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

strictures—of the essay itself.
    A woman named Rita from Memphis, another nurse, talks to me about doctors—the ones who didn’t believe her; the ones who told her she was out of luck, or out of her mind; the one who happened to share her surname but slammed a door in her face anyway. She felt especially wronged by that gesture—the specter of kinship, a shared name, cast aside so forcefully.
    Rita tells me she lost her job and husband because of this disease. She tells me she hasn’t had health insurance in years. She tells me she can literally see her skin moving. Do I believe her? I nod. I tell myself I can agree with a declaration of pain without being certain I agree with the declaration of its cause.
    Rita tells me she handles a Morgellons hotline. People call if they suspect they might have the disease but don’t know much about it. I ask her what she tells them. She reassures them, she says. She tells them there are people out there who will believe them.
    The most important advice she gives? Don’t take specimens in. That’s the number one rule, she says. Otherwise they’ll think you’re crazy in a heartbeat.
    I once had a specimen of my own. It was a worm in my ankle, a botfly larva I’d brought back from Bolivia. The human botfly lays its egg on a mosquito proboscis, where it is deposited—via mosquito bite—under the skin. In the Amazon, it’s no big deal. In New Haven, it’s less familiar. I saw mine emerge around midnight: a small pale maggot. That’s when I took a cab to the ER. I remember saying: “There’s a worm in there,” and I remember how everyone looked at me, doctors and nurses: kindly and without belief. Their doubt was like humidity in the air. They asked me if I’d recently taken any mind-altering drugs. The disconnect felt even worse than the worm itself—to live in a world where this thing was , while other people lived in a world where it wasn’t.
    For weeks, down in Bolivia, I’d been living with the suspicion that I had something living under my skin. It was almost a relief to finally see it, bobbing out of my ankle like a tiny white snorkel. I finally knew it was true. It’s Othello’s Desdemona Problem: fearing the worst is worse than knowing the worst. So you eventually start wanting the worst possible thing to happen—finding your wife in bed with another man, or watching the worm finally come into the light. Until the worst happens, it always might happen. When it actually does happen? Now, at least, you know.
    I remember the shrill intensity of my gratitude when a doctor finally verified the worm. Desdemona really had fucked someone else. It was a relief. Dr. Imaeda pulled it out and gave it to me in a jar. The maggot was the size of a fingernail clipping and the color of dirty snow, covered with tiny black teeth that looked like fuzz. The two gratifications were simultaneous: the worm was gone and I’d been right about it. I had about thirty minutes of peace before I started suspecting there might be another one left behind.
    I spent the next few weeks obsessed with the open wound on my ankle, where Imaeda had cut out my maggot, looking for signs of a remaining worm in hiding. I turned from a parasite host—an actual, physical, literal host—into another kind of host: a woman with an idea, a woman who couldn’t be convinced otherwise. I made my boyfriend set up “the Vaseline test” with me each night, a technique we’d found online: placing a cap full of Vaseline over the wound so the suffocated worm, this hypothetical second worm, would have no choice but to surface for air once the cap was removed.
    No worm emerged, but I didn’t give up looking. Maybe the worm was tricky. It had seen what happened to its comrade. I inspected the wound relentlessly for signs of eggs or motion. Anything I found—a stray bit of Band-Aid, a glossy patch of bruised skin or scab—was proof. The idea of the worm—the possibility of the worm—was so much worse than