I was pacing around a few whiles ago, reading that article in the Times magazine about the NIH and that poor woman who is falling to pieces, and bellowing at the page in front of me. There was so much in that article that seemed wavering and odd. Like this idea of looking and looking for a new diagnosis. Why? I honestly don’t understand. A diagnosis exists as a tool. Approaching it as an end seems nonsensical unless as an excuse to fundraise for Pediatric Restless Leg Syndrome. You arrive almost immediately at a weird continuum where we have to start making proclamations about what a “healthy” body looks like in comparison to a diseased body. So, what does a “healthy” body look like? Structurally perfect in every respect? Free of genetic mutation? Probably not going to drop dead within the year? No complaints? Going to live forever? Able to cheerfully undertake the full catalogue of human activities without pain or madness: defecating, running, reproducing, crying, eating, orgasming, toe-touching, differential equation solving, back handspringing, tight rope walking?

I don’t know why the Times Magazine article reminds me a personal blog entry I read once in which a doctor complained about a list a patient brought to her appointment. The list was written in a jerky, trembling hand and included a handful of nebulous symptoms like dizziness, headaches, back pain, and stomach aches. Anyhow, at the bottom of the list were written a series of nervous and confrontational notes in full sentences, addressed to the doctor. The patient, sounding frenzied, demanded certain lab work and refused to take any more medication. I am inventing some of the detail; I can’t recall it word for word and I don’t particularly want to link to the specific entry because the writer seems like more than a decent person. However, her diagnosis here was a piece of misogynist crap as common and invisible as air. The patient is hysterical (the laden historical translation), she likes being a patient and will never be well. Ah, the bad boyfriend school of diagnosis. If you don’t find me irresistible, you must be gay! Damn, I felt sorry for that poor patient. I imagined her panicky preparation for the appointment, breathing deeply and rehearsing the list of symptoms every magazine on earth solemnly asserts, at the ass-covering imperative of their legal department, you should “talk to your doctor” about; picturing herself standing undressed and un-speeched, just like the previous appointments, sweaty-palmed and acquiescent during the entirety of the six minutes then cursing herself afterward for forgetting to offer the list of clues that would surely have resulted in the One True Diagnosis; deciding it’s a better idea to write everything down so she doesn’t waste the six minutes and the fifty dollar copay again… I feel sorry for the doctor too, but not nearly so much. The doctor is invested with a degree of power unfair to both her and the patient. She carries a license and degree that give a terrifying weight to the indifferent bad boyfriend diagnosis.  I need to come back to this when I have a moment, to try to articulate why I was so bothered instead just pounding away. In the meantime, lest this should read as a doctors suck rant, props to our family doctor, who saved the baby from a lot more pain, and to my father whose dinner table diatribes on everything from hormone replacement therapy, to h. pylori, and what happens when you play on the railroad track, nearly always turn out to be news twenty years later. Though the railroad thing was pretty evident right off.

Is online conversation engendering a return to a more oral culture, where the last word acquires a different kind of importance? Words upon words upon words. Look into history of oral culture and comparisons. See Walter Ong and secondary orality… What on earth did I have in mind when I wrote this? Is this even my handwriting?