A Grand Unified Theory of Disease
When my great-aunt visits, smelling of cloves, oranges, and sulphur, I hide in my bedroom closet in our DC duplex until my parents force me out. I stand before her on an Oriental rug wishing I could sink into it, could disguise myself in its arabesque design. She beams at me, bends to kiss me. But all I see, nearing me, is a bulge of skin quivering from her neck.
After she leaves, this growth haunts me. I’m only in first grade so the word “goiter” means nothing. To me, it is a sign, a hex, a contagion, which I’m terrified I’ll inherit.
It’s as if my great-aunt staggers through life with the world’s sins sagging from her neck.
Does the goiter scare her? Depress her? What about her clove, orange, sulphur? Who is my aunt? Who would she be without her goiter? For all I know maybe, without it, she’d feel lonely, ordinary.
*
After we leave DC, and I no longer see my great-aunt, I forget about her and her goiter. I only consider it again when, decades later, I contract (inherit?) a mild case of pneumonia. I undergo X-Rays and CT-scans, photos of the inside of my body, bacteria settling into sacs. Bacteria, prokaryotes, are cells lacking a nucleus. Does this mean the bacteria, once it invades the organism, floats through pores into my lungs? When the pneumonia subsides, my lungs continue to expel liquid like wavelets emptying the ocean of my bacterial soul.
*
More than the pneumonia and its residue, I worry about all my organs, about each blood cell: red, white, platelets, plasma—any system failure that could occur either with or without warning. While medical reasons exist why one person gets a goiter and another pneumonia, what does the body itself want us to know? Can the body, all on its own, attempt suicide-by-disease?
After all, the brain, on its own, can decide to make the body sick. Psychosomatic illness isn’t fake, isn’t illness “just in your mind.” The brain convinces the body to decline. But since they aren’t separate, the mind and body, along with the soul, conspire to present new and un-diagnosable maladies.
For example, if the soul is depressed, the body might respond with an ailment that eludes diagnosis and treatment. And if the body is physically depleted, it often causes the mind to lose hope and the soul to lose faith.
*
My pulmonologist can’t explain how I got pneumonia though it wasn’t from another person. During the pandemic, I’ve been quarantining.
I study the X-ray, my lungs a frail ghostly outline surrounded by a void. Hunkered in the right lobe is a clot of disease. Lungs, I want to ask you: Why are you sick? Are you sad? Dismayed? Scared? Are you tired of breathing, exhausted by that constant flutter-flutter-flutter? What can I do to make you happy, or at least satisfied enough to perform your job?
If I lived inside an MRI machine, I would know the exact location—time and place—of the pneumonia’s attack. Safely cocooned inside a round cylinder, I could monitor constant images of my otherwise invisible insides. I, as organism, would possess up-to-date notifications on all my body’s goings-on. The machine’s whirr, negating the harsh sounds of the outside world, would soothe me. The machine would know, at any given moment, who I am and when I should be on high-alert.
Upon further consideration, however, my MRI machine would need to be outfitted with special gadgets to also observe soulful feelings and emotions. Sadly, that machine must still be a prototype, or on the drawing board.
Except, when the latest CT-scan results arrive, I read words such as “occult,” “mosaic attenuation,” “no ground-glass opacity,” “partial halo.” Such mystical phrases to describe my lungs. Or me?
*
Maybe my great-aunt suffered melancholia, a well of loss too profound to speak. That’s why scientific knowledge does not erase my fear of her goiter. Even though doctors claim a goiter is caused by lack of iodine in the diet, I believe, even if she swallowed a box of salt, her goiter would not have shrunk. If you sprinkled all the iodized salt in the world—salted the entire earth—the malevolence I perceived in her goiter would still contaminate those with immune-suppressed emotions.
*
Surely there’s a metaphysical connection between my aunt’s goiter and an indentation I discovered in the forehead of my college science professor. Once, when I visited him in his office after class, I sat on his lap hoping to improve my grade. He slid his hand up my thigh, under my green-plaid mini-skirt. Initially, I was failing science because I was overwhelmed by what I did and didn’t know about antimatter. But I clearly felt that gamma-ray electrical charge of his matter…felt his blonde buzz-cut hair scratch my face.
Only now I recall how I opened my eyes when he kissed me, focusing on the gouge in his forehead. Was it a groove from a surgically removed melanoma? Was the depression in his forehead a, well, depression, an outward manifestation of sadness caused by his own absent matter, a wound so deep it was like missing pieces of a soul?
At the same time, when he’d neared me, as when my aunt’s goiter drew closer, I felt almost blinded by the sheer scope of what could befall the human body. I couldn’t look at it; I couldn’t gaze away.
Leaving his office that late afternoon, the corridors of the building empty, fluorescent lights anxiously flickering, I felt a sense of loss. As if I knew less about the matter of my own antimatter than when I first entered his room.
*
Maybe the solution is that I (all of us) need one diagnosis that considers the mind and body as one entity. In fact, I’d welcome such a label—just give me one that’s inclusive. I don’t want to say I have a headache. Or pneumonia. Or appendicitis. Or depression. I want a classification for the entire organism. Brand me “Blue.” Or “Linen.” Or the scent of wet sand. The rough bark of a tree. Mark me “haloed in a mosaic occult.” Categorize me “inoperatively melancholy” or “ground-glass pissed.”
I’ve been called borderline personality, obsessive, an abandoned woman, a sufferer of intermittent IBS. You see the problem? All, and more, are true. I am a constellation of disorders. Therefore, I need an over-riding label that speaks for the whole.
Existence depends on such inclusivity. Without one, I am a stranger to myself.
*
The science professor must be a misogynist in that he seduced a young student. But what about his melanoma? If he had one definitive classification maybe the seduction would not have happened. Maybe his teleology would have been clear. Clearer. Known. I could classify him a Melanoma for Wounded Women, although I do not think that term would cure him
Maybe we are all wounded because, lacking our own special mark, we are displaced, dispossessed strangers to ourselves and to each other. Am I the same as everyone else suffering depression or pneumonia? Surely, my own suffering is unique. Can I trademark it?
But lacking a comprehensive identifier, when I walked out of that science professor’s office, I felt as if the antimatter of my matter trailed behind me like molted skin.
*
A goiter is caused by lack of salt or an inflammation of the thyroid. Pneumonia is caused by bacteria or virus. The science professor’s indentation presented as a melanoma when my gaze fixated on it, my pupils dilated. Other things are caused by sin or karma or bad luck.
If that’s what you believe.
I do; I don’t.
Do I want a diagnosis or prognosis? Do I want to know the cause or the outcome? Both. I want an all-encompassing word to give comfort or understanding. Otherwise, how do we survive, how do we live, each of us, with our own private theories of hope and grief?
Photo by Louis Reed on Unsplash