The Diagnosis
- Katrina Irene Gould
- 6 days ago
- 7 min read
by Katrina Irene Gould
Driving to Trout Lake, Washington, with my husband, I relied on anticipation to carry me past my fatigue. Making sense of the recently identified origins of this exhaustion was still a work in progress. But I didn’t want my lack of oomph to sideline this trip. Good thing I was an old pro at doing-things-while-depleted. We stopped for lunch at a small-town, old-timey diner that made me wish for longer sleeves to cover my arm tattoos.
The cook wore her straight, shoulder-length gray hair loose and sported modern eyewear. She would not have been out of place in a book group, holding a glass of wine, the wine being the reason she came – not for the book, which she never much liked. She stood above the persistent hot sizzle of the grill, doing a job she clearly didn’t like much either. Over the course of lunch, she chastised several customers for 1) crowding the counter, 2) sitting at the counter, and 3) asking for a menu. Nowhere were her preferences made explicit – no signs, no banners – yet she spoke as if to idiots who should have known the correct way to comport themselves in her diner.
This woman had been in my head for the past four weeks. Okay, not her specifically, but her voice. The snappy peevishness that grew from knowing life was stacked against her.
The same voice that, when it arose in my own mind, signaled something was awry. I need not look far for that “something;” obviously, it was the unexpected and unwelcome diagnosis revealed in blood work done four weeks previously. Suddenly, my tiredness was not simply the accumulation of too many poor nights’ sleep. It was, in fact, a chronic virus that would now linger in my system until I died.
Tiredness isn’t the virus’s only symptom; tiredness alone wouldn’t have sent me to the doctor. As I’ve said, exhaustion is an old friend - or perhaps I should say “old companion” since I’ve not yet found a way to befriend it. More than the enervation, I was driven to a doctor’s appointment by a recent slipperiness to my thoughts; too often, now, they hovered out of reach. In folklore, those who hoped to see fairies were instructed to look at them askance; fairies were more likely to appear when seen through one’s peripheral vision. My thoughts were like these elusive creatures, scattering the second I considered them directly.
What good are thoughts that dissipate when the thinker turns toward them?
Actually, not all my thoughts were elusive. Those associated with my aforementioned irritation arrived readily, often in full sentences beginning with the words, “God damn.”
God damn massive truck - why does that guy always have to idle outside our window?
God damn sun, waking me too early.
God damn overcast, not waking me early enough.
Even the most benign experiences became evidence of a world turned against me.
Hearing this narrative in my head again filled me with defeat; it was too familiar from the early days of my children's lives. Twenty years ago, I dragged my depleted, sleep-deprived body after them, hoping I could rally and be equal to mothering. Countless unfinished tasks accumulate every day.
What I needed was an extension of myself, another body, separate from the one that housed the bleak moonscape of my mind. It seemed right that my husband should be that. His body wasn’t being climbed on, slept on, and nursed on. His body wasn’t creating the food that sustained and grew our children. But really, the lists were unfinishable, and he did what he could when he wasn’t at work. My pre-child efficacy dribbled through my fingers and, helpless to stop it, I was frequently enraged.
Since then, I’d worked hard to only ask that my husband be accountable for things he was actually responsible for, and not also demand that he moderate the piercing gaze of the too-early sunrise or the throbbing engine of someone else’s V-6. Exacting this shift in my mind made life eminently better for both of us. I despaired to find that, with this diagnosis, the corrosive thoughts had returned.
But, of course, they had. The moment my symptoms coalesced into a diagnosis of chronic Epstein-Barr virus, so too did my resentment. I had hoped a diagnosis would bring reassurance. Three years earlier, when symptoms sent me toward a COVID test, the positive result was a relief. Now I knew what I had and could predict the course of my illness. Relief was possible because – given my relative health and the fact that I was vaccinated – I could hope to improve. There would be an “after” – after I'd recovered, after the symptoms disappeared.
