Much ado... or not... or maybe just "grace"

Last night I caught a few minutes of a "House" episode where one character had some weird thing going on that they couldn't figure out for (surprise!) an hour. Big deal, right? Same story, just how long will they go before they realize it's not Lupus. It's never lupus. But that's not what I came to talk about.  It was that the main bed-ridden character had low testosterone levels. (They didn't say how low, so one, well, ok, I was left to wonder, and get competitive, "Was it lower than mine?")
So, they gave him testosterone shots.  And he turned from this wonderfully sensitive man into a complete jerk, from, one thinks, the massive bump in testosterone.  Interesting, but schtupidt (do an Arte Johnson voice from Laugh-In and you'll get it).  I mean stupid in the sense of the jerkoid factor of the character being completely driven by the hormone.

It's not that easy. I'm not playing down the factor the hormones have because I've been through something of that picture myself. But I didn't like the implication that the shift in the TV character was all hormone-driven.

Of course, I'm arguing. And I'm still in the throes of trying to understand how I was changed by a lack of a hormone and identifying what that means for the future "me".  It's not that I haven't come back to some sense of what I was before the treatment regimen (so, sex drive *does* return, happily and, surprising as it seems, annoyingly).  But having been through that treatment I am not the same, no matter if my blood tests say I'm inside the envelope now.

Oh I don't know what I'm trying to say... but I'm still trying to say it.  Why is it that I try to put words to something that has no words?  A friend of mine recalled the words of the Greek playwright Aeschylus:

     Wisdom comes through suffering.
     Trouble, with its memories of pain,
     Drips in our hearts as we try to sleep,
     So men against their will
     Learn to practice moderation.
     Favours come to us from gods.     (fm. Agamemnon)

...which she quoted more along the lines of Robert Kennedy's variant...

     Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget

     falls drop by drop upon the heart

     until, in our own despair, against our will,

     comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

During that same discussion, somehow, the term "grace" came up.  My friend had heard the term defined by a caller on a radio show (I think) and it goes something like this:

"Grace is an event that happens, unbidden, against your will, in the midst of struggle, free to all. And after that, you're never the same."

Even if there isn't an original thought in my writing there is this: a shared experience across the ages. And so it goes.