TKM

It was without question the nicest doctor’s office I have ever entered. Spare, spacious, and moodlit with rice-paper tower lamps and recessed lights. Four semi-lounge chairs invited clients to settle in and relax with a magazine—Glamour, Allure, Sunset, Wine Spectator—as if one were poolside on a Princess cruise. These reading choices, no doubt selected for their idle browsability, were neatly arrayed on a sturdy coffee table, which itself was centered on an Oriental rug, a real one, not one of those winking acrylic imposters at IKEA that start shedding red fuzz all over your living room 10 minutes after you lay it down. Twelve-inch ocean-colored marbled tile subtly offset soft white walls whose hushed serenity was broken only by three oil paintings bursting with bright colors and a flat-screen TV wall-mounted above a table of brochures advertising Cynosure, Juvéderm, Restylane, and Latisse, the latter of which, I learned, is a treatment for eyelash hypotrichosis, a chilling term for the relatively nonmalignant condition of short eyelashes.

While the wife and I have a DVR and enjoy our ability to fast-forward through commercials—thereby helping to kill the time-honored model of sponsor-driven television we’ve known our entire lives—whenever I see an advertisement flitting by for a pharmaceutical I’ve never heard of I make her back up, because I find novel drugs and their ads tragicomic in a complacently American way. That’s how I learned of the possible side effects of Latisse, whose first-line application is as a glaucoma treatment—we all knew that no scientists actually set out to “cure” short eyelashes; clinicians simply noticed that glaucoma patients who were taking Lumigan, the alter ego of Latisse, to decrease ocular hypertension, which sounds way more painful to me than eyelash hypotrichosis, developed darker pigment in and around their eyes, which made for thicker, longer lashes. Now, look alive, this hyper eyelash growth is not a permanent side effect; eyelash hypotrichosis is as chronic as disappointment and will reassert its bad ass the moment you discontinue use. However, the potential darkening of your iris pigment is likely permanent, so, you know, if the eyes are windows to the soul, your soul will become darker too. Permanently. Just saying. Heaven knows I’m a major consumer of pharma. Still, it seems excessive to me—especially in a world visited by the miracle of mascara—to take a prescription medication for the rest of your life, at a cost of $120 per month, to maintain slightly longer eyelashes, but that’s probably only because I dodged the eyelash hypotrichosis bullet. My eyelashes are quite long. And my irises are already plenty brown.

I could go on about the injectible wrinkle fillers that were on offer, like Juvéderm, Restylane, and Radiesse, any of which promise to usurp your unsightly nasolabial folds (a.k.a. smile lines), melomental folds (creases emanating from the corners of your mouth, or “marionette lines” in aesthetician parlance), crow’s feet, or just about any other mark of a life well-lived—for about six to nine months, after which your body absorbs it and your face resumes its natural joyful state. But one must put her judgmental opinions about necessity and excess aside when entering the previously alien dimension of plastic surgery and injectible/pharmaceutical cosmetology. I was there for the former, or at least for a consult about the former. And it wasn’t just some random plastic surgeon’s den of solicitude. I was in the surgical cosmetology capital of the world, Beverly Hills’ “Golden Triangle” neighborhood, so named for the obscene consumerism and self-righteous privilege that radiate from its Rodeo Drive nucleus like the seductive, combustible rays of the sun. Touch me, skanks.

Longtime readers of this blog may remember, as hard as they’ve tried to forget, that my girls developed in a free-spirited, artistic way, with one big, floppy D-cup accompanied by a little sister two full cup sizes her junior. I would more plainly call this a developmental deformity, but I don’t want yonier-than-thou feminists all up in my grill for not embracing the perfection of my temple. On the contrary, I mask my goddess-given uniqueness, augmenting my dwarfish side with a prosthetic to approximate a chest that fails to alarm strangers.

Though I long ago stepped up from the nylon-covered foam pad of my youth—which had to be surreptitiously wrung out whenever I was so bold as to go swimming—to a silicone insert that conducts at nearly the same bounce rate as its mate when I walk and feels less like a wadded sock to those who hug me, it’s still uncomfortable and prone to slippage, and I’m tired of stealing moments for furtive adjustments. If I were less self-conscious I suppose I could adjust it more brazenly, like men shifting their merchandise in the deli window, but I’m afraid I could never summon up enough attitude to make that maneuver seem like anything but a lonely lesbian awkwardly groping her own tits.

In truth, I’ve just never taken pride of ownership in my chest; inasmuch as I think about my breasts at all, it’s mostly about how to camouflage them—or how much I’d like to not have to think about camouflaging them. I’ve been dreaming about corrective surgery since I was a teenager, but it’s not the kind of procedure one’s HMO covers—I’ve certainly tried to convince mine that they should—and it’s always been beyond the means of my pitifully stagnant income. But lately, catching a draft off the success of my overeducated wife—who has generously begun to cover a larger share of our household expenses with her more dynamic salary—I’ve found myself with greater financial freedom. So, totally taking advantage of my wife’s largesse, I’m blowing my newfound savings on plastic surgery. Good thing I don’t look like a trophy wife. (Give me time: My nasolabial and melomental folds are only getting deeper.)

So why lop off the big boob instead of augmenting the little one? Augmentation is, after all, less expensive, less invasive, and far less scarring—a state of affairs I find corrupt; how else to explain this being one of very few instances in which women are encouraged to want more, and punished for wanting less. I’m sorry, but if surgeons have figured out how to insert and secure 1-kilogram silicone slabs through straw-sized incisions tucked discreetly under the arms, how have they not yet stumbled on a way to decrease breast mass without cutting off our nipples and slicing down and around the mammary like they’re skinning and de-boning chicken breasts?

Still, I do want less. It’s true that as an adolescent I tried exercising only on the right side to increase the breast muscle of my stunted member. It didn’t work. At all. Probably owing to the fact that breasts are composed of milk ducts and fat, neither of which much respond to exercise.  As an adult, well, my personal presentation can be somewhat at odds with itself, with a pronounced disconnect between my chosen aesthetic and my unchosen mammatude; even as my breasts may well be the only characteristic of prove-it-in-your-face womanhood that keeps me from being bounced out of ladies’ restrooms, I’m tired of them lording their bounty over me like some sick cosmic joke.

And isn’t it a wonderful thing that modern medicine has given us ways to “correct” just about anything we find disharmonious to our own big ideas about how we feel we should, want, or deserve to look? (For a staggering fee, the indirect costs of which will be passed along to my wife; good thing I married her when I had the chance.)

I’m tempted here to address the issue of misguided plastic surgery. There are plenty of people who manage to incorrect themselves in their bitchfight with nature, even people who, by virtue of having had, say, a dozen or two or three surgical procedures in their quest to micromanage their genetic code, find themselves featured on A&E, which has lately found its niche in dwelling on the addictions and obsessive compulsions of Americans gripped by PTSD, dysphoria, or even simple ennui. But who am I to say that my boob job is somehow more meritorious than that of the 110-pound 21-year-old who knows in her heart that she was really meant to have F-cup breasts? And if her newfound “self-esteem” opens avenues previously closed to her—like maybe the gates of the Playboy Mansion in Bel-Air…

Or even the stage door at San Bernardino’s Flesh gentlemen’s bar…

Well, then bully for her!

