the doctor who saved me
I don’t remember his name.
I’d briefly been seeing a concierge doctor. Until then, everyone had been excited to tell me my symptoms sounded like multiple sclerosis—like they were proud of themselves for having read about tingly extremities once. I was irritated. “My symptoms started this month,” I would answer. “My goal is to not have these symptoms develop into multiple sclerosis.”
The concierge doctor was kind and respectful with my spouse; with me, she was constantly offended. “I am the doctor,” she would say to me, a refrain. We were in a power struggle over my body.
The concierge doctor had refused to use the patient portal, insisting that I text her instead. My husband texted her from my phone, posing as me, because I was too scared to talk to her. I’d wanted to ask her for a d-dimer test—to test for blood clots. The doctor was furious. She replied with a wall of text. “You don’t need a d-dimer test, you need a psychologist,” the wall of text began. (She had long been trying to get me to see a specific psychologist, in fact—her husband. I’d kept my mouth shut, but I found her insistence on her husband ethically dubious.)
That night, short of breath with stabbing pains in my neck and chest, I’d gone to the ER. The attending doctor sat at a computer nearby. I’d described my symptoms in a disjointed rush. He didn’t look at me once. I trailed off. I sounded insane. I sat there, inert.
“Okay,” he said at last, “let me see if I have this right.” He read what he’d typed onscreen. It was an ultra-concise, compact, economical version of whatever word salad had come out of me, stripped of its panic.
Finally he wheeled around in his chair to look at me.
“Yes,” I said. “Wow. Wow!”
“You thought I wasn’t listening,” he said, trying to not smile.
“Of course I didn’t!” I agreed. “That’s… that was really good! It was so tight and concise! You took my complaints and made them intelligible!” Then I fixed him with a look. “You’re a really good writer,” I said. We stared at each other.
“I was an English major before I was pre-med,” he said. We both started laughing.
He talked to me about my concerns. When he told me “you don’t have the body of a normal 39-year old,” I shut down again, staring at the floor. Later, when someone asked me for my primary-care provider, I declined to give a name.
The attending doctor returned and spoke to me again, this time while my husband was out of the room.
“I’m admitting you to the hospital,” he told me. “Your d-dimer was elevated.”
He exhaled. “I meant it before when I said you don’t have the body of a normal 39-year old,” he said. “You started by telling me you have leukocytosis. That’s not something patients do.” He shook his head. “And if you don’t find a doctor who will listen to you and take you seriously, you will die.”
After that, I stopped fucking around. I stayed behind in Los Angeles to look for a different primary-care provider. I’ve been golden ever since.