I've Seen Over 50 Doctors And No One Knows What's Wrong With Me

"Like most things in life, illness doesn’t exist in black and white, but in the million shades between." “Having a diagnosis would have confined an amorphous array of unmanageable symptoms into a definable enemy that I could study, measure for size, and destroy.” If you tell someone you’re sick, they want to know what you’re sick with. Without a diagnosis, I had no easy answer to the question “What’s wrong?” If I said something vague but accurate, like, “I have a strange neurological illness,” then I would seem intentionally coy. We treat illness like war, and naming the disease is the equivalent of meeting the maxim: “Know thy enemy as you know thyself.” For some, the language of battle might be important. “We struggle to embrace chronic narratives because they’re scary and uncomfortable.” I understand the desire to put illness in terms of winning and losing battles.