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.