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Key points
- How my family dealt with illness had a lot to do with how I did.
- For me, ignoring or minimizing illness is just as bad as overdramatizing it.
- I realized that my family's love of illness was due to unhappiness in their own lives.
Right now, I have Long Covid. It’s not fun, full of hard coughing fits, fatigue, head and muscle aches, and my personal favorite, shortness of breath. I'm sick. Really sick. But I don’t want to make a big deal out of it, or head to too many doctors, or look for help online. Why? Because making a big deal out of being sick was what my family did.
When my sister was a teenager, beautiful, smart, and strong, she insisted, even though she had no symptoms, on getting a blood test from a doctor because she was sure she had leukemia. When the test, of course, came back normal, she kept asking the doctor if he was sure. When my mother suffered from headaches, she told my sister and me that she was sure it was a brain tumor and that whatever doctors told her to do, she would “submit to it.” Panic attacks in my family were always heart attacks. Stomach aches could be tumors. Even a clean bill of health was still an occasion for drama because they knew it could have been so much worse. My sister’s favorite kind of book to read? About illness, or even better, dying.
I was the one in the family who actually was sick. I had childhood asthma, but because my mother hovered around me, reciting all the rules that if I didn’t follow I would get even sicker, I hid my symptoms the best I could. I just didn’t want to hear the doom and gloom or fall under her scrutiny. As I grew up, my mother and sister didn’t approve of most of my choices and often sounded alarms to me about them. Why had I left my cheating first husband when someone else would snap him right up? Why did I wear all black and disturb others by doing so? Why did I choose to live in a big dangerous city instead of the suburbs like them? And why didn’t I take better care of myself, physically?
Finally, when I was away at college, I lied and told her my asthma had vanished. Only then did she stop asking about it, though she did warn me that you never know, it could come back—and worse, too. When I was critically ill, in the hospital with a rare blood disease and in a coma, my friends later told me how my mother and my sister kept watch in the hospital, exclaiming to my friends that they knew I was going to die, over and over, all with a kind of interest and excitement that put them center stage and made me horrified. How could my family like me better and pay more attention to me when I was ill? Why wasn’t my eventual full recovery equally dramatic and wonderful to them?
I wanted to figure it out.
Now, I think I know why. Illness not only gets you attention, but it changes your focus. Both my sister and my mom had unhappy marriages. Maybe it was easier to get all wrapped up in illness, theirs and mine, to focus on that, rather than to deal with what was going on in their own lives. After all, there are always things you can do and try when you are sick, from vitamins to leaving it up to doctors. But with life issues, there are often no easy answers. And of course, you are the one who must make the changes, which can be scary, because what if what you choose is even worse?
When my mom turned 93, she fell in love for the first time. She stopped talking about being sick. She stopped asking me what was wrong, why was I coughing, how was I breathing, or what wrong choices I was making in my life that she wouldn’t make herself. She didn’t have time for the drama anymore. It was a gift, both for her and for me.
As for me, I kept trying to ignore illness until Long Covid. I worried that a doctor might not believe I was sick at all but just, like my family, over-dramatizing. So, I would cough loudly to make my point. I’d try to look haggard when I went for an in-person appointment. “You don’t have to do that,” my husband Jeff told me. “They believe you. Why wouldn’t they?”
Like everything else in my life, I decided to test drive that opinion. When I had to see a pulmonologist for Long Covid, I told myself I wasn’t going to exaggerate my symptoms, even though I was worried that I wasn’t sick enough to go, or maybe that I just wasn’t interesting as a patient. “Remember, he’s being paid,” my husband reminded me.
So I went in, calm, not coughing, and to my surprise, the doctor neither thought I was faking nor that I was too uninteresting a case to waste his time. Instead, he took nearly a whole hour with me, explaining Long Covid, talking about lung health, and being such good company that coming into his office sick was almost a pleasure. I didn’t have to cough once, and he still believed that I was ill.
So now, instead of dismissing ailments, I can confront them. Instead of worrying that a doctor won’t think I’m sick enough, I can go in, present the facts, and take the medical advice.
And then, I can return to my loving husband and son, the work that I love, and the life that always, always, excites and heals me.
