Miranda Warning for Invisible Illness

You have the right to remain healthy - in appearance.

Meanwhile, INSIDE your body (where no one bothers to look - even most medical professionals with licenses) maintains the right to malfunction. Spectacularly. You have the right to be a STUNNING walking disaster from your organs (the ones necessary for existence and the extras available for sacrifice on an OR table) down to the tiniest neural synapse. At any given moment, one - or more! - of your body parts have the right to self-destruct without warning or outward indication. The results will leave you in crippling pain, suffering extreme exhaustion, and struggling to form coherent sentences.

On the inside.

Where it doesn’t count.

Outside, you retain the right to look thoroughly, fabulously healthy.

Anything you say can and will be used against you in a medical office.

You have the right to seek medical attention for the dumpster fire that is your invisible illness. But it’s probably best if you avoid describing the minefield contained within your body. The more you attempt to assign details and numbers and adjectives to the madness raging through your nerves and blood vessels and organs, the crazier you start sounding. (Let’s not forget how fantastic you look)

Doctors and nurses only tolerate so much madness (about 5 minutes) before pulling a few diagnoses from their grab bag. The most popular include anxiety, depression, obesity, and hysteria (always applicable if you possess - or once possessed - female reproductive organs).

Attempts to protest these conclusions will only further the determination that you’ve lost touch with reality.

Silence is golden.

Screaming in a medical office is unnecessary drama. (Although highly entertaining)

You have the right to a second opinion.

And a third opinion.

A fourth opinion.

A fifth.

If you expect to find an answer to the symptoms keeping you awake at night, robbing you of an everyday existence, expect to bounce from one medical professional to another. (Especially if you violated that whole “say anything” right)

Collect specialists the way other people collect Pokemon. Don’t stop until you’ve completed a set. Look for the coveted gold foil, glittery, Holy Grail physician who listens and goes to bat for you in the face of every opposition. (They’re challenging to chase down. You’ll need your best butterfly net and a platter of irresistible cookies)

And when you locate that unicorn of a doctor who knows what they’re talking about, stake your claim. Bare your teeth at the other patients in the waiting room and growl.

If you cannot afford a test, it WILL solve all of your problems.

You watch documentaries featuring celebrities. Read their authorized autobiographies penned by the finest ghostwriters. Hidden within the scripts and chapters, you spot testing options and treatments your doctor can’t find in any system, regardless of the insurance. The results are always miraculous, made-for-Hollywood answers denied to everyone making less than $1 million a month.

It’s the most awe-inspiring claptrap, designed to throw you into a frenzy of GoFundMe madness. You KNOW you’re the next success case, awaiting 15 seconds of fame, if only your idiot physician would research the damn test.

The deliberate mystery and subterfuge leave you (and everyone you dragoon into the search) pulling out your perfectly-coifed hair. You have to content yourself with labs that come back normal, treatments that offer minimal relief, and constant shrugs and weak smiles.

Because you can’t crack the secret code on pseudo-documentary bullshit designed for feel-good television audiences.

Gorgeous as you are, you’re not destined for the big (or small) screen.

Content yourself with the standard testing and therapy that promises - well, nothing.

Do you understand the rights I have just read to you?

When it comes down to it, invisible illness isn’t THAT complicated: You look AMAZING. All the time.

And you feel like shit.

So you traipse from medical office to medical office while doctors say things that make you feel crazy. And say things verging on crazy. Because they make you crazy.

And you watch celebrities (or made-for-TV characters) solve their conditions with suspicious magic potions. So you embark on treasure hunts for those secrets. Driving everyone around you to your level of crazy.

What’s not to understand?

With these rights in mind, do you wish to continue with your diagnosis?

No one ASKS for an invisible illness diagnosis. Given a choice, you’d accept any other option.

Medical professionals see your unblemished skin, functional limbs, symmetrical body and decide every word out of your mouth stems from a dysfunctional mind.

“It’s all in your head.” (How they love that phrase)

Given a choice, you could (clearly) WILL everything away. The pain, the incoherent thought, the indefinable sense of “unwell” plaguing your every step. It’s under the complete control of your brain. And given a choice, you could undo all of the damage. All you need to do is wrestle it under submission. (It’s a theory that doctor’s writing a paper on, at any rate)

As if you don’t lie awake through the night, holding lengthy conversations with every part of your body, demanding it get its shit together.

Like you haven’t stood in front of a mirror, questioning your mental capacity. (How much good could you do in the world with this terrifying power?) Are the pain and fatigue within your grasp? Where does the key lie? Behind what distant corner of your mind?

For their immense wisdom, those doctors never thought about how to bring your scrambled brain in line with the perfection of your outward appearance. They leave the work to YOU. The assumption is, of course, that their grand revelation will trigger something deep inside.

Because you DON’T want to feel the way you do. And slogging a 20-pound tome around from doctor to doctor ISN’T on your Top Ten List.

Too bad your idiotic INTERNAL system failed to get the memo.

It’s almost as if your MIND and BODY were two separate entities.

Crazy, right?