Saturday, May 24, 2008

What's Wrong With Becca

So they've finally figured out what's wrong with me. At least they think they have. I'm not holding my breath. This is partially because my experiences of late have shaken my faith in modern medical science to its very core, and partially because it simply isn't a good idea to hold one's breath for an extended length of time. If there's anything I've learned in the past year of riding the nauseating roller coaster of my genetic physical oversensitivity, it's that an ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure, and I would imagine that this holds especially true in the area of brain damage.

But - in keeping with my regular routine and as a sign that things truly are getting back to normal - I digress.

I had an encouraging visit with a bullet of a fireball neurologist on Tuesday who, after entering the room with the declaration "My name is Dr. Miranova, and I'm Czechoslovakian. The Czech side, not the Slovakian side, because they're different you know," proceeded to examine me with such speed and intensity that the examination was making me dizzier than my original headache. It was only after a whirlwind of tests that more closely resembled the grilling of a drunk driver that she sat down abruptly and said, "So here's what's going on."

They must not have a lot of time to poop around in Eastern Europe.

When she began with "So sometimes, when we're really stressed..." I had to fight to keep from rolling my eyes in exasperation. The reaction from most of the doctors lately has been less than encouraging, given their general tendency to write my pain off as tension headaches when they can't find anything else wrong. Forget for a moment that I'm a graduate student who works ten hours a day on a good day, that I've lived in China, that I was married and divorced by 25, and that by all rights if anyone knows what stress feels like (and this wasn't it) it should be me. We can also leave aside the fact that my condition in no way resembled any description of a tension headache that I was ever given. Apparently I just didn't know what was going on inside my own head. It's a criticism I've heard before and tend to believe, but never in the physical sense.

This time, however, the neurologist continued, "Sometimes when we get stressed out, we deplete all our physical resources. We don't realize how connected our bodies are to our minds. The lining of the brain gets inflamed and stops properly draining fluid, kind of like a stitch in your side when you're running is an inflammation of the pocket around the liver."

I nodded like I knew this. I didn't.

It was nice to be talked to like an educated adult, and by the time I walked out of her office I was halfway ready to change my specialty to neurology, an aspiration tempered only by the reality that the sight of blood does bad things for my constitution. I have, at any rate, a new found appreciation for the wonders of the human brain. It's an amazing thing. Too often, I think, we confuse psychosomatic illness with hypochondriacism, not realizing that the mind is kind of like an army private at the switchboard of a nuclear submarine. You can justify ignoring and even abusing it to a point, but neglect it too much and it has ways to show you it's irritated. Namely, blowing poop up.

I think the most interesting thing I learned was that our brains have a special way of dealing with certain kinds of stress. It's well documented that we're capable of almost superhuman mental tenacity, says Dr. Miranova, when we believe we're helping others or making the world a better place. But since we only have so much energy, the brain rotates like a magnifying glass in the sun, concentrating the normally scattered energy we do have on the task at hand, which in the end usually results in a meltdown. This is why, she said, medical students can work twenty-four hour shifts during their residencies but almost inevitably break down after the residency is over. Sometimes a day later, sometimes several years, but it almost always happens. I find this utterly fascinating and, in a way, incredibly inspirational. Human beings are literally biologically hardwired to be self-sacrificing, in the most ultimate sense of the term.

The problem, I've discovered, with psychosomatic pain is that it requires psychosomatic treatment. Aside from a deluge of pills and vitamins I'm being extolled to change my entire lifestyle, from the food I eat (no more soy ice cream!) to daily yoga and meditation. My mental and physical health - and not my academic status - has to be my primary focus, probably forever, if I want to feel better. I've been trying to hammer the idea into my neurotic overachiever of a brain, but it's been so molded by the relentlessness and competitiveness of the academic environment that it's been a bit slow on the uptake. That, and I'm starting to suspect that hammering anything at all into one's own brain might defeat the point of stress reduction in the first place.

When I asked Dr. Miranova why, if this truly is a physical reaction, all the students around me aren't suffering from the same affliction, she shrugged and said simply, "Genetics."

"Some people are just physically very sensitive to stress," she continued. "You're one of those people who's going to have to do something you love, something that makes you so happy you can do it indefinitely just for the sake of doing it. Does your job make you happy?"

What a question.

Saturday, May 10, 2008

Chronicle of the Quiet Rebel

I’ve just noticed how loquacious my blog postings have become lately. It’s not that I’m trying to wax philosophical, so much, but with everything that’s been happening lately I’ve relapsed into an overly pensive state of mind. If you think my posts are convoluted, you should see what’s going on inside my head.

A few weeks ago, I was in my weekly appointment with my psychiatrist. For the most part she just lets me talk and nods sympathetically; every once in a while she’ll offer some quiet observation, but it’s rare that she interjects into the one-sided conversations which, more often than not, amount to little more than hollow rivers of my subconscious spewing out of my mouth. Verbal diarrhea, I think they call it. I can’t shut up on a good day. Being in a small, comfortable room where I’m the undisputed center of attention for an hour affects me like mental crack.

At any rate, on this particular day my psychiatrist, sweet and quiet and barely older than myself, surprised me when she looked up from her notes to ask, “How do you think Jeremy deals with your rebellious streak?”

I stopped. I didn’t know I had one of those.

