Mystery Patient

The Independent’s schoolteacher/ diarist knows she’s not pregnant. So what explains these symptoms?

May 31, 2006

Because I’ve been feeling so weird recently, especially since this weekend, I thought I should go back to the clinic to see what’s up. I haven’t been this bizarrely sick in years, if ever. I don’t have a regular doctor in New Haven, so I went to a walk-in yesterday. I was already nervous about what the outcome of the visit would be and the hour-long wait to be seen didn’t help matters much as I spent most of it sitting inside my head wondering about the possibilities of my ailment. My friends at Roomba gave me a hard time last weekend when I complained of stomach pains: ​“Oooh, are you sure you’re not pregnant?” they said with a grin. ​“Are you sure your sickness isn’t morning sickness?” Yes, jackasses, I’m sure. But then sitting in the waiting room, I suddenly became unsure. Even though I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I couldn’t possibly be pregnant, I also knew I’d never been pregnant so I wouldn’t know what the symptoms would be. Anything’s possible, I thought. And with that, I suddenly doubted my entire medical history. Cancer, pneumonia, kidney failure, measles, diabetes, strep throat, chicken pox, bird flu. Maybe I had one of those? The doctor, when she asked me the typical questions, simply listened to my long list of complaints. Her eyes squinted as she processed my symptoms. I guess I had hoped to see her sit back, look confidently into my eyes, smile, and say, ​“It’s just a common cold.” ​“A 24-hour bug.” ​“A paper cut.” Anything with a clear, non-threatening title and a treatment with a name that wouldn’t involve many syllables. So I wasn’t thrilled when she took blood samples and said after examining me, ​“Wow! This is really bad! Ouch!” If I had been in a movie, my reaction to her comment would have been to look directly into the camera with a deadpan face. When she stepped out of the room to go look under the scope, I sat in the exam room feeling nervous. I looked around the room at the white sterile lights, heard the footsteps clicking on the linoleum outside my room, and panicked about the worst case scenario. Minutes ticked by and my eyes wandered the room. I imagined the doctor walking back into the room, sitting down on her rolling chair, and rolling herself over to me to hold my hands. She would bite her lip, her brows would furrow, and she’d ask me if I had ever heard of a disease called Phyllonuclearbronchialfibroiditixanthangum, which of course, I wouldn’t have. I would cry, and she would bring me a gigantic medical dictionary and she would look up this rare disease. There would have been only 11 known cases in history; I would be number twelve. But of course, when she came back, her eyes were still squinty and she still looked like she was processing information — all of which told me she had come to no conclusions. She gave me three prescriptions for medication and then I asked her, in her professional opinion, what she was thinking my sickness could be. ​“Well,” she said, ​“you’ve given so many vague symptoms that I don’t know what the hell is going on with you! You’re my mystery patient today!” And that made me feel much better.

June 1, 2006 

This is what I’m thinking this morning: gay and lesbian couples who are denied marriage licenses by the state should not have to pay state taxes since those couples are not being treated as equal citizens and therefore are not granted the same rights and privileges thereof. This thought came to me after hearing a story on NPR this morning about homosexual couples in New York who were denied marriage licenses and who are going through litigation because of it.
In seventh grade, I wanted to date a boy named Nate Stratton. I knew I wasn’t allowed to date any boy until eighth grade, but I wanted to. So I sat down and had a conversation with my parents at the dinner table. In essence, I was asking my parents for permission to be with this boy. Now, because I lived in their house (rent free, of course — ​“they paid for me) I had to abide by their rules. And they brought the rules down hard. No way, little girl. No way. End of story. Since it was my parents’ house, they made the rules and I needed to go along with what they said.
The story is similar with gay marriage. In essence, when couples apply for a marriage license, they are asking permission from their ​“parents,” the state. Those ​“parents” have the right to say yea or nay but more often than not, the parents say nay, just as mine did. The only difference between my story and the story of gay marriage is that I never paid my parents taxes. I never worked, contributed, paid anything to the household to make sure it was working fine. Therefore, my parents had the right to control me and my decisions and I had no right or power to go against their decision.
However, those couples who are applying for marriage licenses are people who contribute financially and otherwise to their respective states. They therefore have a right to get what they want.
It seems absolutely ridiculous to me that people — ​“who are regular, fully contributing and active members of the community— who want to be with each other are not allowed to be. Who are we to say ​“these two people are not allowed to be together?” Who are we? We are not each other’s parents. Homosexual couples are not the 7th grade children who live under our roof and who need to abide by our rules. What does that even mean? Who are we to set such restrictive, superficial, irrational, and unfair rules?
Change them, people. Change the rules.