It’s been four years since A. was diagnosed with cancer, and there’s something I’ve never quite understood.
When A.‘s doctors told him they detected a malignant growth in his lymph tissue, there was a single sign visible to him (and me) that anything was wrong: what looked like a bouncy ball from a dentist’s vending machine, lodged under the skin of his thigh.
He didn’t feel off.
He wasn’t in pain.
Any difficulties he had, physically or emotionally, were easily attributable to something else.
Sure, he double-checked the diagnosis with a well-known medical center. And locally, as soon as his hematologist looked at him, she noted (out loud) “tumor-induced weight loss”—something we see in photos when we look back, but that must have developed gradually: it was not at all obvious to us at the time.
Still, he went ahead with treatment. With months of pain and nausea and weakness and some close calls. (It’s never a good thing when the doctors can’t figure out the source of your fever when you have no immune system.) He subjected his body and mind to a variety of torture. Voluntarily.
All on what? Some lab results? Some charts that showed things he couldn’t feel or truly see on himself? Photos claiming to capture what was happening under his skin?
Look, I was there. I was physically in the room for a nontrivial fraction of these things. I took it seriously. But it wasn’t my body that was being diagnosed, so I had to rely on these scans and blood tests. But did A.?
I’m thinking about all this because this summer I got a medical diagnosis of my very own. (You get a diagnosis, and you get a diagnosis!) It’s considered eminently solvable and therefore not serious.
Don’t worry, please.
And I do have symptoms. I mean, I think? I can tell something isn’t quite right.
But is gulping down the medication(s) these blood tests entail—daily, for the next 16,790 days of my life (knock on wood)—in proportion with the symptoms I’m dealing with? Are MyChart results with an exclamation mark next to them enough to go on? I have to take the doctor’s word that my labs are (a) mine and (b) accurate, that if I don’t do anything it’ll eventually cause my heart to stutter and stop before its expiration date, but only after all my nerves undress and juggle with fire.
I have to believe a person my age who wears a white coat and has a goofy sense of humor, who sees me usually once a year and only knows about me what I choose to tell her.
And my blood test results.
Or so she claims.
Which is probably why so many people mess up things like birth control and don’t get vaccinated and keep up bad habits, from poor sleep (umm…) to poor diet and exercise. It’s hard to trust what you can’t see.
What I’m saying is: I get it.
How can you believe life can be better if it’s always been like this? If it changed so gradually (or so obscurely, under layers of normal-feeling skin and muscle and fat and bones, under what feels like a functioning brain) that you didn’t even notice how you got here? If you don’t remember what anything else was like? Or if you’ve internalized that, when you’re old enough, things are supposed to stop working the way they used to?
It must be hard to convince people to change their beliefs about themselves and the world, let alone their behavior.
This Glass Has Water 