To be suddenly removed from their lives was enormously disruptive and frightening. Every child worries when a parent gets sick, and every sick parent worries about contributing to their kids' fears. I also went from being a husband to a patient, and not a very good patient, so that placed an enormous strain on our marriage, something that I wrote about in the book. I've lived with both long-term illness and unemployment -- two of the major stresses that can cripple happiness -- and the impact and repercussions of illness, in my experience, have been far more severe.
JB: Who would know better than you? You write about an interesting phenomenon you term "the patient's dilemma". Can you talk about that a little before we move on?
JR: It's presumptuous of me to speak for all sick people in the context of my self-termed "patient's dilemma" -- who the hell appointed me spokesperson -- so permit me to relate it specifically to my own situation. I used the term to refer to the psychological paradox I inflicted on other people as my condition improved.
When my health was touch-and-go, I demanded recognition of its severity and resented people's impulse to offer words of hope and encouragement. "You'll get better," sounded to me like a dismissal of my real suffering. Then, when I was healthy enough to resume an active life, I was bothered when people still treated me like a sick person. "How are you feeling? Are you OK?" sounded to me like pity even if it was an expression of compassion, like a judgment that I would continue to be thought of as sick, when, psychologically, I wanted to move on. As I said, I was a lousy patient.
book cover by http://www.jonreiner.com
JB: I see that. On a different but definitely related topic, your stint at ICU [the company, not the hospital unit], was archetypal for all kinds of reasons. You describe the set-up brilliantly in your book. Can you share that experience with our readers?
JR: I'd be delighted to discuss this other kind of sickness. The period in my life that serves the timeframe of the memoir was marked by two pivotal events -- illness and unemployment -- that triggered the personal crises dramatized in the narrative by the total deprivation and dislocation of Nothing By Mouth.
As a writer, both events worked as equal weights on the same bar, allowing me to take the story far down before eventually bringing it back up to rejoin the living. My invention of "ICU" (not the real name of my employer) may have been an overbaked joke, but I thought it was in the right spirit. I'd actually experienced three corporate layoffs from 2001 to 2007, and I consolidated those events for storytelling purposes.
The occasion of the ICU layoff depicted in the book really did happen. I was a creative director for an integrated marketing agency, leading a pitch for the business of a global processed-food and sweetened-beverage company. In the weeks leading up to the pitch, the publicly-traded holding company that managed us kept cutting heads until I was about the last person in the place. I delivered the pitch at the client's opulent and silent corporate campus, and I thought it went well.
On the ride back to the city, an ICU executive called to tell me there was no need to return to the office, and that my severance envelope was being delivered to my apartment. ICU wound up selling my creative work to the client for someone else to execute. I saw the campaign on TV and print for a long time after. That was the last time I worked in a full-time job. At least the word came to me by phone. The news of my first layoff was delivered by fax. That profound experience of worker devaluation has been a dominant theme for me and millions of other men and women in this country, so I thought it had the universality that would resonate in the book.
JB: You've written about good health involving balance -- in work, life and in what we eat. You're no longer a corporate cog. So far so good. Please talk about what else you've learned about how to achieve that Holy Grail of overall balance.
JR: For me, "balance" has represented more than figuring out how to achieve the healthy mix of work, family, play, diet, etc., which is, enormous in its own right. Those elements largely exist within your control -- you can have a palpable result based on the choices you make. What's been harder has been accepting living with uncertainty, and in one area at least, that's directly related to living with chronic illness. As my wise hematologist summed up the problem to me during an exam: "You want answers and certainty. You can't have that. You live with uncertainty. That's your lot. You have to accept it."
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