One morning in January 2006, Rachel Weaver, a 20-something aspiring writer who was about to start grad school in Colorado, woke up to a hurricane; except the hurricane was whirling within her own body. Here's how Weaver describes that moment:
I opened my eyes to the walls of the bedroom folding and sliding and picking up speed.
I ... pressed my body hard against the mattress in search of the center, the still place. Anyplace. ...
Desperate to get away from whatever was happening, I pushed the covers off inch by inch, keeping my head as still as possible, and slid down to all fours next to the bed. ... I was clawing more than crawling, the carpet rushing beneath my hands like a river just let loose from a dam.
In the hallway, panting, I slowly got my feet under me, crouched low, hands spidered against the carpet. ... If I could just brush my teeth, maybe have some coffee, I figured things would right themselves.
Things didn't even start to "right themselves" for Weaver until about a decade later, when she met a doctor who, instead of trying to make her symptoms fit a prefab narrative, sat with her for two hours and "asked question after question, like a detective on the path of a hardened criminal."
In her arresting new memoir called Dizzy, Weaver, herself, deftly avoids the prefab narrative that accounts of deliverance from chronic illness usually fall into. There's even a name for them: They're called "restitution narratives" because the reward in reading such stories is the return to some degree of normal life. Think, for instance, of the monthly "Diagnosis" column in the New York Times Magazine, whose appeal is based on the promise that some solution will be found by the end of its investigation of a mystery disease.
Weaver takes a more challenging approach: She devotes all but the very last pages of her book to the extended experience of being marooned, as she puts it, "in the windy no man's land of what could possibly be wrong with me."
To me, reading Dizzy is akin to the slowed-down sensation of reading Robinson Crusoe: Year after year goes by; occasionally, rescue appears on the horizon in the form of an ear, nose and throat specialist, acupuncturist, neurologist, physical therapist, ophthalmologist, chiropractic integrative healer. Many of these human vessels of hope end up dismissing Weaver with an all-purpose diagnosis of "just too much stress."
Early on, when Weaver hears that assessment of her dizziness by a nurse practitioner, she thinks back to her time in the Alaskan Forest Service where her job occasionally brought her into close encounters with angry brown bears. "Pretty sure it's not just stress," Weaver tells the nurse practitioner.
Indeed, one of the ways Weaver beguiles readers to stick with her through her long years of "landlocked seasickness" are her flashbacks to her work in Alaska. As Weaver points out, her face-offs with animals in the wild often mirror many patient/doctor encounters. Here, for instance, is the end of an appointment with a young ENT who's just callously shrugged off Weaver's baffling case. Surprisingly, that doctor ends up giving Weaver a break on her bill. The discount is crucial to Weaver: She's mired in medical debt since her night job doesn't provide insurance. Weaver recalls:
I tried ... to feel grateful that she had miraculously lowered her rate to something reasonable, but that shrug played over and over in my mind. I wanted to shrug back now that it was my turn. But I couldn’t. “Thank you,” I said, dropping my eyes, taking my place below her in the animal kingdom of the health care system: patient/doctor, broke/not broke, weak/powerful.
In Dizzy, Weaver, astutely captures these moments of placation and dominance. She adopted this meek behavior, as many of us do, because she was desperate. She wanted to be thought of as a "good patient," in hopes of securing more attention from a doctor, maybe even a cure. What Weaver appreciates more deeply throughout her long ordeal is how much the art of healing has to do with listening and being open to accompanying a patient into off-road terrain.
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