Wanted: Sanity and a Larger Monitor

New Policy

I've been sick again for a couple of days, and had a bit of an epiphany after going to see the doctor. As a result, I don't really feel compelled any more to find a name for what's wrong with me. If there is anything wrong, that is. The doctor's convinced I just react to viruses differently than most people, although he's very willing to refer me to any specialists or anybody I might want to see.

I think in the past, I may have fallen a bit into the "If I can just put a name to it, I can get it fixed." trap that a lot of people seem to get caught up in. Before I go any further, let me just say that sometimes it is important to put a name to things, or find the reasons why something is happening in our bodies. My dad's case is a good example of that. Mine, however, is not, and here's why:

1. I'm not actually dying.

I'll be the first to admit, the fatigue, sometimes shortness of breath, not wanting to move at all, and the rest of it, can be a bit scary at times. However, I've never been hospitalized, and I suspect that after this amount of time, if it had been required I would have been.

2. It's not getting worse.

I had a couple of worse-than-normal spells in college, and one long one before college, but other than that they've been pretty predictable in seriousness/length of time. And since I've been out of school, the spells have tended to be shorter rather than longer. Especially recently. This could be due to better eating, more regular exercise, the substantially lower amounts of stress, or whatever. It doesn't really matter; the important thing is that they aren't getting noticeably worse, or more frequent. Rather the opposite in the last year and a half, really.

3. It's not seriously debilitating.

Anymore, I'm down for one-and-a-half to two days, three tops. That's about the amount of downtime I'd expect from a bad cold, and when I'm not having a spell I feel fine. It's not as though I'm laid up in bed for weeks upon weeks. Actually, I probably have only the average amount of sick days, as I live alone, and don't work with kids. I haven't had a cold or the flu at all this year.

So, given all that, is it really reasonable for me to burn through my deductible and spend valuable hours and days seeing doctors and specialists, trying to hunt down the Phantom Diagnosis That Matches All My Symptoms? No, not really. All the major treatable possibilities have already been ruled out, and being able to say "I have Syndrome X," where Syndrome X has no treatment, nobody really knows what causes it, and even the name really only exists to give a label to an allotment of symptoms with no other known cause, is not really helpful to me.

I'll still get sick, and spend a day or two at a time not doing anything that involves any effort at all (shockingly enough, this means no reading, and no video games. It takes entirely too much effort to turn pages and press buttons), and probably still complain about it, and it won't be all rainbows and sunshine, but I'm done looking for non-existant solutions to (relatively!) minor problems. I'm supposed to get some pulmonary test done before too long, but after that, I'm done.

Posted by Ardith at February 21, 2007 06:04 PM | TrackBack