Because of some health issues of late, I have been in more doctor offices than normal (for me) lately. Between labwork, CTs, xrays, and ER visits, there have been visits to an acupuncturist, my functional health doctor, a specialist, another specialist, and one more (For good measure?). In each of these spaces I’ve been surprised by the level of care I have received.
Maybe my surprise surprises you. Maybe you grew up with no suspicion of the health or medical industry, maybe you had health insurance throughout college, into your twenties and thirties, insuring you would get medical care when sick or injured without second thought, maybe you haven’t been gaslit by skinny doctors or fertility doctors, maybe going to the doctor is just another yearly appointment for you, another tic mark of time passed. That has never been the case for me.
And yet, in each of these appointments, from the lab technician who drew my blood, to the front desk associate who—without embarrassment—picked up my brown paper bag of stool samples, to the new acupuncturist I’m seeing, to the specialist who had me do calisthenics on the exam table while he read a continual X-ray, to my functional health doctor who spends an hour on average with me, I’ve felt nothing but care.
In one appointment, the specialist asked me ten thousand questions, listened to every answer, ordered a series of tests, and then told me, “We will do these tests, but at the end of the day, I don’t treat according to a test exam result, I treat you, your human body. The tests might give us more information, but you are the expert in your body.”
I teared up. I tried not to cry, but then I did anyway. I cried.
In Wendell Berry’s essay “Health is Membership” (which some of you think is the only essay of his I’ve read because I draw your attention to it so often1), he writes,
The world of efficiency ignores both loves, earthly and divine, because by definition it must reduce experience to computation, particularity to abstraction, and mystery to a small comprehensibility…
And yet love obstinately answers that no loved one is standardized. A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is not an explanation; it is not a law. It is precisely and uniquely what it is. It belongs to the world of love, which is a world of living creatures, natural orders and cycles, many small, fragile lights in the dark.
Love obstinately answers that no loved one is standardized.
This is the seventh post in my series I Changed My Mind on Sexuality. You can read the introduction, Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, and Part VI.
This series is behind a paywall for many reasons. If you absolutely cannot afford a subscription right now, contact me and I’ll get you sorted. If you can afford a subscription, it’s most economical for you to do a year’s instead of a monthly one ($3.50 a month vs $7). This series may take six months, I’m not sure 😬