The Hypochondriac

When I was about 25 years old, I started to have strange migrating pains in the core of my body. These pains were mostly in my lower back, hips, neck, or shoulder blades and were accompanied by digestive disturbances of various kinds as well as an overall sense of inflammation and discomfort. They would come and go without warning, vary in duration and severity, and did not appear to have any clear connection to my activities. These “flare ups” were frequent enough that they severely diminished my quality of life.

So, I did what most sensible uninsured young adults would do: I ignored it. It was the early 1990s. the vast information highway known as the internet was not yet in full swing. If a person wanted to find something out, she had to go to the library. I figured it would eventually go away on its own.

When about five years had passed without any relief, I decided it was time to enlist the help of a medical professional.  I scrounged up a few bucks and off I went, mentally prepared to accept my diagnosis, no matter how dire. My symptoms were so severe, there was no doubt in my mind that she would find something: a tumor on my spine, a vitamin deficiency, a virus, a hormonal imbalance…

“You’re in perfect health,” she said looking over the results of some blood tests she had ordered, “There is nothing wrong with you.”

“But there is something wrong,” I objected insubordinately, “Can we do more tests?”

She looked at me impatiently, “What do you suggest?”  

“I don’t know,” I stammered, taken aback by her sudden shift in tone, “You’re the doctor.”

“I’m not going to give you anything,” she stated, clearly suspicious of my motives. “Take Tylenol.”

And, with that, she abruptly ended the appointment.

And thus, it commenced: the decade of doctors. Though I was still uninsured and limited financially in my ability to seek quality advice, I went through a lot of diagnoses, none of which stuck. In fact, what I mostly experienced were versions of the exchange above. “You seem to be a very anxious person,” said one. “You probably have some autoimmune condition, but you can’t afford the medicine,” said another. I had my gallbladder removed, got countless scans, spent days on a heparin drip and once wore a heart monitor. Many just did not seem to believe me. They implied, in one way or another, that I was looking for drugs, even though I never asked for any.

Around my early forties I started to wise up.

“I’m a pariah.” I said to a coworker, “Not only are they ill-equipped to help me, they hate me!”

“Well, what are you going to do?” She asked.

 “There is only one course of action. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” I trumpeted. “I’m going to go to nursing school!”

The notion was not that far-fetched. I worked primarily as a waitress at that time, but I had a master’s degree in Entomology and taught basic biology classes at the community college level. I was broadly intellectually curious, read a lot of science books and possessed fundamental knowledge of the structure and function of living things. However, though I could provide a detailed description of the process of photosynthesis, bark beetle anatomy or the lifecycle of Basidiomycetes, I knew practically nothing about the human body.

And so, with my secret mission to solve the mystery of my roaming, unpredictable discomfort firmly hidden beneath a well-honed façade of legitimate desire, I went to nursing school and, about two years later, started my new career. I forged ahead as a nurse for several years and then went crawling back to the relatively less stressful climate of the classroom. However, the short-lived nursing experiment was not in vain. I had gotten what I needed: knowledge.

In the meantime, things were really heating up on the vast information highway known as the internet. Now, there was a plethora of data available to me.  I developed hypotheses, tried what I felt were “evidence based” interventions, and analyzed my results. In addition, I found out that there were many people like me with similar experiences: soundly rejected by medical science and desperately searching for answers. There were discussion pages and blogs. I did not participate but I read them obsessively: combing the text for clues.

As I entered my late forties, I would still go to see doctors, but our goals were at cross purposes. They wanted me to get a pap smear and control my asthma.  I wanted to find the cause of my mysterious condition. However, I was wise enough, now, to realize that I sounded like a lunatic, so I stopped bringing it up.  If I wanted to get some piece of information from them, I would work it casually into the conversation so they would not label me as a “drug seeker” or a “hypochondriac”.  

In my early 50s, my frustration mounted as the condition continued to plague me. All the work I was doing and still no answers. Something would seem to help for a while and then it would not. The difficulty of finding patterns and solutions was compounded by the natural unpredictability of the condition. I would joke that somebody had made a doll of me and was capriciously sticking it with pins. I did not really believe that, but I was beginning to allow some sketchy explanations on to the table.

As an ecosystem of greedy charlatans preying on the bounty of hopelessness bloomed exponentially, it became harder and harder, even for a hardnosed science person like me, to separate fact from fiction. I explored explanations good and bad: leaky gut, vitamin D deficiency, histamine overproduction, dysbiosis, hypersecretion of cortisol, dermoid cysts, parasites, malabsorption, floating kidneys, Lyme disease, sphincter of Oddi dysfunction, food intolerances, toxins, motility disorders, childhood trauma, spondylitis, sphenic flexure syndrome, myofascial pain, fibromyalgia, IBS, GMOs…

And now I am fifty- three. I have strange migrating pains in the core of my body. These pains are mostly in my lower back, hips, neck, or shoulder blades and are accompanied by digestive disturbances of various kinds as well as an overall sense of inflammation and discomfort. They come and go without warning, vary in duration and severity, and do not appear to have any clear connection to my activities. These “flare ups” are frequent enough to severely diminished my quality of life.

Ideas anyone?

The Butterfly Effect

What is happening in this sprawling world
As you flex your crooked sunset wings?
I press them firmly between hot irons
Dry as paper, these delicate things
I admire your starry thorax, the blacks, my favorite part.
He just sighs and rolls his eyes
I call you “sweetheart.”
 
