41
" In those late fall months, I lived as if in a locked room. I could only look out the windows, catching fragmentary glimpses of life as I’d once enjoyed it, growing even more determined to find answers. Outside, my friends were meeting in the park, eating picnic lunches in sweaters as their children poked one another with sticks, or hailing taxis in a sudden downpour, giving the stranger at a party a second, hungry look. Inside, it was dark and stuffy, and I labored to survive an illness no one could see. In this way the undiagnosed suffer, doubly alone. At "
― Meghan O'Rourke , The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness
55
" In pain, exhausted, and angry, I, too, was swept up in futile pageantry. I signed up for appointments, I waited, I got my hopes up, I went and sat in shoddy, sad offices with pictures of sailboats on the wall and greasily thumbed magazines on side tables sourced from bulk office furniture suppliers. The actual encounter was always confusing, eleven minutes of liminal contact in which I tried to conduct myself in a way that would make the doctor like me, in the hope they would take some true interest in my plight. But their day was full of tests to order, bureaucracy to cut through, an education that taught them not to say, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you.” And so we stood together in a tiny, antiseptic room, the doctor and the patient, a world apart. "
― Meghan O'Rourke , The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness