“Okay,” I sighed. “What’s next?”
“Next we address this empirically.”
“Play it by ear, huh?”
He looked pretty disgusted for a man with a literal Rorschach painting in his waiting room.
“First,” he explained, “we have to correct the fluid imbalance in your inner ear, which is exacerbating the vertigo. Which means no caffeine and very low salt.”
“For how long?”
“For always,” he said, “and you’ll take a diuretic every day. You’ll basically pee all the time.”
“Jesus,” I said, blinking at him, “could this be any less fun?”
“Maybe lay off the alcohol, too.”
* * *
Everyone knows WebMD is a Choose Your Own Adventure book in which all roads lead to death. This did not stop me from doing a “cursory” (hours upon hours) exploration of Ménière’s. Alas, I could find little in the way of long-form testimony about it, which has a kind of knock-knock logic: We’re all too dizzy to type. But since when does the outside world’s lack of interest in medical writing stop people from writing it? Surely I wasn’t the only person with a keyboard to be fascinated by my own ailment. I even went on celebritieswithyourdisease.com, which is in desperate need of an editorial director. Under “Mental Illness” there are a mere six names, and one of them is Jean-Claude Van Damme. It would be like finding out the only other person on the planet who shared your birthday was Mandy Moore and trying to extract meaning from that.
Desperate for comrades in affliction, I decided to delve into the Internet’s answer to open-mic night: chat forums. Alas, uncommon diseases make for disheartening online experiences. There just aren’t enough of us for a quorum. Pleas for assistance are sent up like flares and answered too vaguely (Have you tried Dramamine?) or too specifically (Turns out my TMJ was making it worse, so I got a night guard). Most suggestions are doled out months after the original cry for help. Hope you feel better soon! Soon? What soon? That person has probably fallen off a cliff by now. Then there are the comments with questionable emoji use (I’ve been on the diuretics for a month and now I piss fluorescent ☺), ones whose targets are misplaced (I had to give my dog to my boyfriend, who left me for my former “best friend” and now she has my boyfriend and my dog. Screw Ménière’s!), or ones that have stumbled into the wrong solar system altogether (What brand of dust buster does everybody use?).
The limited promise of comfort was everywhere. It was in the recipes for sodium-free bread (an affront to God’s plan), in the links to studies from 1998, in the clip art of cartoon animals conked out and seeing stars. These were uploaded to Facebook by some guy named Gary, who was forced into early retirement by Ménière’s. Isolated in his affliction, Gary was probably microwaving a plain baked potato in a condominium somewhere. Maybe Gary and I would not be pals in real life, but we shared a common frailty now.
“I’m sorry you’re feeling poorly,” I wrote to him. “Hang in there.”
Gary never replied. Which was okay. I hadn’t given him much to work with. But our lack of correspondence was emblematic of my frustration with the community at large. I’m glad these spaces exist—it’s taxing to spend your life explaining your weird illness on top of coping with it. But the more I read, the more put off I became. What I found was not a dialogue but wallowing masquerading as guidance. People driven to write social media posts about their disease have the tendency to treat it like religion or gender, a fundamental tenet of how they want to be categorized. They hashtag their pain. They howl at it without discussing it, without caring much for the response—behavior that would be considered intolerable if they were talking about absolutely anything else. I found myself shame-reading the words of people sicker than I was, cringing at the sad faces that punctuated their sentences. I wanted to distance myself from them because I couldn’t distance myself from my own body. No club that would have me as a member, no thank you. It is only in retrospect that I can appreciate the heart of what they were saying: This is who we are now. There is no invisible door for us. We will never break character again.
* * *
That which does not kill us makes us stronger: an idea that started with Nietzsche, got laundered through a century of throw pillows, and came out through the mouth of Kanye West. Suffice to say, Nietzsche didn’t actually mean that adversity is the best thing for you. The world’s most infamous nihilist was not about to encourage self-betterment. And yet this is exactly what we mean when we say it. It’s certainly how Dr. Goldfinger meant it.
He had called to check on my progress (Goldfinger, not Nietzsche). For weeks, I had been eating like a heart patient. I had been sleeping at an angle and hydrating myself into a puddle. I had learned that monitoring one’s salt intake is a glimpse into the time-sucking logistics of having an eating disorder. Your hours are spent either thinking about food or purposefully not thinking about food. There is no safe restaurant in which to let loose and order what you want, no designated low-sodium section of any health food store. Products are scattered willy-nilly. You just have to study the nutritional information of everything you touch, as if buying a box of cookies is the biggest decision of your life.
“You’ll get used
