The Dangling Carrot

(If you need to catch up on the health issue I write of here, see a previous post)

I had it in my grasp: the answer. After ten months of stomachache, heartburn, and gutache, several doctor’s visits, five different prescriptions, sixteen pounds lost, and two visits to the emergency room, I had it. I had a piece of paper on it that said: this is what you have. This is the cause of your pain.

While grabbing a hold of this provided no immediate physical relief, it was a burden lifted to consider that my mysterious ailments had been brought out of hiding and identified.

Yesterday I found that the carrot I thought I had firmly in my grasp was a phantom, a vapor. How cruel to let the answers flirt with me for two weeks. At my follow-up appointment on March 27, the doctor yanked the carrot out of sight, telling me that everything looks “perfectly healthy and normal”.

Huh? Did I not have a piece of paper on my fridge stating otherwise?

“Do you want to treat this?” he asked me.

“Yes, this is extraordinarily difficult to live with,” was my answer. I made no effort to mask my incredulity at the question.

He says that he believes I have a spastic stomach (which does not take a medical degree to identify; I could have easily told him that myself) and that it needed help to relax. Before I had a chance to ask, I was handed my sixth prescription since this ordeal started and advised that if it didn’t help in a week or two, I was to call and speak with one of his nurses. The time it took for the nurse to take my vitals, to hear this information from the doctor, and to be on my way out spanned about four minutes.

Wha…? Do they take bets on how quickly they can cycle patients out of the office? I had heard this was par for the course with many physicians, especially specialists. Perhaps since my symptoms offered little in the way of anything interesting, I was to be scuttled along to make room for the next set of symptoms (otherwise known as a “patient”).

I had been wham-bam-and-thank-you-ma’amed. My head was spinning; this is not at all what I expected. I had at least hoped to discuss with him treatment for the conditions described on that piece of paper. What about that hiatal hernia? And the gastric mucosal atrophy? Do I have those, or don’t I?

This sort of treatment may make sense to someone in the medical profession, but I left that office scratching my head. Is this really what passes for so-called “healthcare” these days? Having always enjoyed a great state of health, this is the first time I had really encountered what those who are chronically sick must face on a regular basis: feeling like I’ve been reduced to a collection of symptoms; feeling like every pain simply has a new prescription thrown at it; feeling a little deprived of hope, a little disempowered, and a whole lot frustrated.

I wish I had been more adamant with him and insisted that he tell me if the conditions described on that sheet were in fact present realities for me, or whether these were merely initial findings that he had later concluded were false. I wish I knew.

I really don’t have anything against modern medicine, but the more I am in and out of these offices, the more disillusioned I am becoming with how it is practiced. I am not expecting these visits to double as a therapy session, but why can I not have the room to say, “this is how the pain is interrupting my life. I simply want to return to my life”?

It makes me want to stand up and scream: I am more than my medical chart! These symptoms come in a body, and with that body a whole person is attached! I have people I love, things I want to do and love to do, a job, goals to accomplish! Being in a consistently compromised state of health compromises my ability to live fully! Are these things not important?

So I left the medical office yesterday and got the prescription filled. I came home and defiantly set that bottle next to the others. I looked at my mini-pharmacy and thought, there they are: five orange bottles, each of which at one point offered me the hope of relief, if not returned health (one that had been previously prescribed is no longer part of my regimen). The contents of these bottles have not provided me with anything resembling wellness, so my skepticism runs deep as to whether this sixth will be the magical missing link. In fact, I’ve stopped taking most of them since it seems pointless to pump my body full of synthetic drugs that have fallen far short of achieving the purpose for which they were designed.

I have decided that a fresh perspective is needed. I called today and made an appointment for next week with a naturopath (read about

naturopathic medicine). I will be seeing someone who has been recommended by at least two people I trust deeply. I have been drawn to this branch of medicine before because of its holistic approach to healthcare. Where modern medicine tends to focus on treating illness, naturopathy aims to prevent it, embracing the idea that health is the natural state of the body; the emphasis is on treating whole persons as mental, physical, emotional and spiritual beings.

I really am at a loss as how to conclude all this, as I have arrived at no conclusions myself. The answers I thought I had have been replaced by more questions. I feel small, frustrated, angry, a little scared, and a lot like crying. Was it not just a couple weeks ago that after so much waiting, God gave me a long hoped-for answer? I suppose there are lessons even in this: trusting, waiting, waiting, waiting, kneeling with open hands.

I cling firmly to the knowledge that He who made me also holds me fast and trust that perhaps someday, He will use what I currently see as a terrific mess to be a blessing to someone else who needs it.