronic disease, I think there is overlap on a psychological/emotional level. I didn’t read The Anatomy of Courage for another 18 months, partly because I was scared this book would tell me what I already felt, that maybe I should just recognize my dwindling courage supply and admit defeat.
In The Anatomy of Courage, Lord Moran sets out do the following: find out how courage is born, how it is sustained, and what can be done, if anything, to delay or prevent its “using up.” This last one is what my uncle talked about, the idea of there being a finite amount of “courage” in a human being, that it can be used up and and cannot be replenished. This is something I had independently, and at times subconsciously, been thinking about for many of my ill years: my body would be so broken but not “done,” whereas my spirit was broken and did appear to be/feel “done.” Like I had reached a tipping point at the top of the “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” bell curve and I was on my way down.
In the first few pages, he writes:
“How is courage spent in war? Courage is will-power, whereof no man has an unlimited stock; and when in war it is used up, he is finished. A man’s courage is his capital and he is always spending.”
“There seemed to be four degrees of courage…: men who did not feel fear; men who felt fear but did not show it; men who felt fear and showed it but did their job; men who felt fear, showed it and shirked.”
(Note: all bolded quotes are Lord Moran’s words and from this book)
Moran isn’t certain the first degree can exist, that perhaps there is no such thing as “fearlessness,” but rather only something like the third degree, the courage of control.
“Do they really feel less than we do or have they attained a peak of control which is beyond our reach?”
This is key! And I think this is what happens after so many years of chronic disease; one/I fine tunes this sense of control to such an extent that onlookers equate it with fearlessness or a substantial and potentially limitless amount of courage. “How do you do it??” they will ask. The only answer to this I can ever come up with, other than a shrug of the shoulders, is: I don’t have a choice (and in regards to the experiencing of disease) I feel it, but I don’t think it. I feel ALL of it, illness permeates every inch of my body in a physical way, but I try not to let it permeate every inch of my mind. This is the “control” mentioned above. And it is really hard to create and maintain. In this book Moran writes, in regards to a soldier exemplifying this control:
“…a way of looking at things which alone makes it possible to carry on. His business is to become insensitive, to give up thinking. The wise man lives only for the hour…. He looks just like a boy who is beginning an illness with the shivering attacks, and in the frankest way he will tell you he is just petrified by the business. But I don’t worry much about him, because in the intervals his mind is quite normal. He neither thinks too much of what is gone nor of what may come. He just gets as much out of life as he can. While this lasts he won’t crack however much he is scared.”
The alternative?
“But sometimes the shadow of fear drove men in just the opposite direction, into sheer recklessness. There is drink, a last crazy effort to get something out of life while it lasts. Was this fellow breaking because he was drinking or was he drinking because he was breaking? Was alcohol a cause or a symptom of defeat? Not that it mattered, for once that game began the man was done.”
What (sometimes just temporarily) delays the loss of courage and journey to recklessness and despair?
“In the presence of danger man often finds salvation in action. To dull emotion he must do something; to remain immobile, to stagnate in mind or body, is to surrender without terms. Whereas movement, work of any kind, helps to deliver him from those feelings which are traitors to his better nature.”
Again, this is the “courage of control,” or how I always thought of it, “I feel it but I don’t think it.” When I think back on all of my disease years, they are somewhat unbelievably jam-packed with “action” and “movement,” with few instances of stagnation. Moran found that soldiers who were engaged in active warfare, like in a fighter plane, were able to keep going longer than those in observation roles or “on watch.” It’s not a coincidence then that the concept of PTSD comes “after” or “post”; the action and commands are gone and there is only time to think and analyze and make choices.
“Courage is a moral quality; it is not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives, the fixed resolve not to quit; an act of renunciation which must be made not once but many times by the power of the will. Courage is will power…in Gaelic hope and courage are the same word.”
With chronic disease, sometimes I do have that “fixed resolved not to quit,” but other times it’s a less conscious addiction to action/movement, i.e. an addiction to distractions. No matter how productive, pragmatic, or fulfilling, they are still distractions serving to prevent thinking about disease “stuff.”
…as Hippocrates taught, there is a certain antagonism between physical and mental pain. In a battle somehow the horror of this business of war is not felt. Nature has the stop on; perhaps we are half-doped to come through it all. In this war, Critchley has noticed in sailors the same mental viscosity–a kind of blinkers effect–while the danger lasts, so that only in retrospect does the full force of the ordeal emerge.”
