In the spring of our senior year of college A had a complex migraine, which is a migraine that presents with the symptoms of a stroke: something bad that comes on in the guise of something much worse. It took Yale-New Haven six hours to diagnose this, and then we had to stay another hour when he almost fainted because they hadn’t let him eat at any point during the ordeal. Weirdly, since everything turned out to be fine, I remember the whole incident fondly: the man in the waiting room calmly bleeding from brow to jaw, the point at 2am when the person in the room next to us started hurling herself against the walls and screaming that she had to leave, the limp, tasteless 3am hamburgers we ate at A1 after he was discharged.

While we were waiting we told each other hospital stories, and injury stories and sickness stories, the times we’d puked and passed out, broken bones, sprained or strained ankles, the time I got my cartilage pierced and the infection almost killed me. When your twenty two year old friend calls to say he is in the hospital because this afternoon he found himself involuntarily slurring and stumbling, grasping at words, you don’t even know what the worst is, what there is to fear: instead we told funny stories about youthful scrapes, and how we’d ended up OK, warm in this hospital bed. And in the end it was OK. It really was kind of nice. 

On Saturday I hurt my back in a yoga class; yesterday I went to a chiropractor who ran me through a litany of symptoms and the entirety of my medical history. I told her all the stories I’d told him, and all the ones from the past couple of years. I think of myself as being healthy, but it turns out I’m a mess: flat feet, clicking jaw, chronic headaches and stomachaches (anxiety, unmedicated), episodes of sleep paralysis, a history with whiplash and lower back pain. It was very strange to talk a stranger through all of it; repeatedly I wanted to stop, and, as we’re trained: “really, though, that’s enough about me. How are you?”

Today she took these x-rays: my spine straight, pelvis tweaked, sacrum on an angle. Lately I’ve been having so much trouble writing about myself, looking at photographs, doing anything restive or reflective. I told her about all of the history in my skin and bones but you couldn’t pick me out from this picture. No one could. It’s strange to see yourself so clearly, and yet so alien, too.