One can look up any number of websites that have little purpose beyond tracking plastic surgery disasters, generally of the celebrity variety because, really, how many uncelebrated people are going to emerge from anonymity simply to say, “Wow, look at this horrifying ‘after’ shot of me! I’m not sure what I was going for, but I sure ended up disfigured!”

Hence, the old saying is particularly applicable here: I didn’t want to just pick somebody out of the phonebook. Not that anybody uses phonebooks anymore. My wife and I occasionally receive a copy of the yellow pages but haven’t cracked one open in years, and when we recently found a white pages volume lying on the doorstep we were momentarily fascinated by the relic, as if an IBM Selectric typewriter had been mysteriously delivered to our side porch.

Needless to say, I had not started my search in the yellow pages. Rather, I asked a transgender professor at my wife’s institution of higher learning whether he could recommend any local plastic surgeons, figuring that surgeons who regularly do “top” surgeries for trans dudes would have no trouble whatsoever with the level of reduction/reconstruction I have in mind.

I had been harboring some concern that maybe someone who spends so much time thinking about breasts—defying mass-to-perk physics ratios, discerning ideal nipple placement, defining perfect cleavage plumb lines—would try to talk me into, if not a straight-up augmentation on the wee side, meeting somewhere in the middle of the two, perhaps at a nice, plump C? Like maybe there’s a whole cadre of surgeons involved in a secret fraternal organization foresworn to protect the worldwide breast population from fallen women like me, like a sort of Operation Rescue for boobs. I didn’t want any contention with my surgeon about desired outcomes, because at a certain critical point in this transaction I’ll be out cold on a table and at the mercy of the surgeon’s mammipulations.

Trans dude having come up empty, I went to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons website, where you can search doctors by surgery type, ZIP Code, etc. I chose “breast reconstruction” and selected a 10-mile radius as my parameter. It returned 194 hits, about 150 of which sported Golden Triangle addresses. Even I can’t believe there’s that much call for boobwork by Angelenos, and I’ve lived among their peculiar breed my whole life.

Daunted, I had to narrow my search down somehow, and of the 194 doctors only a handful had recognizably female names, so I started with them, guessing I was less likely to encounter pushback from a female surgeon. The “patient care consultant” for the first doctor I contacted was friendly and incredibly responsive to follow-up e-mails—though the surgeon’s consultation fee seemed a bit on the absurd precious side. Given that, before setting up a first date I wanted to have a reasonable expectation that we were going to get to second base; I didn’t want to fork over $250 taking a surgeon to dinner only to find that she didn’t want to go to bed with me, or that she had a tacky, shedding IKEA rug. When I expressed concerns to patient care consultant Sonya about whether or not the surgeon and I might be on the same results page, or living in the same financial universe, she invited me to e-mail photos of my breasts, front and profiles, for a preliminary look-see and quote.

Enter dear wife for weirdest photo shoot ever.

You know how you sometimes look at pictures of yourself and say, “Jesus, do I really look like that?” That feeling is amplified in naked photos. I sincerely didn’t think it was possible for me to harbor more dislike for that particular portion of my body, but as I sat editing images of my dysmorphic chest, cropping out all references to my head and happy trail, I couldn’t imagine how I had managed to look past it for so long. Have I had carnival mirrors all this time?

I sent the images to Sonya, resisting the urge to apologize in the body of the e-mail. I’m certain that mine isn’t the first set of amateur, anonymous, totally unsexy naked pics Sonya has been sent, nor will it be the last.

I wonder if guys surfing for free online porn ever look at before-and-after shots of breast augmentations. There seems to be an endless supply out there—most categorized by cup size, which can be pretty handy for the discerning breast man. To get an idea of what my reduction would look like, I had to use the “before” and “after” shots in reverse, flipping, for instance, A-to-D and B-to-D augmentations. This was annoying because I wanted to see an actual surgically enhanced breast in the size I was shopping for: These ragtag A’s and B’s were all just as prolapsed as mine, with none of the lifting and smoothing and precision nipplescaping that I’m hoping for in a finished product. I couldn’t find a single site that pictured a woman who had undergone a reduction with an end-point size below a C cup. Is there really no demand for such a result? Do surgeons just not post those pics because they don’t want to scare away clientele who may be worried about having too much of their womanhood slurped out while comatose? Or are the surgeons members of Operation Brescue?

Knowing that most women get reductions in order to relieve neck and back pain, the scope of these reductions seem startlingly minor to me, sometimes sloughing just a partial cup size. And pictures I’ve found depicting disparity corrections suggest that women overwhelmingly opt for an overall augmentation, with implants of differing sizes equalizing the imbalance. At the end of the day, it seems, everybody wants more, not less. Even kittens.

The online transmission of my own “cheesecake” pics—which felt weird enough; I can’t imagine e-mailing a naked picture of myself with my head attached. I guess that’s what separates me from the TMI generation, who gamely engage in sexting and then seem genuinely surprised when, post-breakup, their ex-boyfriends disseminate the nudie shots to anyone with a cell phone. Gah, I clearly wrote FYEO right there in the subject line!

But now I guess I know how those girls feel. I received no further correspondence from Sonya, not even when I followed up five days later to ask whether the doctor had had a chance to view the pics, adding, solicitously, “Now that I’ve decided to give myself this gift, I’m very excited to move forward with it.”

Nope. Nothing. Sonya may at this very moment be sending pictures of my tits to her entire e-mail address book. Subject line: OMG, so FUBAR!

But I wouldn’t let Sonya’s rejection dissuade me. I simply moved on to girlfriend doctor number two, who seemed more qualified than the last anyway, carrying board certification in both surgery and plastic surgery; her office asked for the less precious consultation fee of $125. And her patient care consultant, Nadia, informed me that a patient had just canceled an appointment two weeks out and would I like to see the doctor then? Yes, I really, really would!

Which brings us back to me, sitting in a semi-lounge chair in a moodlit office not reading a fluffy magazine, surrounded by brochures for injectible cosmetic enhancements, waiting for my name to be called, hoping this doctor would be the one.

To be continued…

Hello?

Does anyone bother to check this site anymore for updates? Am I whistling in the dark? Oh, wait, I’m supposed to be writing for myself, so it matters not whether anyone reads it. (Total, complete bullshit. Attention is oxygen.)

Will you please excuse Scout’s absence if she tells you she’s been in traction? Only for 20 minutes per week, but still, you know, she’s shameless—anything to win back your love.

When last we talked my right leg had gone all pouty on me, acting out in response to my rude presumption that it would interminably take up the slack of its slower companion. (It hates being taken for granted—who knew?) The pain was such that I had taken to sleeping in my zero-gravity chair to displace stress from the pressure points.

Nothing has changed, except that I’ve gained a physical therapist. Her name is Eriny.