Only after reading the above did I finally understand that something related to PTSD happens with chronic disease, this idea of being half-doped (sometimes literally!) and not feeling while IN it. Every time I am in the hospital, I go through the motions as if on autopilot and don’t “lose it” too often because I have programmed myself to “come through it all.” But when inevitably “only in retrospect does the full force of the ordeal emerge”…well, it’s awful and overwhelming. Sometimes this full force hits me a week later, a month later, even years later. Driving past my hospital and I have to pull over because I feel paralyzed. Declining ice in a drink because it reminds me of subsisting on 1 cup of ice a day in the hospital. Finding a salt packet in my purse and crying because I remember that I’d add them to my “meals” of vegetable broth and lick every salt granule off the bottom. Not being able to look at jello without getting nauseous. Hearing the succession of beeps of a truck backing up and comparing it to the beeps and the same length of silence in between of the IV machine. Vehement opposition to fluorescent lights.
Before I read this book, before someone said to me that what I was feeling was akin to PTSD, I just got mad at myself for reacting in “dramatic” ways. How could a mere salt packet reduce me to tears for a half hour?? I hated it. And I kept thinking, I got through it. I survived. It’s over. What’s wrong with me? Why am I not over it yet? When will I be completely over it? I recently read The Yellow Birds, which is Kevin Power’s recounting of his time in Iraq and subsequent debilitating PTSD: “My memories would seem closer the farther I got from the circumstances that gave birth to them.” Exactly.
“Can it be said that we are defeated by our own thoughts? Are we not most fearful often when there is no danger?”
I’m unsure of the context here, but Moran quotes Thomas Hardy: “More life may trickle out of men through thought than through a gaping wound.”
So what to do, when thinking and thoughts cannot be avoided?
“When we did think, we lived in the past, for it was clearly unwise to live in the present. We could only cheat our present distress by a flight into other times, away from all the dreary tribulations of the passing hour. Only humour helped. Humour that made a mock of life and scoffed at our own frailty. Humour that touched everything with ridicule and had taken the bite out of the last thing, death. It was a working philosophy that carried us through the day, a kind of detachment from the ‘insubstantial pageant of the world.'”
It’s the same for me, with disease: humor is employed, or an attempt to time-travel out of the present, with varying degrees of success.
The words chosen and the semantics involved, when people talk about disease, are often characterized by war terminology: fighting, battling, winning, losing. The Arthur Frank books I’ve read and written about before on this blog have touched on this. While Frank doesn’t exactly agree with this way of speaking or talking about illness happening within, I’m not sure where I stand; the emotional parallels I have found in the book I just wrote about in this post definitely add some interesting elements to that debate.
I also don’t know where I stand when thinking about Moran’s belief that one can run out of courage, without the option of refueling. I don’t want to believe it, you know? Because there are too many times that I feel so close to running out. How close to that threshold am I? All of the above questions and observations, combined with my recent 19 months of nursing prerequisite science courses, remind me of the making of and administering of vaccines. By definition, vaccination is artificial active immunity. The vaccine usually consists of a virus that is either inactivated, or live but modified to stimulate the immune system just enough to destroy the virus and remember it. How much of the inactivated virus is necessary for properly stimulating a response? Is there a quantifiable threshold or tipping point? Healthy people usually react to the live versions (which last longer, immunity-wise) in a safe and predictable way. People with less than stellar immune systems like myself can’t get the live version of the flu vaccine, for instance, because even though it’s modified, it might be strong enough to wreak serious havoc, potentially fatally. How much of this live version would be too much for the compromised immune system? That threshold is presumably different for different immune systems.
There is a fine line then between a vaccine literally encompassing “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and just flat out killing you. Being able to identify that threshold would be the end. Perhaps it is the same with courage, will power, hope: you try to stay as far from that threshold as possible, even though you can’t pinpoint where it is. And maybe it doesn’t even exist, unless you make it exist out of fear. Lord Moran writes:
“A lost battle is a battle that one believes lost.”
In lieu of wanting to definitively “win” the persistent battle in my mind (and eradicate the possibility of any future mind battles), I would like to believe that I will never succumb to the sheer power of my thoughts and definitively lose.
August 24th, 2013 at 4:52 pm
Thank you for sharing your thoughts on illness so eloquently. Vicki Bresee recommended this site since I have multiple health issues including chronic pain. I am in complete agreement. ..at times I feel as if I am Totally spent and wonder if I can continue. I have to have distractions or it is absolutely overwhelming. I have a fb page just to vent and at times try to laugh at my ridiculous jumble of dz/conditions.
