I’m Not Crazy, I’m Just Sick

Three years ago, a woman I’ve known since I was three years old told me that I was crazy.

She also happened to be the rheumatologist I saw to tell me whether or not there was something seriously wrong with me. Too bad she diagnosed me with precisely the wrong thing.

This lady “did everything right,” according to the old-fashioned requirements of her trade. She repeated the ANA blood test that initially convinced my primary care doctor to investigate a rheumatological cause for my symptoms, and that test was negative. She tested me for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis, the most common of the rheumatological diseases, and both were negative.

Meanwhile, I had trauma in my past. I had a history of eating disorders. I had been diagnosed with depression, anxiety, even bipolar disorder once upon a time. Clearly my psychiatric issues were acting up…right?

What she couldn’t explain was why I couldn’t stop vomiting. The nerve pain. The bronchitis that lasted for months. Choking on my own mucus. Migraines. Swollen hands and feet. Ice-cold limbs, even sitting in a warm bathtub.

She couldn’t explain these things. So she didn’t try.

Symptoms become everyday phenomena if you refuse to discuss them or look at them too closely. She decided I was exaggerating, even though I had been diagnosed with cyclic vomiting syndrome and chronic migraine headaches and rare adult-onset asthma and chronic bronchitis by other doctors. She decided these other doctors were incorrect, their opinions irrelevant, perhaps victims of the charm some misogynists believe young women capable of.

Other women can be misogynists too, you know.

She diagnosed me as crazy. She shrugged and sent me away from her office.

I got sick again, of course. I got sick for five months. I coughed up rivers of mucus. I coughed until I couldn’t breathe or sing or speak or eat. I coughed my throat raw. I coughed my esophagus into jagged vines to keep the rose garden of my heart safe from the people who claimed to want to protect me.

I found rheumatologist after rheumatologist who did the exact same thing. They repeated the same tests. Every ANA test after that was positive. Every ANA test after that said I was sick. Every auto immune panel was positive for markers of inflammation.

They said “nothing to see here.” They sent me on my way.

Three years later, I have been diagnosed with a rare disease. My lungs are shot. I am sick more often than I am well. I cannot get out of bed some days. I cannot stand to take a shower, to cook a meal, to take a five-minute walk. My hair is falling out in clumps. I am so cold I shiver under five layers of blankets.

My body does not have the energy to keep itself warm. My body does not have the energy to digest solid foods, even when burning with hunger. My body covers my skin in a rash of welts that cover me head to toe, that wrap around my ribcage and spread ribbons of pink all the way to my fingertips. My head never stops hurting, even with medication. I drink to self-medicate.

My eyes sting with dryness. I cannot keep my torso upright. My muscles strain and collapse under the weight of my own expectations of myself. I put a down payment on a studio apartment yesterday. I am scheduled to move in September. I wonder if I will live long enough to see what color the walls are.

Every breath is a struggle to keep my head above water. I am struggling not to drown in my own mucus. My heart is a dumping ground. You can see the muddy footprints where others have set their feet.

One small step for them. I am going to die too soon.

Every time they called me “crazy,” what they were actually saying was, “we don’t care whether you live or die.”

Calling women crazy is not about claiming we are not telling the truth about our lived experience. It is about insisting that our lived experiences don’t matter. Crazy women can be raped or die of a curable disease and who cares? Not I, said the brown cow. It is their own fault, for being so crazy.
For being so rape-able. So murder-able. So sick. So crazy.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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