If I’m to learn anything in this traineeship, my supervisor emphasizes, it’s that I can’t help anybody unless I’m authentic in that room. I had cared about Michelle’s well-being, I’d wanted to help, I’d done my best to listen—all key ingredients for starting the relationship.
I thank her and start toward the door.
“But,” my supervisor adds, “be sure to get that history in the next couple of weeks.”
Over the next few sessions, I get what I need for the clinic’s intake form, but it’s clear to me that’s all it is—a form. It takes a while to hear a person’s story and for that person to tell it, and like most stories—including mine—it bounces all over the place before you know what the plot really is.
Part Three
What makes night within us may leave stars.
—Victor Hugo
31
My Wandering Uterus
I have a secret.
Something is wrong with my body. I could be dying, or maybe it’s nothing at all. In which case, there’s no reason to disclose my secret.
This question of my illness started a couple of years ago, a few weeks before I met Boyfriend. Or at least I think it did. My son and I were on our summer vacation, spending a relaxing week in Hawaii with my parents. The night before we were to return home, though, a painful, angry rash seemed to appear out of nowhere and devour my body. I spent the plane ride back hopped up on antihistamines and slathered with over-the-counter cortisone cream, scratching myself so hard that my nails were caked in blood by the time we landed. Within a few days, the rash subsided, and my doctor ran some tests and chalked it up to a random allergic reaction. But the rash had felt like an eerie foreboding, a harbinger of what was to come.
Something seemed to be lurking inside me, attacking my body over the next several months while I looked the other way (which was, at the time, directly into Boyfriend’s eyes). Yes, I felt fatigued and weak and had an array of disturbing symptoms, but as my condition worsened, I convinced myself that it must be a change in stamina that happens in one’s forties. My doctor ran more tests and found some markers for autoimmune disease but none that could be linked to a particular illness like, say, lupus. He sent me to a rheumatologist, who suspected that I might have fibromyalgia, a condition that can’t be diagnosed with a specific test. The idea was to treat the symptoms and see if they improved, and that’s when the off-label-use antidepressant ended up in my record at the CVS across from my office. Soon I was at that CVS often, picking up cortisone creams for bizarre rashes, antibiotics for unexplained infections, and antiarrhythmics for my irregular heart rate. But my doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and I reasoned that this was a good sign; if I did have a dangerous illness, my doctors would have found it already. No news is good news, I told myself.
Just as with the misery-inducing happiness book, I plugged along, keeping my health worries as private as my writing worries. It wasn’t so much that I purposely hid my medical situation from my close friends and family. It was more that I chose to hide it from myself. Like the physician who suspects he has cancer but delays getting scanned, I found it far more convenient to just not deal. Even as I no longer had the strength to exercise and inexplicably lost ten pounds—I felt sluggish and weighted down even as I became lighter—I assured myself it must be something benign, like, I don’t know, menopause. (Never mind that I wasn’t in menopause yet.)
When I did let myself think about it, I’d go online and learn that I was dying of basically everything, only to remember that in medical school, we students suffered from “medical students’ disease.” This is an actual phenomenon, documented in the literature, in which medical students believe that they’re suffering from whatever illnesses they happen to be studying. On the day we studied the lymphatic system, a group of us felt each other’s lymph nodes over dinner. One student put her hands on my neck and exclaimed, “Whoa!”
“Whoa what?” I asked.
She made a face. “It feels like lymphoma.” I lifted my arms and felt my neck. She was right; I had lymphoma! Several other classmates felt my neck and agreed—I was toast. Better check my white cell count, they said. Let’s