The Next Next Thing: The Lady Takes the Cure
In which your correspondent negotiates the post-COVID hellscape of healthcare and gets serious about radical self-care
Due to the miracle of the internet, I recently figured out exactly which Little Golden Books’ version of Heidi it was that shaped my early ideas about health. My poor grandmother must have read it to me until she was crosseyed because I remembered the illustrations so clearly, Heidi’s straw hat, Grandfather’s white beard, Klara’s fainting couch, and the wildflowers and goats. Goats feature prominently. I can practically smell my grandmother’s peach-scented Pond’s night creme.
If you don’t know the story, it goes like this. When five-year-old Heidi is orphaned in late 1880s Switzerland, her aunt dumps her on her grandfather, who lives in the Alps. Apparently he’d been happily tending his goats and wearing his lederhosen in solitude because at first he’s grumpy about it, but her sunny disposition wins his heart. Heidi briefly goes to the city to be a companion to a sickly rich girl named Klara. Homesick, Heidi returns to the mountains. When Klara comes to visit, fresh air, exercise, and goat milk heal her. Her parents rejoice that she no longer needs her wheelchair.
As a lifetime bookworm, I have acquired a whole mental vocabulary around the idea of “taking the cure,” in scenarios not unlike Klara’s. Upon becoming ill, one would go to a place like a late-19th-century Swiss sanatorium. There, the patient would be treated with waters from thermal springs, fresh air, sunshine, perhaps muesli and goat yoghurt. None of the less picturesque remedies of the pre-antibiotic era are allowed to intrude upon this fantasy.
Reader, I am sorry to report that my adventures in medicine have been less Swiss Alps and goat products and more Rube Goldberg-style assembly line scenes as envisioned by Looney Tunes.
I started my newsletter as a chronicle of reinventing myself in our post-pandemic world. I was thinking mostly in terms of professional reinvention because I had lost my full-time faculty gig after a couple of decades in higher education. However, it turns out that late-career job seeking is just as dull as early-career job seeking. I’ve landed more or less where I began after grad school: I teach some technical and professional writing and editing and do some technical and professional writing and editing. It’s work that I enjoy and feel good about doing.
I am less enthusiastic about my new part time job, which is dealing with the US healthcare system. I’ve had what I’ll politely call a fussy gut since birth and have over the course of my lifetime experienced diagnostic attempts of varying degrees of barbarity. So many doctors had shrugged and suggested that it was all in my head that I had accepted the fact that I was a batty hypochondriac who was occasionally just going to have to ride out episodes of pain and digestive unrest.
After the last one landed me in the ER, yet again, my husband asked me to please give doctors another try. So I did. After a couple of years’ worth of tests, which must be done in an order dictated by the insurance company, we learned that I have an underachieving pancreas and dealing with its attendant health issues is a lot of work. If you get to choose the body part that goes rogue on you eventually, I do not recommend the pancreas as it is both extremely temperamental and involved in everything. Nonetheless, it was validating to learn that I hadn’t been imagining it all this time.
I spend many hours on the phone developing olympian levels of frustration tolerance in order to get medication, schedule procedures, and get paperwork from one provider to the next. I have had to learn to read testing orders and results. Just in the past few weeks, documentation errors caused my latest barrel of blood to be sent for the wrong analysis (gotta start over). I consider myself lucky to have caught the coding typo that very nearly landed me with an accidental brain scan.
How am I doing it all without banging my head against the table? Well, I am occasionally banging my head against the table, but I am also doing quite literally everything else I know of to take the cure on my own behalf. Since last Christmas, I have returned to Al Anon, the 12-step program that I started going to in my 20s, to deal with family baggage. I have restarted regular yoga and meditation practices. I have found a new therapist. I meet regularly with a registered dietician with a specialty in complex medical diagnoses and a sense of humor that is perfect for a job that requires graduate degrees, hospital training, and frequent discussions about poop.
At a certain point, it occurred to me that “The Next Thing” might be well-suited to chronicling my various attempts at taking the cure. So, welcome to the next thing for “The Next Thing,” which I am tentatively calling “The Lady Takes the Cure.” As the Lady in question, I will try to speak daintily about the necessarily less dainty topics and I will do my best to include goats. I refuse on principle to call it a “journey.” I hope you’ll join me.
Sorry about your gut issues and the effing healthcare “system.” So frustrating. You know if you ever need to incorporate actual goats into taking the cure that this is something I can definitely help with. See you in a few days!