Eriny has theories about the origin of said pain. Of sciatica, bursitis of the hip, and piriformis syndrome, which bundles sciatica and bursitis into one convenient package, she’s pretty sure it’s the latter—which she notes is often caused by gait disorders, the fancy term for my drunken-sailor walk. At any rate, she needed to treat it from a couple of different angles to be certain.

I couldn’t have been more delighted that first day I saw her—the morning of my 39th birthday—to hear her say the words “deep-tissue massage.” Free spa treatment! Happy birthday, me!

I knew what a deep-tissue massage felt like; I had, after all, paid $135 for one at the Mandalay Bay spa, more properly called “Spa Mandalay Bay,” in Las Vegas. And to think I would be getting one now for only a $15 copay! Oh, sure, Kaiser Permanente’s Occupational and Physical Therapy Unit, perhaps more properly called “Unit OPT Kaiser Permanente,” lacks some of the fancy trappings of Spa Mandalay Bay: the preliminary relaxation session in the eucalyptus steam room, the ploofy robe, your choice of stink-pretty essential oils, indirect lighting faded just-so, soft plinky-plonky music, the clog-shod massage therapist seductively whispering, “How’s that pressure for you?” But listen, for the $120 difference, I’ll accept Kaiser’s sheet-draped exam table in a beige room under fluorescent assault. And if Eriny doesn’t exactly whisper in my ear, neither does she shout at me.

As it turns out, Spa Mandalay Bay’s “deep-tissue massage” was just so much bullshit. Though it featured a tap more pressure than the Swedish massage to which I had treated myself during a previous trip to Vegas, overall it was a perfectly pleasant experience—as I suppose any spa treatment ought to be. Eriny’s $15 job, on the other hand, amounted to outright abuse. Ho yeah, there were tears. I only just managed to keep from leaping off the table and running limping away.

So I was feeling a little cringy when I went back to see her for my next appointment. But once we agreed that there had been only slight, not profound, improvement, she said she wanted to try pelvic traction. It sounded intriguing, as do many medieval tortures, but mostly I was just pleased to duck out of my scheduled “massage.”

Eriny led me to a treatment room outfitted with an execution gurney. She harnessed my midsection in an institutional corset before I got horizontal, and once I was on the gurney she pulled my arms through another harness and buckled it around my chest, then she went about cinching all the straps until I was immobilized to her satisfaction.

Are you turned on? No, I wasn’t either. There are few venues less sexy than a medical treatment room, especially when your bondage top is wearing a medallion with a full-color rendering of an agonized Jesus bleeding under his crown of thorns. Not. Sexy.

After 20 minutes of having my spine pulled like taffy by a machine exerting between 30 and 70 pounds of pressure in alternating 30-second intervals, a surprisingly not unpleasant experience, I was released from my bonds and given these parting words: “This is a long-term treatment, so don’t expect any miracles overnight.”

Friend S. was throwing herself a 40th-birthday party the following day and had rented a roller rink. I had told her that I was having physical therapy the day before in hopes of being able to skate. I was kidding, of course. Anyone who’s witnessed my walk of late, a highly adaptive drunken lurch, my legs only grudgingly responding to my brain’s commands, would laugh at a mental image of me skating. But the following morning I felt less calcified than I have in months, and I remained loose the whole day.

Readers, I skated.

I didn’t skate well, mind you, but that was much more a result of 20 years having passed since I last set wheeled-foot in a rink than any physical limitations. And just as S. promised, I felt like a teenager again, albeit with less self-consciousness. It was kind of a miracle—both the skating and the not caring whether anyone was watching or laughing at me.

I stiffened up about 36 hours later, but it was great while it lasted, and I figured, hey, maybe I could count on 48 hours of happy body—which would be two days more per week than I could hope for before—every time I had my spine yanked. And Eriny said it would only get better with further treatment! It will come as no surprise that I priced in-home pelvic traction kits through online medical suppliers. Because, you know, if 20 minutes of traction results in 48 hours of mobility, imagine what an hour would do…or a whole day!

As it turns out, there is no magic bullet (except the kind they put in sex toys to make them vibrate—or so I’ve heard). I’ve had four more traction sessions since, with none having yielded the 48-hour miracle of the first. In fact, with the second treatment I felt significant pain at my immobilization points for several days afterward. And this morning, my fourth treatment, I walked in all zippity-do-dah and walked out stiff.

Still, I remain hopeful, and I have a little theory of my own. You see, Eriny hasn’t worn her bleeding Jesus medallion since that first treatment, and Jesus was way into healing the lame—even if neither he nor his biographers much cottoned to people-first language. And even Peter, just about the coolest apostle ever, got into the miracle racket, pointing at a random beggar and commanding, “In the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene—walk!” And the man obediently leapt to his feet and danced like a sideshow freak at a Christian circus. The Bible notes that this particular convert had been lame since birth, working his alms racket at that same location for 35 years, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers. And if the ungrateful bastard wants to complain about his lot, may he meet the Philistine who’s walked about her whole life in terribly uncomfortable strappy heels from Payless.

My point is that Eriny could wear the goddamn medallion again. I’d make a handsome vessel for a modern Christian miracle, and the Good News would not be lost on me. Really.

In the meantime, Happy Birthday, Jesus, you studmuffin. You don’t look a day over 33!

(God, I hope that didn’t seem overly solicitous. I’m being totally sincere.)

I’ve been sleeping in a chair most nights for the past couple of weeks. It’s a really nice chair, one of those Relax the Back zero-gravity numbers—in green suede—but, you know, it’s still a chair. The first time I resorted to its embrace was during a sleepless night, several weeks ago, in which I was unable to find a single position where I wasn’t tempted to amputate my right leg at the hip joint, such was the pain that radiated through it for reasons unknown. (For those of you keeping score, my right side, which hosts my right leg, would be my heretofore non-gimpy side.) It seemed like such an extreme measure back then, sleeping in a chair, but it’s become routine, just another option: Hmm, bed or chair tonight?

A friend said it sounded like a sciatic nerve flare-up and suggested that my partner try to beat it into submission. My girl didn’t seem eager to pummel my ass at first, but after a few hesitant warm-up taps she got all Fists of Fury on me. (I haven’t dared ask whether she had a particular incident or quarrel in mind during our uncharacteristically antagonistic encounter.) At any rate, the therapy did not a lick of good.

My primary care doctor didn’t so much take my pain complaint seriously: After he manipulated my leg this way and that and saw nothing obviously wrong, Dr. Devil-May-Care told me to feel free to exceed Advil’s label-recommended dosage, breezily adding that I could take “as many as four at a time”—just in case I was thinking more along the lines of, say, 18.

Does my HMO hate me?

It’s not such a ridiculous question. I’ve lately been collecting ailments as if they’re exotic butterflies, and my current primary care doc would be only the most recent in a long line of doctors to get all Billy Mumy on my ass and wish me into the cornfield. And if any perceived abuse of my HMO’s resources isn’t enough to get me shit-listed, there’s also this matter of a letter I wrote them years ago—before they became my HMO—to rant at them on behalf of my grandfather.

