I’m the dead end. I am dead. No: This is my life, this pain, this fog, this endless aching, this endless exhaustion. It would be better if I were dead. Dr. Emily wouldn’t be here looking so sad, cradling her baby belly, shaking her head over me, wasting her time. I’m sure she’d much rather be home, decorating a nursery, folding tiny clothes into drawers, focusing on the life she will be birthing, not this dead end, not me.
“So that’s it? There’s no answer? We’re just done?” I try but it’s impossible not to cry, not to have my stupid ineffectual tears leaking down to my nose, my lips.
She rolls closer to the exam table and puts a hand on my knee. “Of course not. We’re going to keep looking. We’re going get to the bottom of this. Or do our best to try to, anyway.”
I bet she will be a good mother. I can see her, in her Dr. Emily clothes, her white coat and stethoscope, holding a tiny baby, soothing it with quiet sounds and gentle rocking. Putting a Band-Aid on a skinned knee. Reading a bedtime story while idly caressing a toddler’s hair as they lie in bed together. But just imagining this opens up a yawing need, a clawing at a tender place, that makes me feel like I might cry forever, so I squeeze the flesh of my right hand between my thumb and finger with my left hand and try to push it down, all of it, everything.
“So. Moving forward,” she says. “When you come next week, I’ll introduce you to the doctor who will be taking over for me while I’m on maternity leave. And I’d also like you to start seeing Dr. Cohen.”
“Who’s that? Another specialist?”
She hesitates, and then says, gently. “He’s a psychiatrist.”
I look up at the ceiling. Maybe gravity will keep the tears inside my eyes. “So you’re giving up on me.”
“No, I am most definitely not,” she says, standing. I feel her hands on my shoulders, her belly grazing my knees. “I promise you I’m not. Dr. Cohen is merely one part of the team, one part of the overall treatment plan we’re putting together here.”
I wipe my eyes, head down now, forcing her hands off my shoulders.
“Look, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get some support while you’re going through all this,” she says. “It’s got to be stressful for you, feeling so sick, being so worried about what might be wrong with you while also dealing with the symptoms you have. Doesn’t it make sense to talk to someone about it? And possibly be treated with medication that might help you cope? That’s all Dr. Cohen is here, another piece of the puzzle, to support you while we figure out what’s wrong.”
“It sounds like,” I say, and now I don’t even bother trying to keep it together, appear sane, be the good patient. I am crying the kind of embarrassing, heaving sobs that make it impossible to talk. There is snot running down my face, my eyes hurt from crying. But I don’t care. Everything hurts, everything is pain, I don’t have the energy to pretend like I’m okay anymore. “It sounds like you just think I’m crazy. Like that’s why I’m sick. I’m just crazy. That’s what you want me to admit, right? That I’m crazy? And then I can just go away and stop bothering everybody. Is that it?”
I wipe my nose with my sleeve and look up to see Dr. Emily’s eyes bright with her own tears. But she blinks quickly, pulls it together.
“No,” she says, her voice quiet but steady. “That’s not it.”
For a moment the only sounds in the room are my sniffing, my breath catching on dying sobs as I try to calm myself down.
“I don’t think you’re crazy. I think you’re in pain. And I don’t know why. And, while we try to figure it out, I want you to have someone to talk to about the pain you’re in. Maybe that’s all you’ll do with Dr. Cohen is talk. Or maybe he’ll prescribe you something that might help you cope with your pain level. That’s for the two of you to figure out together.”
I nod my head. It feels like we’re done here. Like everything is done.
“Oh!” She exclaims. I glance up and see her looking at me apologetically, a hand on her belly. “I’m sorry—the baby just kicked. It surprised me. I don’t know that I’ll ever get used to it.”
“The kicking?”
“The idea that there’s actually a person in there.” She turns back to the rolling chair, picks up my file. “So amazing, the secret things bodies can do.”
“Yes,” I say. But I’m not thinking about the baby blindly moving and turning inside her. I’m thinking about my pain, the deep, black ache of it, how I picture it like tentacles, inexorably squeezing my body, wrapping itself around my bones, choking me, relentlessly growing inside me, with a consciousness all its own, a biological imperative to exist that is directly at odds with my own existence. How I am its host, how somehow I have nurtured this, willed it into being, allowed it to flourish inside me, given it life.
It’s late winter 1990 and no one knows what’s wrong with me.
The room is dark and chilly, and I’m dismayed when the tech tosses me a hospital gown and yanks the privacy curtain around me so that I can change. I’m already so freezing.
I gown up, leaving my socks on, and push back the curtain.
“Just a few more minutes,” he says, squinting at his computer monitor, adjusting a piece of machinery.
I wrap the hospital gown tighter around me.
“You okay?” he asks. He’s frowning at me as though I’ve done something wrong.
“Just cold,” I say.
“No, I mean, what are you in for?”
I don’t understand, and he looks exasperated before turning back to the monitor.
“Why are
