There’s another side to illness. The heightened thoughts and stand backness from the normal day runnings of life; observing without the fast rush of ‘get there’ adrenalin; the comings and goings are slowed down, so you notice where your feet fall.

Or, as Virginia Woolf said:

“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual
change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go
down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what
wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to
view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little
rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are
uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of
death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and
wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of angels and the
harpers when we have a tooth out and come the surface in the
dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth-rinse the
mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of
Heaven to welcome us – when we think of this, as we are so
frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness
has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the
prime themes of literature.”

(On Being Ill is an essay by Virginia Woolf  that appeared in T.S.Eliot’s New Criterion in January, 1926).