I bat these questions away, send them to mix into the swirling abyss of this nonspecific, ever-shifting pain. They are too terrifying to contemplate. Because: Why would I choose something so awful? But also: What if I have?
Finally it is my turn, my name is called, other people’s heads turn to watch me go. I wonder what it is they think I’m here for, how serious they think my condition is, how sick they think I am. If they think I’m sick at all.
Dr. Emily greets me and leads me to a large exam room, where two other doctors are waiting for us. She points me to a chair and makes the introductions, and then I wait, unsure of how to perform for my audience. I reflexively want to be my trying-not-to-be-in-pain self, so as to impress the doctors with my competence, my seriousness, my reliability, the way I try to with my teachers at school. But I know this may work against me.
Also, I am afraid. After holding back the pain for so long, working so hard to appear as though it doesn’t affect me, if I actually relax my guard, start to let it in—I’m afraid I won’t be strong enough to fight it again when I need to, when I leave this room and go back to my world.
“Can you just walk us through the timeline?” asks one of the doctors, a youngish guy with glasses and a receding hairline.
“The timeline,” I repeat.
“Yes, when this all first started, everything you can remember.”
June 28, 1990, 3:27 P.M. That’s when the pain started. I know, because I wrote it down. But I can’t tell them that. It’s too absurdly precise. Suspiciously precise.
“Well, the pain first started around late June of this year,” I say.
They all make note of that and return their gazes to me, expectantly.
“I had been practicing piano for about an hour—”
“She’s a classical pianist,” Dr. Emily interjects. Some murmurs of approval, more sounds of pens on paper. Dr. Emily nods at me to continue.
“Normally I practice for three or four hours before my hands get tired, or before I take a break. But I’d only been practicing for an hour, and I noticed my hands feeling really achy. So I massaged them for a few minutes and went back to practicing.”
It was impossible to explain to them the slow creep of that first sensation of pain, the feeling of something being wrong but not knowing how wrong it would be, the retroactive sense of foreboding that accompanies the memory, knowing now that that unassuming moment—a random ache, a pause—was the start of something endless. I’ve retraced my steps hundreds of times, thinking back to how I could have possibly willed it on myself, that dawning moment of pain.
“But soon I noticed the aching feeling spreading up my arms and all the way to my elbows.”
“So, both hands? Both arms?” This question from the older doctor. “The pain was symmetrical?”
“Not exactly,” I say. “I mean, yes, both arms were affected. But it wasn’t like they were mirror images of each other. They both hurt, but . . . maybe not necessarily in exactly the same specific spots. I don’t know. It was kind of just all over. It’s hard to remember.”
I don’t want to remember. But I keep remembering, hunting through the memories for clues, even when I don’t want to, even when doctors aren’t asking me to. It’s difficult to think back further than that day in June, so that’s where I start, each time, with the pain blooming from my hands. I limit my scope. It becomes a refrain in my head, a place I visit, a sequence of events I can understand because I’ve retold it to myself so many times.
“So the pain was in your arms,” Dr. Emily prompted.
“Yes, up to my elbows. So I stopped practicing and lay in bed writing a letter, hoping the pain would stop. But instead it began spreading even more: up my arms, over my shoulders, and down my back, even to my legs and feet.”
I don’t tell them how I read his letter over and over, this kind-of-but-maybe-not boyfriend’s letter, his words seeming like boyfriend words—“I’m sorry, I love you, I swear I do, I’ll be different, I’ll be better, I swear”—crying while the pain stole over me, how the pain seemed to spread like ink from the pen in my hand to the rest of my body as I wrote my response to him.
“I tried to sleep, but I felt the pain moving all over my body, until my whole body was encased in pain. My face, the top of my head, my neck. All the way to my feet. It felt like shin splints, but all over. Like I could feel my bones, but it wasn’t only in my bones. Just this kind of bone-deep pain.”
The doctors nod. “And then?”
“Somehow I managed to fall asleep, and when I woke up, it was a day and a half later.”
“So you slept for more than 24 hours,” the older doctor says.
“Yes.”
“And were you still in pain when you woke up?” the younger doctor asks.
I remember the confusion as the pain dawned on me again, after all that blissful pain-free time asleep, the way my father looked at me quizzically when I emerged from my room, the way I held out my hands wordlessly and began to cry, unable to explain what was happening.
“When I first woke up, for a few minutes I didn’t feel