With Epstein-Barr, there wasn’t an after. My doctor laughed uncomfortably when she delivered the news, laughed at the impossibility of what she said next: “When you realize the EBV has gotten the upper hand because you’ve overdone it, stop everything. Rest as many days as it takes to feel better.” On a day when I’d succumbed, I could expect to awaken with sandbags pressing me into the bed. The sand would be in my head, too, creating such an impediment to thought that only a few would reach their destination.
There would now be no “me” without this condition, though I’d only ever previously known the me without it. What about my life would EBV’s looming presence – sometimes fully expressed, sometimes subterranean – indelibly change?
*
I always meant to be the sort of person who consistently practiced self-care, but somehow, I only ever thought of my well-being when things were falling apart – like now. Scheduling a massage uplifted me – until I remembered that someone I didn’t know was going to see my naked body. What had I gone and done? The 24-hour cancellation window closed before I remembered I could cancel. I walked the several blocks to the masseuse’s office thinking about my sagging skin and unshed lockdown fat.
Once at her office and after reviewing my intake information, she left the room so I could disrobe. I stretched face down under the sheet. That’s when I understood that, as she moved from one body part to the next, in addition to my nakedness, my tattoos would also be revealed: the shooting star, the smiling moon, the mother-daughter elephants, the tribal armband, the lotus and tree of life. I stopped listing them when I came to my Cherish the mundane tattoo.
I claimed the word “mundane” as my own when, in my twenties, I learned one of its definitions was “of the earth.” I appreciated the irony that a word we used for the dullest of undertakings described, in fact, the richest, most bountiful creation we could know. Three decades later, I encountered a sentence that suggested we ought to cherish the mundane, and I couldn’t wait to write it on my body. I chose a plain font – as seemed fitting for the mundane – and asked the tattoo artist to ink the words on my inner right forearm in quintessential blue-black. Maybe if I saw that sentence daily, I would do what it suggested, and all good would flow from there.
But now, the words stopped me. I felt incapable of ever cherishing the mundane, especially now that it included this virus. Who was this woman who so confidently encouraged herself and others to cherish those things so often beneath our notice? Why oh why had she permanently marked me with words that I had no hope of living up to?
I could not have felt further from her.
I lay on the massage table in a state of acute self-consciousness and renewed despair. The masseuse touched me with strong hands. She began at my trapezius, that confluence of neck and shoulders – always the first to clench when I succumbed to stress. She remained there until the muscle loosened, like a baker kneading and kneading till the dough developed the sought-after gluten. Then, she moved on.
Over time, beneath my hopelessness and awkwardness, a different experience of my body emerged. Beyond my painful preoccupations, under the masseuse’s hands, my skin, muscles, and bones began to awaken. I sank into myself, but not the EBV-like sinking that pulled me down like a cement life-ring. Rather, sinking the way we might be said to sink on an out-breath. I was letting go of ideas about myself, and instead was reduced, though that’s the wrong word, to my physicality. Cherish the mundane was a thought, an idea. Even if I couldn’t square myself with the hopeful, beatific tone of it, I could hang out in the ordinariness of a body, a body that remembered wholeness.
An hour later, my massage over, I walked into the soft afternoon. I began the uphill walk toward home. I glided.
Three blocks into my walk, I heard a rapid, staccato chirp, almost a click. The black-eyed junco flitted no more than a foot from my face, eating seeds from a stalk of evening primrose and chattering away. I stood and watched.
When I began walking again, another interpretation of my tattoos seemed possible: maybe they were not forever there to torment me at moments when I felt far from their ideal. Perhaps instead they were breadcrumbs I’d laid, words to help me return to myself when I was temporarily lost.
***
Katrina Irene Gould has spent thirty fulfilling years as a psychotherapist in Portland, Oregon. Her personal essays, poetry, reviews, and stories have appeared in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Gilded Weathervane, The Adanna Literary Journal, HerStry, Mukoli: The Magazine for Peace, Glacial Hills Review, Literally Stories, and others. Steve Almond says, “Writing is a forgiveness racket.” Gould writes in hopes of demonstrating that we can examine our complicated human experiences, and in so doing create more compassion for our struggles—since often the person we most need to forgive is ourselves.
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