I would like to be your fb friend if you are on it. My name is nikki smith and I am on vickis fb friend list.
September 26th, 2014 at 2:29 am
Some of the most preferred jerseys,3154, conventional jerseys and as well , custom cycling tops The enterprise that has to ensure your dirty costumes (and such thinggs as towels,, bed linens and table covers) are removed from the bedroom (together with the bathroom carpet, the back door and out from your sports pouch) to the clothes, into the system,cheap Orioles jerseys usa,7274, onto the insert then lower back is you Consider adding something what a few of the fans the thing is at NFL football
September 29th, 2014 at 4:34 am
New NC restaurant looking for donations up front,Customized nfl football jerseys for sale. get customized nfl jerseys cheap from china store with competitve price and fast free shipping.While renovations are underway on Main Street, the business owners took an online approach to drum up interest and money. People have so far donated nearly $3,000. The goal is to get $50,000 in contributions. Money will go toward kitchen equipment, according to Veres.Food philosophy: The restaurant partnership is
September 29th, 2014 at 8:20 pm
Public action Hubei station GuoXiaoDong attendee music teacherJanuary 06, to send their children sneaker national action Ambassadors Guo Xiaodong came in Hubei Hongan brought sports footwear for horses Elementary Planned and two teaching points doing 112 children. In order to allow young boys and girls to have a better learning workplace, along with volunteers GuoXiaoDong also deliberately equalized playground overgrown weeds, and stucco wall structure painted with a brush employing the kids in
October 3rd, 2014 at 9:20 pm
Jordan acquired a majority spot in the Bobcats NBA second dunkle cool football jerseys bossYao Ming had 20 thousand thousand yuan acquisition of Shanghai men’s basketball employees,fake elite socks for sale, a player becomes the boss prevalent. However, the acquisition of Bobcat and furthermore Jordan compared to Yao Ming, the boss is shabby — Yesterday morning,Lowest Price Discount Chinese NFL Jerseys Free Shipping, Basketball Board voted unanimously that can cheap football jerseys china appr
October 4th, 2014 at 1:04 am
One of them can be: In the event Zoysia additionally large apple company company end utilized with the eighth additionally incredibly very last playoff area combined with 11 weeks merchandise, additionally any tad when pub models spotted might be throughout by means of virtue relating to applying a single extra relating to individuals may be the successful all through procedures or maybe overtime, Your current shoot-out may be the successful might be subtractedThey have some of the famous player
March 1st, 2016 at 3:47 am
今の限定版の時計を配置したオメガ同軸逃げシステム装置、スムース、象牙色文字盤が優雅な復古息、その上の時間スケール、針と早期オメガマークやアルファベットは18金の材質、気高くて優雅。文字盤の上のローマ数字の「XXIX」(29)寓意が北京で行われた第29回オリンピック大会。18金ケース径37 mmを経て、スムースに磨きをかけて、18金付きとボタンの黒い折り畳みワニ皮バンドを完璧に溶けて。スーパーコピー時計アーチ防摩耗サファイアクリスタル表鏡を経て、防ミラー処理、深さ100メートル防水。表を刻んで北京オリンピックマーク印刷、唯一無二の限定版番号や腕時計の発売日とともに、黒つや消し専属セット荷重。 http://www.ooobag.com/tokei/bvlgari/assioma/ac28cdefce4de5dd.html
March 1st, 2016 at 11:24 pm
紹介によると、赫柏林このブランドはいま家族の第3世代の人が経営、赫柏林表も外観デザインや品質の上で、すべて持ってフランスロマンチックと繊細な性格。設計上のオリジナリティも比較的地味、線は優雅な。このブランドの品質について、肖晓もまた、「彼らの品質も守って家族の使命感、利益と家族の栄誉感の選択の中で彼らに後者より。」 http://www.ooobrand.com/distribution/index.html
March 1st, 2016 at 11:25 pm
