Personal health crises may challenge the foundations of our reality. Everything we believe about the world and our future is cast in doubt as core assumptions are invalidated to accommodate conceptions of disease and disability. The negative implications of illness may invade every aspect of our lives. Thinking sick is expecting less than what is possible, and yet, it does not have to be this way. Physical illness provides the human spirit an opportunity to construe reality as it is, fluid and infinite. Physical illness provides us with an opportunity to understand ourselves as separate from physical existence thereby expanding the potential for what we may be even in this world of matter and energy, technology and science. Thinking Sick reflects the introspection of a piece of Western Kentucky white trash, turned small-time preacher, turned clinical psychologist, turned entrepreneur, turned Fortune 10 healthcare executive, who is brought to his knees by the paralyzing and painful Guillain Barre Syndrome and Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy. As I come to expect a life defined by unrelenting, neuropathic pain and debilitating, peripheral muscle weakness, my life spirals downward until I observe the fundamental relationship between “me” and my physical body, allowing me to gain separation from the core beliefs composing my assumptive world and personal life narrative. I discover through observing pain and paralysis we are not our illness. Illness does not define who we are, our realities, and our futures. We, not our illness, define our realities and therefore our futures. We are our greatest cause and should therefore expect more. If you are facing a major medical problem, if you are suffering, you will identify with my private struggle to see what is possible despite physical impairment. If you work in healthcare or healthcare policy, you will be sternly challenged to consider the implications of systemic assumptions inhibiting our approach to pharmaceutical innovation and healthcare policy. A new way of knowing, a new way of verifying and approving, and a new way of helping and healing will emerge if we will individually and collectively throw off restrictive assumptions, allowing room for the freedom to imagine, the courage to determine, the energy to persevere, and the awareness to appreciate it all come what may.