He laughs, “Let nature take its course!”
“Rachel suggests I should keep her alive;
She says she’ll stop eating if she’s ready to die.”
“They don’t have volition,” he snorts,
“I’ll crush her for you if you prefer.”
“An act of chivalry?” I sneer, then whisper,
 “You look straighter.”
Into what I think is your ear.
 
He relates his daring Mexico trip way back in ’82
“Disgusting,” he said, “A hemolymph rain!
Hell, I just plowed right through!”
But he is well traveled, and we are naïve
Single minded captives of asymmetry
Deprived of the trip would make us whole
 
I ask,
“Should I crush her fast or freeze her slow?”

Mandolin

 

 

What, besides fine dust, layers this object?

Joy, discovery, frustration, regret, fear, failure. 

To my visitor, it is a decoration

With its golden-brown body and its mother of pearl.

 “Why don’t polish it?” She asks.

I acknowledge the neglect and answer her,  

“You only see the dust.”

Christmas, 2020

 

 

This year, I will master silence
I will  make less noise than a snake’s tongue
Footsteps quieter than an ant’s procession
Words like the snap of a spider’s web
A blinking eyelash whipping the skin.
 
Instead of speaking, I will listen
The birds will praise my subtlety in song
And I will recognize each of their voices
In the night I will walk below a chorus of moon and twinkling stars
I will hear the brush of my ghostly gown along the pebbles
And the worms plowing the earth
 
Instead of moving, I will be still
Nests will be built in my hair
Possums will curl their bare tails around my limbs
Bats will crash into me and fall to the grass
and I will ponder the sound of each hair on each blade
For eternity.
 
And then, next year, I will master invisibility.
 
 

 My body has been

Against me all of my life

Ugliness, fear, pain 

 Little worlds in cracks

Sun stretched clung root persistence

I take your advice 

Number Five

When I moved to New Hampshire, I picked up the trash scattered throughout the forest all the way up my street. I dragged it home, carefully rinsed out the tobacco pouches and mud, and then, with my flashlight and magnifying glass in hand, I began the process of separation. There were a few glass bottles and aluminum cans. There were the typical number ones and number two plastics. The nip  bottles were mostly number one. The Dunkin’ cups? Number five.

Without the option of curbside pick-up that I had grown accustomed to, I hauled the booty to the recycling center. Soon after I arrived, my exuberance turned to dismay when I found that the plastic disposal area only provided receptacles for my ones and twos. A stern attendant stood watchfully nearby.  

“Remove your caps,” He said, “They pop off and take out the workers’ eyes.”

I immediately complied, tortured by the thought that up until this moment, my negligence in this area had resulted in serious eye injuries for millions.

“And rinse them out better next time,” He added, clearly unsettled by the number and variety of dirty nip bottles I was dumping into his barrel.

“Where do I put my fives?” I asked in a disheartened tone.

“We don’t take them,” he replied without sentiment. 

I was incredulous. I had always been able to recycle my number fives.

“China stopped taking our waste in 2018. It’s just going to a landfill.” He stated matter-of-factly as he strolled away, leaving me aghast, alone with my limp bag of Dunkin’ cups.

“What an absurd system,” I grumbled on the way back home, the irrepressible cups bouncing on the seat beside me. “Don’t worry,” I consoled them, “I’ll find a way to keep you out of the waste stream.” 

A year later, I still have that bag of cups, straws and lids sitting on my screen porch. I thought about displaying them out on the side of the road with a hand-painted sign: “This Forest is not your Dumpster”. I then considered filling them with sand and building a garden wall. An art piece? The orange straws would make a nice Christmas star. Yesterday, I vowed to ship the whole lot off to Dunkin’ with a note: “I found some of your stuff lying around and thought you might want it back”.\

“Once you buy something,” my boyfriend said as I attempted to find the CEO’s address online, “It’s yours.”

“Yeah, well, it has their name on it!  Why do you write your name on your underwear? Because it belongs to you,” I protested on my way down the basement stairs in search of a shipping container. 

“It’s not their fault that people are slobs,” he shouted after me.

I emerged from the basement, cobwebs sticking to my face and hair. “Even if you can change human behavior, it takes hundreds of years. Dunkin’ could change this problem in a day.”

“Really?” He looked up skeptically from his morning tea.

“Or maybe a week,” I muttered, cramming the cups in the box. 

The timeline aside, the real question, it seems to me, is why is this my problem? Why am I racked with guilt over somebody else’s transgressions? I am not referring to the litterbugs, although a new round of public service announcements might be helpful. Change, in this case, is not going to happen from the ground up. Yes, I know, there are many innovative alternatives to single-use non-degradable plastic out there, but they are practical only for diehard deep ecologists and people of means.  The average American will buy what is affordable and accessible. Relying on public education and individual responsibility is not the answer; people like the convenience of single use and besides, with a pandemic ranging, it is almost a mandate.

I am pointing my wagging finger in one direction only: at you, manufacturers. I am stunned by the effort you put forth on a beautiful package without any regard for its not-so-beautiful future: lying around on the floor of a forest, floating down a  stream, stuck on the writhing head of a furry animal, choking the majestic whale and the innocuous sea turtle, filling the guts of the mighty albatross, piling up on our screen porches… it has your name on it, guys.

The solution is clear. Manufacturers, it is time for you to take responsibility for your packaging from cradle to grave. The technologies already exist, you just have to care enough to implement them. Right now, you reap the profits but absolve yourself of the consequences as soon as the product hits the shopping cart. We, the people, have grown accustomed to this unfair arrangement, but this is not the way it has to be. 

We are drowning out here in plastic