Tag / hope

by Isla

Miracles

In which I consider the nature of hope

This is the gap filled by gods.

Or if not gods, then magic.

Or if not magic, then convincingly futuristic sounding “medicine”.

Or if not futuristic medicine, then convincingly ancient sounding “medicine”.

This is the gap that bleeds hope.

It exists in our minds alone. The world gives little care for concepts like ‘unfairness’ or ‘undeserving’.

The world just is. And sometimes we cannot trace our patterns of meaning over its contours.

The gap is vulnerable. It wants to be filled. Like a child it reaches for anything that comes into its vicinity.

And there are always those with a shark’s sense for blood.

They will circle when hope cries out, carefully brewed oil of snake or poisoned apple in hand. They wear a mask of utmost sympathy, and speak with the zeal of one with absolute fact at their back.

And what can hope do but reach for a taste?

Charms, crystals, prayers, herbs, mysterious energy reading machines – just a little more, just a little longer, one more day-month-year. The cure lies just around the corner.

‘Lies’ being the operative word.

The gap hungers, whimpers, so tired of the ache of hoping yet never quite fulfilling.

Yet if we let gods, magic, mysticism, or alternative medicines pass us by, what balm can soothe the gap?

I fill my gap with my own absolute insignificance.

With the scale of this planet, the solar system, the galaxy, the universe. With the incredible statistical feat of my existence. With the duration of my life against the age of the Sun. With the breathtaking beauty of a world that will continue to rotate uncaring and unaware of the motes that scatter its surface.

It is here that I find comfort. Meaning in the absolute meaningless of space. For all that humanity builds or destroys, our wars, our discoveries, our loves and joys, those we laud or despise, we are but a blink. Everything we know and discover is incredible, and yet utterly insignificant against all that we do not know.

My gap overflows. 

And though this may not find cures or solutions, there is a peace that comes with perspective. Yes, I am insignificant. But how wonderful it is to have the capacity to think that thought. 

How lucky I am to have my blink of existence.

by Isla

The MUPS-Files

In which we discuss MUPS (which isn’t a puppy with a suspiciously lumpy neck)

There’s a basement under the Great Hall of Diagnosis. It’s never talked about and the basement door can only be reached by traversing the myriad doors and corridors of the upper floors, with their neat, rectangular, printed labels (Erythromelalgia – Gonorrhea – Vitiligo – Yellow Fever – Ichthyosis).

The label on the basement door is handwritten with an attempt to look authoritative – right up until the writer realised they were running out of space and the letters began to get smaller and smaller:

‘Medically Unexplained Physical Symptoms (MUPS)’

Underneath, on a scrappier piece of paper, someone else has scrawled in blobby biro,

‘Welcome to the X-Files’

The basement’s occupants are numerous and varied. Every time medical testing fails to allocate a condition to one of the more reputable rooms above, it gets dumped in the basement.

The patient, meanwhile, receives the good/bad news that there isn’t a diagnosis. On the one hand, you’re not dying more quickly than you ought to be, as far as medical science can tell. On the other hand, we can’t find a reason for those physical symptoms, so we can’t treat them.

The unfortunate subtext is that there isn’t a real reason for the symptoms. There’s a sneaking suggestion that the cause of the symptoms is something psychological rather than physical, of the mind rather than the body.

The mind is a product of the body, of course, and undoubtedly can induce and influence the body’s behaviour. And yet it seems curious that this is the only explanation given weight. There is rarely any mention of the possibility that medical science might develop and learn more, and eventually figure out that there is a determinable cause for some of these conditions.

Conditions like Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue are finally making the journey from the MUPS basement to newly decorated rooms with printed labels on the floors above. Evidence has been found and explanations have been developed following extensive research. Medicine is acknowledging that there is something real to find out about, and is finally validating the experience of all those people who were told it was in their minds.

On two occasions, I’ve been the patient listening to a consultant say they can’t find anything wrong. On both occasions, I nod, and silence falls. I wait for a suggestion of a next step, a new test or another referral, but their benign smiles remain impossibly fixed. I begin to feel flutters of frantic panic, a desperation for something, anything to hold on to, a gasp of hope. They give me nothing.

I wonder if they’re waiting for me to say the words for them, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ and see myself out. I eventually received a ‘Good luck’ from one of them, but it tasted bitter in its emptiness.

Being designated to the MUPS basement leaves you unlabelled, open to the slow erosion of society’s slurs for those who lack a medically approved stamp: lazy, attention seeking, hysterical, weak, a drain on resources.

I’d like to get out of the basement one day.