“I—” I begin. “I don’t know. That’s why we’re doing it.”
“You don’t know?” Now he seems outright disgusted. He mutters something under his breath and says, “This is a very expensive test, you know? It’s not just a thing you do to rule stuff out.”
I can feel my throat constricting, my eyes burning with the beginnings of tears. I focus on the ground, on my feet in their whitish-pinkish socks, survivors of some long-ago laundry incident, on the coldness of the cement floor beneath them.
“I’m here because my doctor ordered it. That’s all I know.”
He mutters something under his breath again, but louder this time, loud enough for me to almost hear it. Fucking waste of my time.
“Excuse me?” I look up at him, staring at him directly, daring him to repeat himself.
“It’s just, you look fine to me,” he says. “The people that usually get sent down here?” He shakes his head. “It’s no joke.”
“Yeah, well,” I say. “I’m not laughing.”
Finally he guides me to the platform, another cold place, where I am to waste his time by lying on a wide table, which turns out to be even harder and colder than I anticipated, even with the thin blanket he provided as cushion. My teeth are chattering and my tears are running down the side of my face as I look up. Above me is a light so bright it obscures everything. The tech is now a dark shape who busily moves things above me, beside me. I hear the whir and clank of machines, but everything is that bright light, and the sound of my own teeth hitting together.
“It’s very important that you don’t move.” His head butts in front of the light as he leans over the table, and now he is a dark-green human-shaped thing looming above me, a corona of spotlight shimmering around him. “No teeth chattering. No more crying.”
“Okay,” I say, but it makes my teeth chatter more, my nose run.
I close my eyes as the machine above me comes to life, a camera scanning me for abnormalities, hunting for information. A fucking waste of time.
It’s spring 1991 and no one knows what’s wrong with me.
Every week I am given a new potential diagnosis: lupus, multiple sclerosis, Epstein-Barr virus, parvovirus, cytomegalovirus. None of these pan out, except for my positive results for Epstein-Barr virus and cytomegalovirus, but those are so common and unlikely to be the culprits behind my endless pain that they are dismissed, and the doctors have exhausted all the tests they can think to give.
“It’s a puzzle,” Dr. Emily, fresh off maternity leave, tells me. “I’ve never been stumped like this before. I feel terrible that we haven’t been able to help you.”
She suggests that this may be what’s called a somatoform pain disorder. In other words: psychosomatic.
“That’s not exactly what it means,” she clarifies. “What somatoform pain disorder means is that there’s an idiopathic component to what you’re experiencing.”
Idiopathic. Idio, meaning “one’s own” or “private,” plus -pathic, from pathos, “suffering,” “something endured.” My own private suffering. Meaning this pain is something that has been invented—curated, nurtured, caused, allowed to flourish—entirely by me.
Dr. Emily hastens to assure me that people with somatoform pain disorder experience very real pain—it’s just that the pain lacks a discernible physical cause.
This is the psychiatrist’s fault, I know it. Or, rather, my fault: I didn’t bother trying to perform for him, to be a good patient. I was angry, and defensive, and resistant to the process, even though I could see him understanding this, writing down “angry,” “defensive,” “resistant to the process.”
“So, what,” I’d said, at our first meeting, “I’m supposed to sit here and tell you about my dreams and fall in love with you?”
“Is that what you think is supposed to happen?” he countered.
“Well, isn’t that the cliché about psychiatrists?”
“That patients form attachments to their therapists? Sure, that can be part of the therapeutic process.” He sat neutrally in his chair, his face open and expressionless, a blank canvas awaiting my projection.
“I think it’s a story psychiatrists tell themselves to make themselves feel better,” I said.
He nodded. “Is that something you ever find yourself doing? Telling yourself stories to make yourself feel better?”
I felt caught for a moment, but I said, “I’m not going to fall for this. I’m not going to do what everyone wants me to do.”
“And what do you think it is that everyone wants you to do?”
“Prove that this ‘illness’ is all in my head. That it’s not real, that I’m not sick, I’m just a crazy person.”
“Do you think ‘crazy people’ aren’t really sick?”
“Look, that’s why they sent me to you,” I said. “It’s the option of last resort. They want you to agree with them that I’m just crazy, and then they can write me off, problem solved, oh, she’s a teenager, a musician, a girl—isn’t that the definition of crazy? Being female? I don’t want to be sick. I didn’t choose this, I didn’t decide to be in pain all the time and tired and miserable, I didn’t make this happen. But I want them to find something actually wrong with me, because otherwise. . .”
He waited for me to continue, and then when it was clear that I couldn’t, he said, “You don’t want to be sick, because of course who would choose to be sick. And yet you want for there to be something identifiably wrong, and you want a ‘real’ medical diagnosis, so as to justify all of this time and expense and pain and effort, because otherwise, you feel, you are just ‘crazy’ and beyond help and entirely at fault. Do I have this right?”
“Yes,” I said, blinking back tears.
“That is a difficult story to be telling yourself.”
And yet, as I see it now, the story seems to be that Dr. Emily and her team think I am making this up. They recommend