コンスタンチンchaykinコンプトゥスの復活祭の時計は、あなたはそれを推測し、東方正教会の復活祭の感動的な日付を識別する顕著な挑戦に取り組むために設計されました。 パネライスーパーコピー このように、なぜ日付を計算するのが非常に難しいですか?さて、決定要因を含むので、月のサイクルは、太陽のサイクルは、エパクト、太陽の補正とより多く。chaykinのこれらの要因の全てを使用して計算をするために彼自身の方法を作成する方法を学びました、そして、彼だけにクロックを教えるように東方正教会の復活祭の日付を計算する。私たちはすぐにリストが無数の他の機能の中で、これはこの顕著な構造の目玉、大理石、真鍮、シルバー、鋼、ジュラルミン、ガラス、金、ラピスラズリ、とより多くから作られます。 http://www.eevance.com/tokei/zenith
March 1st, 2016 at 11:26 pm
としての時にSwatchは腕時計のスタイルを求めても突破、非常に重い小売店のデザインコンセプトは現在、顧客のために新しい感覚。「Swatch利園山道旗艦店」を採用しスイス新しい「Ice Dunes -能登麻美子レディ」をデザインコンセプト、店内の内装を巧みに白を基調に歩道橋空間、ファッション、Swatchの腕時計やアクセサリーの主役になる台の上に、完全に製品の色を見せ斓マダラは緻し匠心独运の視覚に訴える。シャネルスーパーコピー 旗艦店の設備具高度柔軟性の資質、店内の内装がスピーディに交換によって展示の形は、多くの変化と強いイメージ効果以外に合わせて、新シリーズの発売のほかに、お客様によって新鮮で、客にファッション息の環境下にSwatchから潮~型の腕時計やアクセサリーシリーズは、ショッピングを満喫して楽しみ! http://www.newkakaku.net/guz1.htm
March 1st, 2016 at 11:26 pm
1929年アメリカ株式市場の大暴落し、その影響を受けて、自動車製品の販売量を増やすため、アメリカ発起した運動場の技術進歩として、機能が美学さほど重要でない。チュードルスーパーコピーこの運動の後に対してタブ界石英危機に創後捲土重来を生じた啓発を受け、石英危機後のタブ商より重視機械時計はデザイン。この傾向は、90年代末と21世紀初頭の腕時計の作品の中で現れて。 http://www.bagkakaku.com/vuitton_bag/2/N41100.html
April 30th, 2016 at 3:24 am
Hello! I’ve been reading your website for a long time now and finally got the
bravery to go ahead and give you a shout out from Huffman Texas!
Just wanted to say keep up the excellent work!
October 27th, 2017 at 10:32 pm
I wanted to write you one tiny word to thank you the moment again for those breathtaking strategies you have documented in this article. This has been tremendously open-handed of people like you to grant freely just what a number of us would have offered for sale for an ebook to end up making some bucks for their own end, precisely since you might have done it if you considered necessary. Those suggestions as well acted to provide a fantastic way to be aware that other individuals have the same eagerness the same as my own to see more related to this problem. I’m sure there are a lot more enjoyable moments in the future for people who find out http://pusnews.com.
October 27th, 2017 at 10:33 pm
Needed to compose you this very small note in order to thank you once again for these beautiful advice you have shared at this time. This is so seriously generous with you to grant freely what a lot of people could possibly have supplied for an ebook to generate some dough on their own, specifically given that you might well have tried it in the event you wanted. These strategies in addition worked as a easy way to be certain that many people have the same zeal similar to my own to figure out somewhat more regarding this condition. I know there are thousands of more pleasurable opportunities in the future for individuals that discover http://thiefnews.com.
November 13th, 2017 at 4:13 am
Great place to order cheap practice hockey jerseys by Paypal.
Cheap NFL Jerseys
December 20th, 2018 at 1:34 pm
Great post, thanks and keep bringing news like this
April 1st, 2019 at 12:21 pm
Wedding Dresses Online | Wedding Dresses for 2019 – Cheap Wedding Dresses, Fashion & Modest Bridal Gowns Online.Shop for cheap Wedding Dresses? We have great 2019 Wedding Dresses on sale. Up to 80% Off, Low Price High Quality. View Size Chart. Multiple Payment Options.
cheap dress like a star 2019 https://longformaldresses.tumblr.com
April 1st, 2019 at 12:25 pm
Cheap Prom Dresses – The Dress Outlet:Cheap Party Dresses, Inexpensive Formal Evening Gowns,Prom dresses for plus size. Beautiful selection of short or long prom dresses under 100 in your favorite colors. Get one at cheap price!
cheap wedding dresses https://maternityeveningdresses.tumblr.com
May 20th, 2020 at 5:05 am
Great post, thanks for sharing Treasure at Tampines