The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison Read Free Book Online Page A

the ones I want to talk to; that the coffee station is useful because it’s a good place to meet people, and because drinking coffee means I’ll have to keep going to the bathroom, which is an even better place to meet people. The people I meet don’t look disfigured at first glance. But up close, they reveal all kinds of scars and bumps and scabs. They are covered in records—fossils or ruins—of the open, oozing things that once were.
    I meet Patricia, wearing a periwinkle pantsuit, who tells me how she got attacked by sand flies one summer and everything changed. I meet Shirley, who thinks her family got sick from camping at a tick-rich place called Rocky Neck. Shirley’s daughter has been on antibiotics for so long she has to lie to her doctor about why she needs them.
    I meet Dawn, an articulate and graceful nurse from Pittsburgh, whose legs show the white patches I’ve come to recognize as once-scabbed or lesion-ridden skin. Antibiotics left a pattern of dark patches on her calves that once got her mistaken for an AIDS patient. Since diagnosing herself with Morgellons, Dawn has kept her full-time position as a nurse because she wants to direct her frustration into useful work.
    “I was so angry at the misdiagnoses for so many years,” she says, “being told that it was anxiety, in my head, female stuff. So I tried to spin that anger into something positive. I got my graduate degree; I published an article in a nursing journal.”
    I ask her about this phrase: female stuff. It’s like heart disease, she explains. For a long time women’s heart attacks went unnoticed because they were diagnosed as symptoms of anxiety. I realize her disease is part of a complicated history that goes all the way back to nineteenth-century hysteria. Dawn says her coworkers—the nurses, not the doctors—have been remarkably empathetic; and she suggests it’s no mere coincidence that most of these nurses are women. Now they come to her whenever they find something strange or unexpected in a wound: fuzz or flakes or threads. She’s become an expert in the unexplainable.
    I ask Dawn what the hardest part of her disease has been. At first she replies in general terms—“Uncertain future?”—lilting her answer into a question, but soon finds her way to a more specific fear: “Afraid of relationships,” she says, “because who’s gonna accept me?” She continues, her speaking full of pauses: “I just feel very—what’s the word … not conspicuous, but very … with scars and stuff that I have from this, what guy’s gonna like me?”
    I tell her I don’t see a scarred woman when I look at her; I think she’s beautiful. She thanks me for saying so, but I can tell the compliment rang a bit hollow. One comment from a stranger can’t reclaim years spent hating the body you live in.
    With Dawn I fall into the easy groove of identification— I’ve felt that too —whenever she talks about her body as something that’s done her wrong. Her condition seems like a crystallization of what I’ve always felt about myself—a wrongness in my being that I could never pin or name, so I found things to pin it to: my body, my thighs, my face. This resonance is part of what compels me about Morgellons: it offers a shape for what I’ve often felt, a container or christening for a certain species of unease. Dis-ease. Though I also feel how every attempt to metaphorize the illness is also an act of violence—an argument against the bodily reality its patients insist upon.
    My willingness to turn Morgellons into metaphor—as a corporeal manifestation of some abstract human tendency—is dangerous. It obscures the particular and unbidden nature of the suffering in front of me.
    It would be too easy to let all these faces dissolve into correlative possibility: Morgies as walking emblems for how hard it is for all of us to live in our own skin. I feel how conveniently these lives could be sculpted to fit the metaphoric structure—or