My father, who has called me exactly twice in my adult life, rang me up one day in 1999. “Your grandpa’s in the hospital,” he said. “He tried to kill himself.”

Let me just say here that my grandfather as I remembered him was a bit of a bastard. I say “as I remembered him” because we had been estranged for 15 years. Nevertheless, the dutiful daughter called in sick to work and headed south on the 101, toward Orange County and family.

I went with my parents to visit my grandfather at the “care unit,” which seemed more like an assisted living facility than a mental hospital, and where my grandfather was eating chocolate ice cream and flirting with a nurse one third his age.

“It was those [HMO] bastards,” he said, after some adjustment time during which we established that yes, it had been 15 years since we saw each other, and yes, I was an adult now. He went on to say that he had told his doctors over and over that his medications weren’t working and that he couldn’t stand to live in constant pain anymore. In addition to the standard assortment of elderly gentlemen’s aches, he had had problems with his feet and legs for decades. And, yeah, of course, it was undoubtedly exacerbated by the big D that we know too well.

After one too many copays, one too many aloof doctors, one too many changes into a gown to wait around in a freezing exam room only to be sent away with instructions to get plenty of rest and to moderate activities and to pay attention to those dietary needs, Grandpa went out and bought himself a handgun. He endured California’s “goddamn” 10-day waiting period, he groused, then he drove to an isolated area and stood in the middle of a field with his new firearm at his temple—cocked—until he realized he couldn’t summon the will to pull the trigger.

My dad, who had not been estranged from his father during that period, nevertheless didn’t know about the gun until a policeman told him he had found it—loaded—under the driver’s seat of my grandfather’s unlocked Camry, in the parking lot of a local Motel 6 where he had booked what he presumably thought would be his scene fin. I can’t imagine very many more depressing spaces in which to bid my last than a suburban budget motel room, but I guess it’s appropriate to the hopelessness of the act—hell, it may even be reassuring to think that polyester-blend bedspreads and factory-direct art belong only to the living. As my grandfather told it, he didn’t want anyone to have to “find him.” In this case, “anyone” should be understood to exclude the Motel 6 housekeeping staff.

The gun, “not having been discharged in the commission of a crime,” had to be taken into custody by a family member, the policeman told my dad. It wasn’t acceptable to leave it in the car, loaded or not. “I don’t want the damn thing,” my dad told me as we drove to my grandfather’s townhouse to get him some pajamas and a change of underclothes. Once at his place, eerily unchanged since his wife had died fully 20 years prior, I laughed for the first time all day upon seeing, on his nightstand, a library copy of Final Exit atop Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back. My librarian friend Slangred once told me, shortly after assuming her post at a large central city library, that both of her branch’s circulation copies of Final Exit were past due—quite.

It was from Final Exit, he said, that he gleaned the tip to pull a bag over his head after he overdosed—that way, once he passed out he could asphyxiate in peace, and he wouldn’t have to worry about whether he had taken enough pills, whether he might succeed in killing his brain only to be survived by his more rote biological systems.

Was it a sincere attempt? That’s the first question people ask after establishing the basics: Is he OK, how did he do it, and why? Cynicism, and perhaps denial, makes us doubt the commitment of those who don’t cut deep enough, take too few pills, jump just five stories instead of the recommended 10. Was my grandfather’s attempt sincere? He said he left the motel room because his mouth felt like it was lined with cotton—a side effect he hadn’t anticipated—and he couldn’t stand it anymore; he knew there was a Jack in the Box across the street, so he thought he’d get himself a soda. (Why didn’t he just drink some tap water? Delirium? Or second thoughts?) A fellow Motel 6’er knew something wasn’t right with him as she watched him try to cross the street; she called 911 before he hit the asphalt, and his plan was thwarted by a round of stomach pumping and a couple of weeks under the watchful care of “son-of-a-bitch doctors” and flirt-worthy nurses.

The concept of sincerity came up in my letter to [HMO], particularly in terms of its efficacy in their then–advertising slogan: “Peace of mind.” I threw the slogan back at them repeatedly, castigating their neglect of my grandfather’s most basic stated need: relief, however fleeting, from constant pain. The letter, I’m sure, wasn’t my best work. Still, I received a response from the vice president of blameless apologies, sympathizing with my concerns in that very passive corporate way: We’re sorry that this experience has been so very frustrating for you, and it’s unfortunate that your grandfather has been unable to find relief from his pain, and if you have any further needs please feel free to contact the director of lunatic relations at…

Sincerity’s tough to come by these days.

My grandfather lasted another seven years—a period I like to think of as “How Grandpa Got His Groove Back”—over the course of which I saw him many more times. After he was discharged from the mental hospital he was assigned a new primary care doctor who made it his mission to solve the pain issues—no doubt an imperative issued from above—and inside of six months he was feeling markedly better physically and, perhaps as a result, mentally. The onetime bastard underwent some kind of personalityectomy to become an oddly lovable old man, one who, so far as anyone knows, never attempted suicide again. And none of us questioned his decision to refuse treatment when he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2005. He had resolved to live the remainder of his days, finite at last, as he wished.

Slangred will be pleased to know that the aforementioned copy of Final Exit was returned to the library. And my grandfather’s handgun sleeps with the fishes, ceremoniously dropped to the bottom of the Pacific by my uncle while on a fishing trip, making me wonder how many firearms not discharged during the commission of a crime lie corroding on the ocean floor.

I, meanwhile, am now a card-carrying member of [HMO], and I’d like to know what it takes, short of a “suicidal gesture,” to get just one doctor to say, sincerely, that he or she understands my frustrations and won’t give up on me. Will someone at [HMO] please help me to, as their current ad slogan promises with such elegant brevity, “thrive.”

One does not thrive while sleeping in a chair.

I look spectacularly silly right now. Like I’ve been made up—by grade-schoolers—to play a character with a massive head injury in a school play. I’m not sure what kind of elementary school pageant would call for a character with a massive head injury. Maybe I’m playing a Sikh.

I’m in the midst of my continuous EEG, which, thank Jesus, is being conducted in the comfort of my home. It turns out Kaiser has a “to go” option, so I went in yesterday afternoon to get wired up by a bubbly tech we’ll call “Misty.”

Misty knows lesbians! She told me about them after I used the word “partner” and the pronoun “she” in the same sentence. From then on much of what I had to say drew inevitable comparisons to Misty’s lesbian neighbors, with whom I didn’t feel much simpatico, at least from what Misty had to say about them.

I liked Misty, even though we didn’t seem to share much common-ground acreage ourselves. When she asked me what I had done over the Memorial Day weekend I told her that I had seen the Al Gore movie.

“Oh, yeah, how was that?” she asked, marking my scalp for electrode placement.

“Not exactly the feel-good hit of the summer, but definitely worth seeing,” I said. “You know, if you don’t mind adding global warming to your list of worries.”

“It’s a different world out there now, isn’t it,” she said, shaking her head.

