February 11, Neurasthenia

A few weeks ago I came close to not getting out of the house any longer at all. The condition, not uncommon, particularly in women, and all those who share their virtues, used to be called neurasthenia. Besides not getting out of the house, one does things in what appears like strict order, today repeating yesterday foreshadowing tomorrow. A certain appeasement of anxiety results from such planned repetitivity. A little like planned parenthood, yet well beyond it, there comes planned life, where life is the only thing one has got left to wrestle.

Surprisingly, my narrow to the point, forward looking spellchecker still recognizes the word. While I observe things changing at such a speed, as to make that which is only a few years old appear beyond the very possibility of useful existence. If they were, and some wikipedia entry attested to it, they're now useless, be they concrete objects or concepts. The important thing is not to regret them, but to believe that they are, without a doubt, obsolete. Was that really possible? Were people really called neurasthenics, when they refused to leave their house? Would that be ethical? That name, that label? we ask with suspicion. Was that a form of hysteria? and if so, were the doctors responsible at fault for naming it?

Were these patients, these clients, not highly offended when somebody (a doctor they addressed to as Herr Professor mind you) told  them that they did not suffer of an organic, but rather, of a psycho-neurological, or rather (at the time) nervous condition? Needless to say, the very judgement passed on such revolute circumstances must, today, be the result of the speed at which all beings technological egg us on, as if people and their machines were never more pressed to mark the finish line.

Proust suffered at the hands of this affliction himself. He who makes it easy to understand why, as we grow old, we turn ever more in the direction of our forebears. The meaning of our actions becomes clearer when we see some version of them in another. The advantage with making ourselves the improved rendering of our kin resides in the appropriation of certain historical circumstances. In this process of identification chronology is levelled, and we are free to adopt those lost conditions which are now precious and available to the nostalgic. In other words, since our own life history seems to be wanting, we are free to adopt our great aunts’ oddities as our own.

It is not quite correct to say that I did not leave the house. I do, every day, but only for the daily waltz with Rocky, along the forest and pond-lined Canada trail. Somehow, this forest has become part of our dwelling, and therefore, like for our dog, the divide between the outside, public domain, and our territory, does not begin at the door of the house, but at the margin of the forest, along the fields inhabited, during the warmer months, by our skittish cow-friends. During these walks, and maybe because of their solitary, Rousseauist nature, I am tempted to try and figure the illness of which I suffer in the terms of what it would have appeared like before diagnostic imaging techniques.

There's a good research topic: first, a survey of those who, affected by a tumor, carried on in spite - if not because of - it.  I do not mean the elephant man, even if he is certainly the logically extreme case. I mean people who lived with the symptoms and  knowledge - if such it can be called - and did what they had to do. Secondly, what was it, this thing they had to accomplish, or, better yet, what did it become? In light of the illness underlying their actions?

All of a sudden you will notice that you know of at least a few of such personnages. Strangely enough, the "growth" inside is almost acceptable, almost friendly, seeing how we often describe it, from reference to the proverbial grain of rice, to the pea, to the orange; and even, as I am reluctant to show, but show I must, for it is the truth, to a wurst, that is, yes yes, a sausage. This metaphor (I call it so because within such anxiety riddled circumstances any comparison acquires larger meaning) was offered by that poetically challenged lung specialist I see once in a while. He who happens to be German. My friends know how much I revere that language. Moreover, in this context, the love affair German(ic) folk entertain with the sausage is relevant. This man, who I suspect must be perfectly healthy – which bodes ill for the patient, but we can talk about that at another time - was looking for a simple, accessible metaphor. He wanted us to get it. He paid attention to our needs. Anyhow, this oncologist, trying to explain the shape of the formation which appeared in my lung months after the radiation treatment, is bothered by the lack of certitude regarding its nature. You may remember that blog episode. During this last appointment, which took about 6 minutes, and could easily have been conducted over the phone, possibly with less damage to my asthenia, we had been turning that unknown fact inside out for some long seconds. This allowed not only for the lovely wurst metaphor, but also for a much more puzzling, off putting question. Wherefrom I conclude, sometimes even 6 minutes is too long. The question came, unexpected and hard, in my general direction: now that we knew we know little, if anything for sure, about that appearance in my lung, pray tell, "you do know about the thing in your back", do you not?

Quotation marks indicate the level of the communication we struggled to sustain. The question itself was put in a sort of indifferent, vague, by-the-way-here's-a-detail sort of way. Nothing in the gaze to betray the thought, possibly the thinking process, behind. He looked overall drawn and unshaven, in spite of wearing a beard. I kept going back and forth, up and down, from his face to the photograph of his face on his name tag, which showed a younger, sturdier, more ambitious, even if just as much of a philistine kind of fellow. That photograph must come from the time when he still believed in cancer research.

Had Colin not been with me, I would have answered differently. I promise it makes a difference, because, with him there, I have to behave, to adhere to and possibly match that coolness, the cool of cool he embodies, even when he occupies the fated chair of the patient's companion. That superbly generous, unfazed demeanor, undisturbed in the face of human failure, no matter how often it repeats, remorselessly, its errors.

I would have asked the lung specialist if he was indeed trying to see whether the medication I have been taking, whatever it is - for he would have no idea - had already turned me into a senile old woman, who does not quite know any longer why she spends her time "on disability", either in the woods, or at home.

Or, I could have said something about his own level of brain activity.

Instead, we assured him, like good wards of the health care system, that yes, we knew the lesson, we knew what was happening to my spine.

Now, you might understand how, when one has spent some time under that label, however imprecise, of "disabled", under which I present, even unknowingly, in most social settings which I still have to attend, one develops a bit of a hesitation, a bit of a phobia, regarding the encounters with even the better informed members of the so called community to which we now belong. On the other hand, the lung specialist could have compared the shape which eludes him to worse things. He could have more precisely, closer to its actual size, compared it to a worm, which would have put a different spin on the therapeutic contract we somehow still entertain. One can always do worse.

As for my bouts of neurasthenia, all I can hope for is that the tumor, real as it is, if diminished, will keep pushing me out of the house and into the forest. We have our alpenstock, Rocky and I. We keep measuring the distance and thinking of all the blog entries still to be written. All the pictures still to be taken in order to replace the undigestible imaging flooding my chart.