“You Were Right,” the Doctor Said

Here is what I wish we could do....

This week was all inspired by one ER trip a few days before my most recent spine surgery, wherein I learned that something was going extra-wrong inside my “stomach”, and had to decide which problem was bigger and which surgery should be expedited.

I sat down to write a singular post about it… And then realized it was so long that it could be the chapter in a book, and it might be better to give myself a nice extra week of gentle recovery, and give ‘you’ a little more time in one train of thought?

(You’ll have to come back tomorrow to see how it all ends!)

I wanted to THANK YOU for subscribing, if you’re a Word Nerd like me… because Word Nerds help keep this alive!

I made a promise to do my best to write Every Single Weekday and - though sometimes medical emergencies have led to a day off now and again- I’ve kept it a decent chunk of the time (let’s say an arbitrary but confident 83%?)… and that has given me so much purpose, passion, and pursuit, not matter what thing I’m not-actually-gently recovering from at the moment.

Thank you. That sounds selfish to say, “Thanks for giving me a passion and a purpose” but… Also, in all honesty, thank you for that?

Bonus Tip I Like To Share: If YOU hate getting tons of emails (like me) and don’t like having one arrive every weekday, you can always do what a supportive reader did and “still have my yearly subscription, but unsubscribe from the emails.”

The goal was giving an archive of this unfolding memoir where you can return and re-read…

Or read anything new just one day a week (a Sunday morning news, if I may be so bold- though coffee must be included or you’ll be immediately ejected from this website)…

Or whatever floats your boat.

There is an app, there is a website, there is a thing people used to be called a printer that I’m told still exists in museums and retro-fitted homes (just kidding?)…

You hold the map. I’m just the questionably valanced cartographer. 

THANK YOU for seeing this week’s story through!

PS: ANYONE can ask for a year scholarship [full access to all writing] any time they want or need. Supportive Word Nerds help keep this work going, and help make that possible for anyone out there who asks!

Here is what I wish we could do: 

I wish primary care doctors could do all primary care things, including standing lab orders that help a chronic patient continue much needed data collection which benefits the specialist, without fearing they’ll get sued for telling someone to keep suffering as an informed person, rather than keep suffering as a cast-aside one. 

I wish specialists could do more special things to help a patient when it’s an emergency. 

I wish Emergency Rooms were for emergencies.

I wish it all was connected. That we had a case worker and they connect to all the disconnected doctors and doulas and doldrums and help a progressively ill patient not become progressively psychologically ill(er) because they are shuffled around to waiting rooms full time, just to be told to … wait. 

I wish that every single person in medicine was told some sort of psychological study (I’ll make one up for us?) that proves that having baseline information about “where” an ache is stemming from can help a human deal with the alarm bells inside in the short term (which, in medicine, is always actually long term)…. and that helping us with small dignities in the long term - like having information about our bodies when something is wrong with them- can help us suffer through this very short life for a very long time, alone. 

I wish that when I say the word “alone”, it’s understood that I don’t think ‘life is meant to be lived alone’… But I do think that suffering is and can only be felt by its individual holder in each and every individual moment, and thus: Suffering, by nature, is the loneliest location on earth. 

Unexplained suffering, by nature, goes against everything about nature that makes it worth our while. 

Oh, I forgot to tell you what happened at the ER, in the end, didn’t I?

“You were right,” the doctor said, as she came back into the room, swirling her glittering cape for good measure, “Except it wasn’t one of the other: It was both.” 

Wait… Do you need me to playback the tape for a second?”

“You were right,” the doctor said, as she came back into the room- 

Good. There we go. That feels better doesn’t it. Okay.

Pressing play again…

“Your liver levels were about 4 times as high as what they should be, as an example,” she said, pointing to the levels I’ve watched climb no matter how many medicines I take to help it, and regardless of the fact that I’m not even earning this math the fun way (I drink like 2 glasses, once a year)… “So you’re probably definitely feeling a lot of pain from your liver right now, like you thought.”

(For those who don’t know this: Often, doctors will swear, without blinking, that livers don’t cause pain. Wikipedia even backs up this myth sometimes. And I don’t know what man once told a whitecoat that but- although I’m sure they don’t hurt for every one- a lot of CF and lived-liver patients likely would disagree. But who are we, right? Just the people with the thing that’s actually wrong inside of our bodies. That data is meaningless.)

“But… You also have a rupturing cyst,” the ER doctor continued, as I got lost imagining what superhero colors would best go with her complexion for even saying out loud that livers can hurt (“Is she a spring or is she a fall?”)- “But it’s still pretty big, so even though it ruptured, your surgeon will need to evaluate. It could get plugged up by the scar tissue and stop right where it is… It could keep hurting you… There are a lot of possibilities to discuss.”

Sometimes things hurt inside of our bodies that doctors swear shouldn’t hurt…

And sometimes the part that hurts the most is how much we want an explanation for Unexplained Suffering…

Even when the explanation is right in the name.

Part Three. More Tomorrow. (They’re connected!)

Hi. Do you like cats? Me too!