Actually, the primary point of the film is that we are and always have been our own worst enemies, that our boogeymen du jour merely divert attention from our ongoing self-destruction. But I wasn’t sure I needed to have a potentially distracting conversation with someone who was now attaching electrodes to my head. (See, I’m already failing to live up to my responsibility—articulated during the end credits of the film—to talk to everyone I know about the immediate dangers of global warming. I suck.)

When I say she was “attaching” electrodes to my head, I’m talking about capital-A Attachment. For my first EEG I had some putty-like stuff on my scalp, but this time Misty was adding a layer of adhesive—after assuring me that my hair wouldn’t be ripped out during removal—that smelled like model cement and made my eyes burn.

“Do you ever worry that you’re doing permanent damage to yourself by working with that stuff all day?” I asked.

“I kinda do,” she said casually. “I’ve read reports that claim it’s totally safe, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not. I don’t think you need to worry about one application, though.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about myself,” I insisted. “But you don’t want to become one of your own patients.”

“That’s for sure,” she said. (Hey!) “Close your eyes for a minute while I do the front ones.”

She didn’t need to tell me twice. I shut my eyes tight. “Of course, if you look at it another way, you get to huff on the job,” I joked, inhaling a little myself.

When I said I smelled like a nail salon Misty said, “No joke. They used to use acetone to get it off, so if I leave any glue behind tomorrow, you can totally use nail polish remover to clean yourself up.”

Ah, the low-tech fix.

After about an hour of placing electrodes and shellacking my scalp, Misty said it was time to wrap me up. As she winched gauze tightly around my head I told her that when Jayne Brooke was having a continuous EEG on Grey’s Anatomy she got to wear a stylish black skullcap over her electrodes. Misty snorted in response and added more gauze.

It’s now T minus 30 minutes to removal, or at least my ride to removal. My partner had to attend commencement today, leaving me mighty afeard I might have to ride the bus to the hospital, but my friend S generously offered to take the afternoon off work to give me a ride. I’m not sure I can express how very grateful I am for this, both because it’s just plain nice to be treated with such kindness and because I was having visions of my freaky self on the bus with my head full of electrodes and gauze, looking for all the world like a patient gone AWOL—you know, blending with my fellow passengers.

So I’m off to see Misty, and when I return I’ll no longer look like a post-op neurosurgery patient. And I’ll no longer have to carry around my bulky brain-wave recorder. And I can take a shower! All good things.

My driving privileges have been revoked. Again.

They were revoked last year as well, after my first blackout (a.k.a. “the precipitating event”), though only for a few days. “Standard protocol,” my neurologist said. Doctors are required to instruct patients not to drive and to report them to the DMV after any unexplained loss of consciousness—pending diagnosis. Happily an EEG was scheduled lickety-split and I received my results the following day, after which I was free to drive all the way to China if I so chose. Sure, the loss of consciousness remained unexplained, but the EEG pronounced my brain sound, so…

I went almost a year without another loss of consciousness, then I had a minor lapse in February. No big whoop. I was hungry, I thought, and tired. Then one morning a few weeks ago I entered a kind of catatonic state, eyes wide open, muscles tensed—or so I’m told. My partner reported that I seemed to startle awake then lapse back to my lights-on-nobody-home status. I remember dreaming, but I don’t know what about, nor do I recall coming to at any time during the episode. I fell asleep afterward and slept hard for hours; when I awoke I felt as heavy as I’ve ever felt, as though I were sewn to the mattress.

My GP thought this last episode sounded more seizure-like than the blackouts I’d previously described to him, prompting him to think the other episodes were also seizures. So off I was sent to the neurologist, another one this time. My GP thought I was entitled to a fresh perspective after having spent the better part of last year visiting with a neurologist who did his level best to convince me I’m a head case.

I saw a lovely doctor last Wednesday who put me through the neurological paces then said she was referring me for a 24-hour EEG.

The first EEG I had was the regular snapshot variety, with only about 30 minutes of monitoring. They tried to provoke my brain into doing loopy things by making me stay awake for 30 hours prior to my appointment, but, resentful at having its integrity called into question, my despotic encephalon saw right through their tricks and held steady, bitterly asserting its soundness.

This time they’ll check me into the hospital and get a 24-hour reading, which I at first took to mean that I would be hooked up for 24 hours then discharged, but when I Googled “24-hour EEG” I was alarmed to discover that the “24-hour” part merely connotes continuous monitoring, with average hospital stays in the three-day zone. Oh. Sounds like something I’ll want to clarify when we set up my appointment.

I haven’t been scheduled yet, and if I don’t hear from someone soon, I’ll start agitating, ’cause, you know, I can’t drive in the meantime, which is inconvenient for a person with a full-time job and such, especially in Los Angeles. You’ll remember Dale Bozzio singing “Nobody walks in L.A.” That’s not strictly true. Mentally ill homeless folks—thank you, Ronald Reagan—they walk in L.A. As do recent immigrants, seniors whose declining eyesight or mental faculties have triggered their delicensure, truant gang-kids-in-training, repeat DUI offenders, and I: We all walk in L.A. Later in the song the lyric becomes “Only a nobody walks in L.A.,” and we’re all pretty much nobodies, my aforementioned pedestrian friends and I, at least through the eyes of those who would oppositionally define themselves as somebodies.

I’ve been taking advantage of L.A.’s limited subway system and its “improving” bus system. I’ve also been taking advantage of my partner, whose shuttle services are timely, friendly, and free. As I waited for her on Wednesday night to pick me up at the Universal City subway station a coworker came up behind me. “I didn’t know you rode the train to work,” he said. “I don’t normally,” I said, “but my driving privileges have been temporarily revoked.” He grinned and asked conspiratorially, “Wow, what’d ya do?”

While riding public transportation has its advantages—I’m catching up on unread back issues of The New Yorker and arriving at work in a state that’s downright Zen compared to the defensive stance required of morning commuters—its disadvantages are many and loud. A day or two of bus riding supplies colorful stories with which to entertain my partner, “The Moaning Man” and “The California Hater” being two recent favorites. But the genres wear thin, so a story about a man who from the origin of the subway line to my stop relentlessly shout-performs an extended profanity-laced monologue about, say, his dislike of police officers, well, it just seems tiredly derivative of my California-hater story.

So I’m hoping for an end to my public-transportation adventure before my stories become stale, and I know that my partner would appreciate same. I mean, she loves me and means it, but a tiny part of her must fear that I can collect only so many anecdotes about Metro Rail lunatics before my stories resemble the very rants I lampoon. And that fear is prudent. Crazed Metro passengers are not born—they are made.

This week I’m just a little less crazy than I was last, thanks to a diagnosis that in three not-so-short words moves me swiftly from the psychosomatic column to the realm of medical legitimacy. The words are cervical spondylotic myelopathy, and while their ramifications don’t thrill me, I may as well have a name for the symptoms that have clearly set up camp. Hell, they’ve pitched a tent, raised their little troop flag, built a fire in the pit of my stomach, and started to roast wienies—all very much without my consent. Which is why it has sucked so much wind for the past 13 months to be told I’m a head case.

