When Glenn Beck was on Fox I loved his show, despite never watching it. What I loved about it is how he sent the Left into a frenzy. If you were a room full of strangers and wanted to identify the lunatics, mention Glenn Beck. The lunatics would suddenly begin convulsing and screeching. Otherwise, I found Beck to be a bit of  a weirdo. He was a man on a grail-quest. Having seen his ugliness in the bottom of a glass, he was racing around looking for the antidote.

Religion, followed by slaying the Progressive dragon was his thing on Fox. Then he left Fox and started his own network. I give him a ton of credit for figuring out before everyone else where the future of media lies. From what I gather The Blaze has made Beck a millionaire many times over. Still, when I see him I get the sense he is still a man on a mission that he is still trying to unravel. This latest seems to fit the pattern.

Glenn Beck on Monday revealed the true extent of his health issues, saying he can no longer keep what has happened a secret from his friends, his staff or audience, whom he considers to be his family.

If you have sensed a change in Beck — maybe you even thought he was losing interest in his program — Beck said it is because he was told he may only have several functional years left, and his health conditions were causing such excruciating pain that it was difficult to do live programming.

“Tonight’s show is not for the casual fan or, really, anyone in the press,” Beck said. “This is a one-on-one between friends. No one in the media ever does a show like this, because it is crazy. … But I believe that by not talking with you openly, it destroys everything of real meaning and value — namely, our trust.”

“I have never lied to you, but I have omitted a few really important facts because — they scared me,” Beck admitted, beginning to swallow back tears. “I didn’t have any answers, and the answers I was being given at the time meant … the end of our time together.”

Not only is there a religious vibe to this, there’s a Jimmy Swaggart vibe to it. That’s an old school preacher move. The personal testimony has been a staple of the southern religious experience since forever. The preacher reminds his flock that he is their shepherd. Then he tells them he is not long for this world. Then the ushers pass the plate and everyone kicks in what they can. The preacher recovers.

Beck said that five years ago, around the time of his Restoring Honor event in Washington, D.C., God began to tell him that he was standing in the wrong place. At around the same time, his health issues began, starting with vocal cord paralysis, eyesight problems and what doctors at first believed was a painful form of neuropathy.

“While I was at Fox, the pain would get so bad that my camera crew, our executive producer Tiffany and I, had worked out hand signals so they would know when to take the camera off of me,” Beck revealed. “We didn’t know at the time what was causing me to feel as though, out of nowhere, my hands and feet, or arms and legs would feel like someone had just crushed them, set them on fire or pushed broken glass into them.”

Beck said that while he was in intense pain, something unusual was happening that he actually thought was an advantage in his business: he only ever needed two to four hours of sleep a night.

“Doctors tell me that up until recently, I hadn’t had a real REM sleep in maybe as long as a decade,” Beck said. “I didn’t have a dream that I remember, except one in a decade. And quite honestly, this isn’t a symptom you look to fix if you have a ton to do. But the first sign of trouble I noticed was what I call a ‘time collapse.’ If we had met before, I couldn’t tell you if it was a month ago, a year ago or when we were in high school. I then began to lose names to faces and over time, entire conversations would go away.”

Beck said doctors told him it was normal for someone processing as much information as he was, and the phenomenon has been discussed by figures like Winston Churchill.

I guess we’re supposed to believe that Beck is a sort of stigmatic and a medium of some sort, with massive amounts of data flowing through him, to you, his followers. His suffering for you is, well, Christ-like, isn’t it? Well, the modern version, least ways. It is sort of a crucifixion-lite, where the savior nails himself to the cross metaphorically.

Maybe I’m being mean-spirited, but I’m skeptical. Adrenal fatigue, for example, is nonsense. It is not a real medical condition. It was cooked up by snake oil salesman to trick middle-aged women into buying crystals and colonics. My bet is the real doctors told him he was either faking or suffering from some sort of psycho-somatic condition.

I know this makes me a stone-hearted villain, but I think he is faking.