Boyer, The Undying

There are people who feel bad in their bodies and do nothing about it, and there are people who feel bad in their bodies and sub­mit their symp­toms to search engines and stop there. Then there are people who can afford to cir­cu­late what hurts bet­ween pro­fes­sio­nals who will offer them com­pe­ting diag­nos­tic bids. This group of people fol­low a set of symp­toms toward a pro­mise, ask for tests, ques­tion ans­wers, tra­vel long dis­tances to visit spe­cia­lists who might be able to reco­gnize what’s wrong.

If symp­toms are cir­cu­la­ted long enough, a set of dis­com­forts might be allo­wed the mer­cy of a name : a disease, a syn­drome, a sen­si­ti­vi­ty, a search term. Sometimes that is cure enough—as if to appel­late is to make okay. Sometimes to give a per­son a word to call their suf­fe­ring is the only treat­ment for it.

In a world where so many people feel so bad, there’s a com­mon unmar­ked and inde­fi­nite state of fee­ling ill that pro­vides, at least, mem­ber­ship in a com­mu­ni­ty of the uns­pe­ci­fied. Discomfort in need of diag­no­sis forms a fee­ling-scape of curious pains and cor­po­real erup­tions, all unta­med by the cate­go­ry disease. The kind of ill­ness that has no name is the kind that is held in sus­pense or held in com­mon or shuf­fled into the adja­cen­cy of psy­chia­try.

A body in mys­te­rious dis­com­fort exposes itself to medi­cine hoping to meet a voca­bu­la­ry with which to speak of suf­fe­ring in return. If that suf­fe­ring does not meet suf­fi­cient lan­guage, those who endure that suf­fe­ring must come toge­ther to invent it. The sick but undiag­no­sed have deve­lo­ped a lite­ra­ture of unna­med ill­ness, a poe­try of it, too, and a nar­ra­tive of their search for ans­wers. They finesse diets in res­ponse to what medi­cine fails, assay life­style res­tric­tions, and in the mix of refi­ned inges­tion and cor­rec­tive pro­tec­tions and rota­ting pro­fes­sio­nal ins­pec­tions, health or ill health wan­ders from the bounds of medi­cine, resists both disease and cure.

Cancer’s cus­tom, on the other hand, is to rare­ly show up unan­noun­ced. Cancer comes in a wave of experts and expert tech­no­lo­gies. It arrives via sur­veillance and pro­fes­sio­nal decla­ra­tion. Our senses tell us almost nothing about our ill­ness, but the doc­tors ask us to believe that what we can­not see or feel might kill us, and so we do.

“They tell me,” said an old man to me in the che­mo­the­ra­py infu­sion room, “I have can­cer, but,” he whis­pe­red, “I have my doubts.”