Cervical spondylotic myelopathy is a fancy-schmancy way of saying I have spinal arthritis with neurological complications. I have bone spurs at C5 and C6, as well as a bulging disc, all of which cause swelling of spinal ligaments when agitated. The swelling of the ligaments narrows my spinal canal, which compresses nerves and disrupts their signals to the rest of my body, explaining the drunken-sailor walk, the slowing of my responses, and the numbness in my limbs—as well as the waxing and waning of said features. The narrowed canal also impedes blood flow to my brain, causing the dizziness, fatigue, and blackouts I’ve been experiencing. In fact, I had a blackout just yesterday morning to celebrate the diagnosis.

So, to recap, I’ve had a head CT, three MRIs (one of the brain and two of the cervical spine—both soft tissue and skeletal), a lumbar puncture (euphemism for the dreaded words spinal tap, a procedure I let the neurologist talk me into trying without anesthetic since he said it’s easier that way to “hit the target”), a nerve-conduction test, eight hours of neuropsychological testing (after which I was pronounced cogent but “slow”), a sleep-deprived EEG (for which I had to pull my first all-nighter since college—total awake time prior to test: 30 hours), Holter heart monitoring (24 hours during which I was wired and saddled with enough equipment to make me look a little pregnant), an echocardiogram, and enough blood drawn to film the prom scene in Carrie.

At various times I’ve been told my symptoms were the result of panic, psychomotor retardation (a slowing of motor skills due to prolonged depression), and conversion disorder (in which emotional issues are avoided or resolved through physical disabilities).

We might have come close to answering the puzzle months ago, when my GP noted my positive blood tests for antinuclear antibodies and rheumatoid factor and sent me to a rheumatologist. But the rose-colored-bespectacled specialist felt up my finger, elbow, and knee joints and, finding no obvious swelling, dismissed my GP’s concerns. My 5% chance of having a positive ANA in the absence of disease being exponentially decreased by the simultaneous likelihood that my RF reading is a false-positive, his careless dismissal of my case seems unconscionable to me now.

I didn’t want this to turn into a rant, but I guess that worm has already turned.

When other explanations don’t come easily, I think doctors find it very convenient to write off patients with psychiatric histories as having psychosomatic disorders. And I was just crazy enough that I was beginning to believe they could be right. It gets slippery, because the more a patient stamps her feet and insists something’s physically wrong, the more crazy she can seem. Then every inconclusive test becomes yet another nail in her coffin of delusion.

Worse, when a neurologist who saw me for all of 15 minutes diagnosed me with conversion disorder, he proceeded to lecture me in a paternal tone that the sooner I accepted it the better my chances for recovery. He added that if I sought enough second opinions, I could probably find a doctor who’d be willing to diagnose me with something. In other words, his judgment was beyond reproof. Did I mention that he was about a decade younger than I?

Once he had entered his opinion in my file, getting further tests was, as my GP put it, a political game. He still believed my symptoms had a genuine physiological cause, but he had now been overruled by two specialists—the bug-eyed rheumatologist and my Doogie Howser neurologist.

Thankfully, my GP stuck by me and slimed me into a third MRI, which proved the charm.

I have no doubt that there are people who wait longer than 13 months for diagnoses. But take it from me, anyone who wasn’t nuts to begin with who goes through over a year of diagnostics without any clinical findings, gawd help them, they’re on the express train to certifiability.

When I woke up this morning I had a great idea for a blog entry that I’ve now forgotten. Aren’t those the best kinds of great ideas, the ones you forget? Because that means they can remain great forever, unexamined by second thoughts that reveal them to be stupefyingly mediocre, serviceable at best.

A friend of mine once told me that he had come to understand the meaning of life, in one startling instant, while high on pot. Upon awakening the following day his existential concept had flitted away, irretrievable to his sober mind. But he was certain that he had discovered “it” and was pleased to have had this vision while high, reinforcing his idea that stoners are god’s chosen people.

I’m having what I’ve come to call a hypoxic-brain day. It feels like my mind is suffocating, and no matter how deeply I breathe I can’t draw enough oxygen to clear it. It’s like trying to see the world through a shower curtain, or trying to drink oatmeal. Everything takes longer—walking, reading, writing—and requires more effort. I feel more like a liability than an asset at work right now, but I can’t go home because that would require driving and when I’m like this my reaction time sucks and I can’t seem to keep my attention from drifting no matter how hard I try to focus on the road. And it’s raining. Being a liability at work is one thing, being one on the road is quite another.

Around my partner and friends I sometimes refer to my supposed brain damage—as diagnosed by a neuropsychologist after a battery of tests that followed last year’s seizure/stroke/whatever—in a joking way. It comes in handy when excusing oneself for a lapse in memory or judgment. Usually, though, I doubt I have a genuine brain injury. But then there are times like these, when I have to keep prying myself out of mini fugue states to refocus my clouded faculties on whatever I was doing before my mind wandered off. Just now I feel addled with all the costs of being high and none of the rewards, and for the record I feel impossibly far from discovering the meaning of life.

“It is like fanny pack,” the Russian cardio tech told me as she fastened a pouch around my midsection. And she wasn’t off the mark. While my heart monitor’s mission control, the ambulatory EKG recorder, was not quite as large as your classic fanny pack, it was nowhere near as sleek as an iPod—think more Walkman circa 1979 (when, by the way, Sony initially introduced their portable cassette player as the “Soundabout”).

The Cardiac Studies receptionist apparently wasn’t kidding when she told me to wear a loose-fitting blouse to Thursday morning’s appointment, where I received a Holter heart monitor to wear for 24 hours, just to see if there’s any cardiac mischief to account for my blackouts. (When the receptionist called to schedule me for a “Holter fitting” I thought she was saying “halter,” which left me wondering for several days just how many straps might be involved.)

The first shirt I put on Thursday morning was voluminous, from about two sizes ago, back when I treated my depression with food instead of meds. When I saw myself in the mirror I felt unconscionably dumpy, and I couldn’t imagine that the wires and such would need that much wiggle room, so I changed into a shirt that was biggish but not ridiculously so. As it turned out, that shirt was just big enough to contain my gadget-augmented girth.

Shouldn’t portable medical technology be at least as advanced as portable music technology? My partner’s current-generation iPod—and only the 30GB model at that—stores 7,500 songs; my heart monitor was to store only 24 hours worth of cardiac activity (on a 64MB chip) and was about five times the size.

When I poked around online I found that Kaiser and I weren’t exactly on the cutting edge; there were Holter systems that looked far sleeker than the one I was wearing. But noting their price tag of around $1,500, I understood Kaiser’s hesitation to replace the older models. They have to trust us riffraff to wear these things for a full day without absentmindedly diving into a swimming pool or wandering through a magnetic field. Besides, they probably do have some shiny new units that they reserve for their real patients. (I fear that Kaiser has written me off as a head case and is merely humoring me with dummy tests; my suspicion is reinforced when my MRIs are performed at a unit outside the hospital in a trailer marked “MRI 2,” which my partner jokes should read “MRI too!” being the fake one and all.)

