Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,96

some difficulty with her joints that made it hard for her to go hiking, he’d stopped seeing her. I asked him why. After all, she didn’t have an acute illness; it sounded more like a common case of arthritis, and we were middle-aged, after all. Besides, Boyfriend wasn’t even a hiker.

“I don’t want to have to take care of her if she gets really sick one day,” he said over our shared dessert. “If we’d been married for twenty years and then she got sick, that’s different. But why get into it knowing she’s already sick?”

“But any of us could get sick,” I said. At the time, I didn’t think I fell into that category. I thought that whatever I had was temporary (a bug of some sort) or treatable (a thyroid imbalance). Later, as my Medical Mystery Tour got under way, my denial turned into magical thinking: As long as I don’t have a diagnosis, I can postpone telling Boyfriend the extent of it—indefinitely, and maybe forever—if it turns out that nothing’s wrong after all. He knew (sometimes) that I was having tests done and wasn’t feeling “myself,” but I also explained away a lot of my fatigue the way Dr. Cowboy Boots had: I was a busy working mom. Other times I’d make jokes about getting older. I wasn’t willing to test his love for me by letting him think that either I had some physical illness or I was crazy for believing that I did.

Meanwhile, I was so terrified by whatever was happening to me that I kept hoping my symptoms would simply vanish. I thought, I’m going into this future with Boyfriend, focus on that. Which is also why I ignored any hints that we might not be well suited for each other. If that future went away, I would have to contend with an unwritten book and a failing body.

But now that future has gone away.

So I wonder: Did Boyfriend leave me because I was sick—or he thought I was paranoid for believing I was? Or did he leave me because I was as dishonest with him as he had been with me about who I was and what I wanted in a partner? It turns out that we weren’t that different after all. In the hopes of making it work with a person he genuinely enjoyed, he wanted to postpone his confession for the same reason I did: so that we could continue to be together even though we couldn’t. If Boyfriend didn’t want to live with a kid under his roof for the next ten years, if what he wanted was freedom, he certainly wouldn’t have wanted to take care of me if one day I needed it. And I’d known that about him as early as that dinner-date conversation—just as he’d known I had a kid.

And now I’m doing the same thing—postponing—with Wendell, because the truth comes with a cost: the need to face reality. My patient Julie had said that she always wished she could freeze time in the few days between having a scan and getting the result. Before that call came in, she explained, she could still tell herself everything was fine—but knowing the truth might change everything.

The cost of my telling the truth isn’t that Wendell will leave me, as Boyfriend did. It’s that he’ll make me face this mystery illness head-on instead of pretending it away.

32

Emergency Session

“You sound like Goldilocks,” I said to Rita a month after her suicide ultimatum. Despite her tumultuous past, I’d been focusing on Rita’s present. It’s important to disrupt the depressive state with action, to create social connections and find a daily purpose, a compelling reason to get out of bed in the morning. Mindful of Rita’s goals, I tried to help her find ways to live better now, but nearly every suggestion I came up with was a bust.

The first thing Rita did was reject the wonderful psychiatrist I suggested that she see for a medication consultation. She looked him up, noticed that he was in his seventies, and pronounced him “too old to know the latest medications.” (Never mind that he teaches psychopharmacology to today’s medical students.) So I referred her to a younger psychiatrist, but she, Rita felt, was “too young to understand.” Then I referred her to a middle-aged psychiatrist, and although she had no objections (“He’s a very attractive fellow,” Rita noted), once she started the medication, it made her too sleepy. The psychiatrist changed her medication,