Pat's stroke: the best thing that ever happened to her

The theme's most extreme statement that catastrophe is the door to recovery. Pat spent her twenties failing at rehabs; only a near-fatal D.T. stroke at thirty-two — leaving her communicating in Morse-code blinks, her face half-rictused — finally broke her enough to Surrender, so that she can call the stroke "far and away the best thing that’s ever happened to her." And her willingness, armless, to "eat a rock" on the founder's order is Surrender rendered as literal absurd obedience: the readiness to do a senseless thing because you're told, which is the whole program's price of entry. Ruin is reframed as the necessary demolition; you cannot Surrender until you have been leveled.