So I went to work Thursday feeling like I was packing a bomb or wearing a police wire, what with the electrodes and surgical tape covering my chest and midsection and the hard, bulky box strapped to my stomach. The tech joked that she hoped I didn’t need to go to the airport that day. I told her I didn’t but that I was worried about scoring drugs later that night.

As the day wore on, I grew increasingly itchy and uncomfortable. My “unit,” as I had come to regard it with grudging acceptance, was the least of my worries; at least its straps were adjustable. But my tape-covered chest made me feel like a papier-mâché girl.

And the worst was yet to come.

The worst being that I had to sleep in this thing, the wires of which crisscrossed my bra such that it, too, would have to stay put until the following morning. For our lady readers, what’s the first thing we want to do when we get home from work? Take off our effing bras! It’s onerous enough making our pendulous pods defy gravity all day, but curtailing their freedom to flop around all yippee-skippy once we’re abed is beyond mean. The wee hours are when my breasts exercise their natural inclination toward ptosis. To deny them their due is to offend nature.

The best thing about wearing a heart monitor for 24 hours was that it made me appreciate not having to wear one. It is one of two tests I’ve undergone that I would not ever like to repeat, the other being my sleep-deprived EEG, prior to which I had to stay awake for 30 hours, toward the end of which time I would have given up nuclear secrets, the identity of the Black Dahlia’s killer, or even my friend Hugh’s cheesecake recipe, anything that might promise to earn me some horizontal relief. I’d submit to another spinal tap—without a local—before I would willingly repeat either of those tests.

Having my monitor removed this morning can be counted among my life’s great moments, assuming that we’re speaking liberally and are including the top 500 moments or so. I’d put it above finding five dollars (at age 12 in the parking lot of the Rusty Pelican) and beneath learning to swim.

I was supposed to have a female tech for both attachment and removal, but this morning a male tech came to fetch me from the waiting room. Maybe the Kaiser folks figured I was androgynous enough to go either way. At any rate, I didn’t care. I popped my shirt’s snaps open so fast you’d have thought we were shooting an exam-room porn scene, except that women in porn films seldom wear long-sleeve corduroy shirts—too seldom if you ask me. The tech countered my sexy move with his own, tearing the electrodes and tape from my bare skin like a crazed animal, or at the very least like someone who had other patients to see and no time for procedural foreplay.

After our frenzied exchange he said I was all set and turned away to futz with the equipment. Covered in conductive gel and adhesive residue, I stood at the exam-room sink with a paper towel pitifully dabbing at my angry red skin—even angrier now than it had been the previous morning, when the Russian woman rubbed it mercilessly to rough up the areas where the electrodes would sit. “Oh,” today’s tech said, removing the lid from a canister of pre-soaked gauze. “You can use alcohol for that.”

So I’m electrode-free, and I’ve shed my unit, and I can’t wait to free my boobs, which have been in their current state of bondage for 32 hours. Were I a woman of lesser endowment I’d consider giving them a weekend furlough, two luxurious days of bra-less hedonism, but nature is a cruel mistress, having saddled this tomboy with D-cup glands that forced her to stop boxing the neighborhood boys just as she was hitting her prime.

In a few days I’m certain to receive a call from my doctor telling me that everything looks normal; what else could be expected of a placebo test? A few days after that I’ll be scheduled for another appointment at MRI too! And thus life moves inexorably forward in Jabberwocky, where I’m thinking about buying a fanny pack to house my new Sony Soundabout.

My nerves are conducting information at a happy rate. This I learned yesterday from an unflinchingly nice physiatrist, which is a medical specialty I had never heard of but am pleased to add to my vocabulary.

Unlike, say, neurology, physiatry seems an extremely unsexy field of specialty, one where practitioners aren’t likely to get huzzahs for breakthrough studies or found eponymously named disorders. But lack of glory aside, something tells me physiatrists sleep well at night. Theirs is a science of helping physically compromised people remain as functional and pain-free as possible. Isn’t that lovely? I know there are plenty of doctors in other specialties who went to medical school to help people, but so many of the specialists I’ve seen seem to have lost that vision somewhere along the line, such that patients become nothing but the sum of their Immunoglobin-G indices and antinuclear-antibody ratios.

When I waitressed I often approached my shifts as marathon rounds of Whack-a-Mole, the arcade game wherein players wield giant mallets to pound moles as they randomly pop up from various holes. My mallets were breadbaskets, coffee refills, food, and—when simply sating the moles’ hunger wasn’t enough—comped checks or management intervention. And so I moved through my shift, knocking down mole after mole, which were in turn replaced with new moles, and so on until closing time.

Now I’m the mole, and I’m sent away for blood tests and imaging and physical therapy. When that’s not enough, I see new specialists and subspecialists, most of whom approach me with an air of challenge: Why are you here? What are you doing in my office? How do you expect me to help you? Put on the defensive, I try to describe the past year as I’ve experienced it through a suddenly and inexplicably uncooperative body, and as I do I begin to stutter and stammer and sometimes even tear up, none of which persuades them to take me any more seriously as someone whose compromise may not be entirely psychiatric. They ask me the same questions other doctors have asked, sometimes glancing through my file as I respond, and, when no obvious answer presents itself, they declare me not their problem and bring the hammer down. By the time I change out of my hospital gown and collect my things, I, too, am convinced that I’m a waste of their time.

This physiatrist, she was different, in much the same way my GP is. Sincere and welcoming—without seeming at all undoctorly. Maybe the difference between her demeanor and that of other specialists lies in the fact that she administers her own diagnostic procedures—as I understand, only physiatrists receive the proper training to perform nerve-conduction tests and EMGs. The nature of her specialty allows her ample time to see her patients, and maybe as a result she wants to have a more personal relationship with them. Or maybe she was attracted to her field because she’s the kind of person who wants to interact with patients in this way. At any rate, she made me feel like the most important person in the room as she calmly placed the electrodes and measured the varying lengths of nerve to be assessed, as she asked how I was doing after each round and carefully wiped the conductive gel—which made me smell like a baby’s bottom—from each area before she moved on to the next. If not for the electric shocks, our session might have been a spa treatment—such was the delicacy of her touch and the unhurried nature of her ministrations.

When she finished she gave me her preliminary report, that there didn’t appear to be anything suggestive of a nerve disease or disorder, and said that she would write up a more detailed analysis for my GP. She said that she didn’t need me to set up another appointment at this time but that I should stop by her nurse’s station on my way out to pick up her card in case I wanted to see her in the future.

I left her office feeling cared about, which struck me as extraordinary, but shouldn’t we always feel that way when we leave our doctors’ offices? If we don’t feel physically better, shouldn’t we at least feel emotionally better for having had our needs seen to?

Once, my GP told me that he was going to leave my file on his desk to keep my case fresh in his mind, hoping that some previously unexplored avenue might occur to him. That idea alone was almost enough to heal me. Wouldn’t it be something if some measure of kindness and unhurried personal care were all I needed to leap this terrifying divide between mental and physical wellness? If in being regarded as a legitimate patient I might at last accept that my illness is best treated by my mental health team? Isn’t that treatment plan worth a shot, docs?

