Brey Willows

Card 39, Writing Down the Bones: Write about a doctor you know or one you went to.

I was so, so tired. All the time. I couldn’t function like I had been for the last 17 years. I was sleeping, sometimes for 20 hours at a time. The problem with this, other than the fact my life was slipping away on a pillow, was that I was due to leave for university shortly. How could I go away like this?

The doctor said, “Your blood tests show Epstein Barr Virus. That’s what’s making you tired. Unfortunately, it’s usually a precursor to some other disease, but we won’t know what that is until it manifests.” To be fair, she did look sorry about the news my life had just shifted dramatically. But there was no cure for the virus, and it could lead from to anything from Mono to Cancer.

Just what you want to hear when you head off to Uni to start your life.

That started a battery of tests and doctors. One nurse told me we should test for AIDS, because that seemed likely.

And then one day I sat across a desk from a very officious looking man with grey hair and a grey mustache and tired eyes, and he listened to me, hands folded over his stomach. Then he opened a book, pointed to a paragraph, and said, “read this.”

I started crying. “That’s it! That’s they way I feel all the time.”

“I’m sorry,” he said in a tone that suggested he said it a lot. “There’s no cure. You’re going to feel this way for the rest of your life. You’ll learn to live with it.”

I was 18, and was just told my new state of being was one of exhaustion, pain, and debilitating immune issues.

And so I learned to live around it, still seeing doctors when things went really sideways, still hoping one of them would come up with an answer as the years went by. I moved to the UK and started the system over again.

The new doctor was probably about four foot ten. She had frizzy, wild dark hair and eyes that didn’t miss a thing. She was frenetic motion, even when she was sitting still and listening. She did an exam, touching specific points that made me hurt.

“Pah,” she said, “you’ve got Fibromyalgia. I don’t know why they didn’t diagnose it before. It’s obvious.”

And then I had an answer. It’s amazing how information can calm you. Once I could research it, learn to do things that helped, talk to other people to find out how they dealt with it, my mental state cleared up some too. Suddenly I had a community to talk to, I had a plethora of answers online, and the world didn’t seem like it was forever covered in a fog I couldn’t see through.

There have been other doctors. There have been lots of hospitals, lots of other issues. But that lovely Spanish doctor gave me back control of my life, and I’ll never forget her.