When I was young, my mom used to refer to me as a “quiet rebel,” someone who would smile sweetly until you left the room, and then rearrange your furniture while you were in the bathroom just to mess with your head. I like the term: it’s much more mysterious and romantic than simply calling me passive-aggressive. But I’ve never really thought of myself as a rebel. The word seems to imply a sense of antagonism that I’ve never really felt, a desire to make other people uncomfortable that I’m not aware of ever having had. I like other people, and I like being a productive member of society. I just don’t like being told what to do.

The older I get and the more I experience in life, the more conscious I get of the fact that we’re all just carbon-based life forms, that most of the people in charge aren’t any smarter than I am (and many cases are probably a little dumber), that tradition and dogmatic religion are artificial constructs designed to neatly package mores and morality so we don’t have to think for ourselves. That there are things that are universal, like love for our fellow man, and that these are the things that you have to search for; they don’t find you. Not while you’re watching TV in your boxer shorts, and not when you’re sitting in a church pew in your best Sunday dress. No preacher or political reformer is going to hand you a Bible or a Little Red Book with World Peace neatly hidden in a hole cut out of the pages inside. In my mind the realization of this isn’t rebellion. It’s just a willingness to go against the grain in the event that you realize that everyone else in life is wandering around as blindly as you are. The funny thing is that so few of us just cowboy up and open our eyes. Bumping into the sharp corners of metaphorical coffee tables is apparently much more fun, if slightly less spiritually rewarding.

Thursday, May 01, 2008

Waiting

In a few minutes, I will have my first MRI. I'm sitting in a waiting room at the hospital now.

It's the hardest part, the waiting, when you're not feeling well and they don't know what's wrong with you. It's a constant practice in the art of not thinking: not thinking about the unceasing and unexplained ringing in my ears and swelling behind my eyes, not thinking about the bizarre chemicals they'll soon be putting in my body and the long needles they'll have to use to do it, not thinking about my irrational but persistent fear of enclosed spaces and what it's going to be like in twenty minutes when I'm in a dark, whirring tomb, tied down by plastic tubes that artificially navigate through my veins. My precious veins, those tiny little freeways of life that spread like a spider web through my body and which, until just a moment ago, I have never in my twenty-seven years of breathing oxygen even stopped to consider.

This is the great irony of the practice of not thinking. The more you try not to think, the more you end up thinking. And practicing trying not to think only doubles the effort, which ultimately doubles the thinking.

And so all day long, in spite of constant attempts at defeating my apparently natural tendency toward mental masochism, I've been thinking of nothing but spinal taps and morphine drips and white lab coats. I've been hating doctors and nurses and receptionists and, more than anything else, the people inhabiting the planet around me who seem so destined to slide easily through life without so much as an ingrown toenail, while I struggle my way through grad school with a severe dopamine deficiency, a constant postnasal drip, and now a head that throbs so badly and so constantly that even my prescription narcotics no longer dull the pain.

I've been thinking, too, how frightened I am, in spite of all my efforts to the contrary. I've found it's much easier to soldier on when you aren't actually battling anything. One assumes, too, that winning the war would be significantly easier if it were a little more obvious who the enemy was. The worst part is not knowing, especially given all the thinking I'm apparently doomed to do, whether I want to or not. When you don't know, there are no limits on what your mind can make up; it's a situation which, when you have an imagination as wild as mine, is almost as frightening as the illness itself.

I don’t mind having to face my own mortality. It’s my inadequacies I’m not interested in confronting. The fact that I am weak enough to feel this level of pain – or worse, this level of fear – is unnerving. I like to pretend I’m stronger than this.

But I’m grateful, too, for the lessons this experience is teaching me.

Last weekend the pain became so intense that I ended up back in the emergency room. Convinced that I was suffering from an intense migraine, the doctor gave me an IV drip of something that was supposed to open the blood vessels in my head, but for some reason ended up shutting down the rest of me instead. All the muscles in my body contracted, and I had the most severe feeling of nausea I’ve ever experienced. I thought I was going to die. Jeremy’s in the middle of finals at school and couldn’t stay with me, so he called my good friend Aydin and asked him to come sit in the hospital with me.

When Aydin arrived he sat next to me, stroked my hair, and put his head next to mine on the pillow.

“You’re going to make it through this,” he said. “You’re a really strong woman.”

A few minutes later they came in and gave me a powerful dose of morphine. It’s impossible to explain the sudden and overwhelming sensation that it’ll have on you, if you’ve never had a morphine drip before. It comes on all at once, makes you feel hot and heavy and sore for just a moment, and then suddenly releases you downward into a state of absolute release. It slices through the pain like a knife, cuts away whatever it is that binds it to you and lets it fall to the floor, and you’re suddenly convinced that you will never be in pain again, that you might never have been to begin with, and that it’s quite possible that the concept of pain in and of itself might simply have been nothing more than a product of your imagination conceived in a moment of weakness.

But as difficult as that is to describe, it’s nothing compared to the comfort that can come from having friends by your side. Aydin’s presence that day, the way he simply sat next to me, quietly helping to shoulder a burden that by all rights I should carry by myself, was absolutely cathartic, the morphine to my emotional pain. The way he and Jeremy and my other close friends band together and pass around the responsibility of taking care of me makes me feel like something precious in a museum. Something worth guarding. I’ve been in a great deal of pain lately, and yet somehow I can’t help feeling like I’m one of the luckier people on the planet.