Wednesday night I passed out on my way to bed. Happily, I was standing face-to-face with my partner at the time, so she saw my eyes go dead and my face grow pale and caught me before I could fall, then laid me down on the nearby divan. (Doesn’t that sound fancy? Divan? And now you might be thinking we’re all regal and shit, but the divan is a piece of furniture my partner’s parents shipped to us when we had their dog because, well, their dog really liked to lie on it. So our fancy divan, the one I just fainted on, is more properly a dog bed.) Then we slowly made our way back to the bedroom in a sort of waltz pose, my partner leading, walking backward with me facing her, my arms about her shoulders. She repeatedly called “H!” (short for “honey”) and I repeatedly said “OK” to let her know that I was cogent despite my undoubtedly dusky appearance. She brought me a teeny glass of orange juice and cruelly refused to let me get up to brush my teeth when I finished it. And after she extracted a promise from me to call for an appointment with my doctor in the morning, she went to e-mail my friend G to cancel our breakfast plans.

This most recent blackout merely caps my frustration as I approach the one-year anniversary of “the precipitating event,” a seizure on March 16, ’05, wherein I lost consciousness for several minutes and awoke mentally and physically compromised in ways that persist, in their annoying waxing and waning fashion, to this day. Over 11 months later—after a head CT, two MRIs, a sleep-deprived EEG, a spinal tap, and enough blood draws to drain a medium-size child—the official entry on my chart is “possible MS” and the unofficial word in the doctors’ lounge is “nine kinds of crazy.” The latter pronouncement came in the fall, six months or so into my diagnostic purgatory, from a man I like to call “Dr. Malkinesis,” a neurology subspecialist in movement disorder who spent every bit of 15 minutes with me before he wrote me off as having a conversion disorder. According to the National Library of Medicine, ahem:

“Conversion disorder is one of several types of somatoform disorders, in which psychological problems produce physical symptoms.”

Here’s the good part: “Risk factors include a history of histrionic personality disorder.”

Isn’t that utterly fantastic? I’ve been diagnosed as hysterical, a trait I’ll emphasize by ending this sentence with an!

The good news about this diagnosis, as opposed to, say, “malingering,” is that I’m not being called a big faker. Apparently, I would have no more control over CD than I would over MS. Also in the good-news department, the NLM emphasizes that the symptoms of CD can last “days or even weeks,” so I’m really, really due to be over this thing any time now.

I was willing to believe I was a head case for a few months. I didn’t like it much, but it was an explanation for the randomly relapsing and remitting symptoms, a pattern that, while a hallmark of MS, isn’t enough for a diagnosis of same without objective evidence of demyelination, which was happily lacking in my brain MRI and spinal tap. “Mental” is way better than MS anyway, right? So despite my internalized stigma, I embraced the conversion disorder theory with as much gusto as I could muster and looked to my mental health team for a timely resolution.

That was about four months ago, and we have yet to answer the essential question: Why? A conversion disorder is classically a reaction to a psychological conflict which the symptoms help to resolve—i.e., paralysis of a hand before a piano recital in the face of extreme stage fright. If my syndrome is genuine CD, I should be able, with therapeutic assistance, to identify a root psychological problem, something that my subconscious is trying to help me resolve through physical compromise—in my case: a certain torpor of my left side that makes walking slow and labored, numbness in my extremities, mental fog, and a mild intention tremor in my right hand. If, as my psychiatrist suggests, my psyche is herein demonstrating impressive creativity in its approach to problem solving, I would have to insist that it stop being such a show-off and give the abstract expressionism a rest. We get it, psyche: You’re very, very clever.

What with all the chirping of crickets on the psychological front, I’m not so much buying the CD diagnosis these days. I had a minor meltdown about it last Sunday, crying through lunch at PF Chang’s, trying to pull myself together when the waitress uncertainly edged near to see whether everything was OK. No, it’s not OK. It’s very much not OK, but the dan-dan noodles are delicious, thanks.

Tuesday morning, just two days after that emotive lunch, I felt a big face-plant coming on as I stepped from the shower. I lurched the few feet between myself and the bed and lay down. I tried several times to get up and continue getting ready, but each time I met with that blood-rushing vortex that threatened to take me down. So I called in dizzy to work and went back to bed.

Then Wednesday night: the latest blackout.

When I saw my GP Thursday morning, he being the most likely doc to extend me any further benefit of the doubt that I’m not completely mental, he flipped through my now-voluminous chart and noted my “history of fainting since childhood.” (Histrionic personality disorder, anyone?) No, I said, I had told the neurologist that I experienced exactly two fainting episodes in high school and no other losses of consciousness between then and March ’05, more than 20 years later. “Oh,” he said. “Well, that definitely makes these recent episodes more compelling.”

We went over some of my less sexy symptoms—i.e., urinary urgency—and we talked about what kind of imaging had already been performed: the head CT and the brain and neck MRIs. He went back to his office to look at them, and when he came back he said, “You know, your neck MRI was soft tissue only; we’ve never looked at the bony structures.”

Funny thing, my partner and I were just this week speculating whether there are different types of MRIs depending on what docs are looking for. Despite our scant knowledge on the topic—what we had seen on television—we tentatively decided that there is just the one kind of MRI that shows everything at once. But the inaccuracies of TV medicine are all too apparent to me when I see a whole team of neurologists on House hovering about the monitor during an MRI, solving the most baffling cases right there in the computer bay. Each of my MRIs were attended only by a wisecracking technician whose only concerns were whether I had any steel plates or pins in my head, whether I wanted the AC on while in the tube, and whether I was claustrophobic. No, no, and no.

“Do you think it would be worthwhile to do another neck MRI?” I asked my GP.

Yes, the answer was yes. In fact, he expressed surprise that my cervical spine hadn’t already been looked at. Hallelujah! Someone still reserves a spark of faith that I’m not completely insane. Enough doubt that he’s also sending me to a cardiologist—”just to rule out that kind of stuff”—and ordering nerve-conduction testing, wherein techs will insert needle electrodes into my muscles to measure their response rate when flexed and such.

The implied caveat is that when all these tests come back normal I’m going to have an awful time convincing anyone in the Kaiser system that I’m anything but certifiable. But still, each diagnostic avenue represents a way out of this Twilight Zone town Psychosomatia—and the roads can’t all be cul-de-sacs, can they?

It’s odd, this validation I feel over the promise of further testing. It has struck me that I’m declaring victory for a battle in a war I can’t possibly win—the pyrrhic struggle between sick and crazy. My partner, bless her heart, pointed out to me that I CAN win, that they might find something wrong, though easily treatable, and return me to my former self. Then all of it—the symptoms, the stigma, the fear, the uncertainty—becomes nothing but a tale about my baffling year of sporadic disability, dead-end diagnostics, and the doctors who threatened to drive me over the crazy cliff.

I do so look forward to laughing about this someday.