Washington Post Op-Ed: A Sudden Epiphany Showed a Johns Hopkins Physician the Limits of Medicine, by John V. Campo, (Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine):
As an academic physician, trained first in pediatrics and then psychiatry, a field highly skeptical of religious faith, I was unprepared for a transcendent experience that followed what I will call a housecleaning misadventure last spring. I have since come to view my previous skepticism of religious experience — one that prevails across much of medicine — as something that can impair doctors’ understanding of patients and their needs.
It started on Memorial Day as my wife and I were cleaning our home. There were some resistant hard water stains in the shower that I decided to tackle with an electric scrubber and an industrial-strength cleaner. Soon after, my left hand and the left side of my face went numb, and I had difficulty controlling my movements. I concluded that I had unwittingly poisoned myself by inhaling the cleaner. The symptoms quickly wore off, and our discussion with poison control persuaded us that I did not require emergency services.
Later that week, I awoke in the middle of the night, my wife sleeping quietly beside me. My mind was filled with a message that felt like it came from outside me, in words that were not my own: “Someday your body will fail you, and all you will have is me. It will be enough.” …
Several months later, after a long walk on the beach during a family vacation, the symptoms I had while cleaning our shower recurred. It was a focal seizure, as I would later learn. An MRI scan showed a mass in the right posterior frontal lobe of my brain, abutting the motor strip. It was a glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor with a poor prognosis. …
Blaise Pascal, … on the night of Nov. 23, 1654, had a transcendent experience that he recorded on a scrap of paper. One portion of that text read: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of philosophers and scholars.” Pascal did not meet God by constructing a proof for divine existence; he encountered God unexpectedly in the middle of the night.
Such a moment of sudden revelation or insight is often referred to as an epiphany, derived from the Greek “epipháneia,” meaning appearance or manifestation. Forty-five percent of U.S. adults report having such experiences. Discounting these occurrences as purely subjective has potential to limit practitioners’ connection with patients in medicine and psychiatry.
My story isn’t complete, but the words that came to me in the quiet of the night are true enough: Someday my body will fail. Indeed, that process has already begun. Following a craniotomy and partial surgical resection of the tumor, along with radiation and chemotherapy, I have experienced changes in sensation and strength on the left half of my body. Although the remaining words of the message contain some mystery, I’m hopeful and confident that the love of God surrounding me “will be enough.”
Editor’s Note: If you would like to receive a weekly email each Sunday with links to faith posts on TaxProf Blog, email me here.
