The Diagnosis
CW: Reference to disordered eating
Erin Jamieson
Diagnosis
The snow is powdery and soft and bitter, coating the streets of Cleveland, the only disruption to the ashy gray skies.
But in the examination room, everything is contained, sterile. From the beige tiled floors to the neat stack of magazines to the sticky cushion of the table where I lie.
My mother brought me here—even though I told her many of my teammates have lost their periods too. It’s just something that happens, from training hard, from logging in miles. I should be taking a history exam. I should be anywhere but here, shivering under a maroon dress and thin black leggings.
I ignore my rumbling stomach as a nurse places a smooth stethoscope on my chest. Normally I would’ve eaten a hardboiled egg by now and a half cup of berries. But I missed my morning pushups and situps, and I can only think of how long I’ll be sedentary, how many fewer calories I’ll burn.
The nurse smiles at me. The type of tight smile you give someone when you have bad news and aren’t sure how to break it.
“Doctor Braverman will be in soon.” She squeezes my hand, which is more unnerving than if she’d said something. Like she thinks I’m going to need strength.
The moment the door closes, I pace. It serves two purposes: I’m getting some exercise in, and I don’t have to sit still with my thoughts. I’ll be eighteen at the end of this school year, yet I feel like a child, trapped in an exam room, trying to get an answer for my mother so we can forget all of this.
But why did the nurse act as concerned as my mother? Or maybe I’m just tired and lightheaded. That happens a lot lately. I was lightheaded on the starting line of my final cross country race. When I asked the coaches, they chalked it up to nerves.
Doctor Braverman is tall, brunette, with blunt bangs and coke-bottle glasses. She’s maybe around my mother’s age, with stern hazel eyes.
She orders me back on the examination table, takes my pulse once, twice. She locks eyes with me.
“Have you been experiencing any symptoms? Aside from the missing periods?”
I consider it. The dizzy spells right before and after a run, when I get up in the morning. The weight in my limbs as I walk from class to class. The panic that rises in my throat like a bubble when someone offers me food.
“Nothing,” I say. “I feel fine.”
She doesn’t squeeze my hand. Her brows crease. “I’ll be right back. I’m going to speak with your parents.”
“Is something wrong?”
She doesn’t answer, shuts the door behind her and leaves me once again alone.
The snow is still falling outside and the way it erases the roads makes me think of being erased, makes me wonder how you can come expecting one thing and come out with something entirely different.
Bradycardia.
A single word tightens my chest.
But it’s the word itself.
It’s what I’m being told it means.
My pulse is low, dangerously low. I hear words thrown out, like the doctors are creating a casserole of these terms, hoping it will result in something I can stomach.
Orthostatic hypotension.
Malnutrition.
Anorexia nervosa.
These are terms they’re using to describe me, but they might as well be from a textbook. I want to say I was like any other athlete. Athletes, we were always told, had low heart rates. A conditioned heart. Athletes watched what they ate. If you were lighter, you ran faster. I read in a magazine that, if you dropped five pounds, you could shave up to a minute off a 5K time, maybe more.
But even the words I do speak, explaining that I do eat, are cut off by my parents, by the doctors.
“I need to go home,” I say, but no one will listen.
“She’ll have to stay here until she’s medically cleared,” Dr. Braverman says to my mother, as if I’m not in the room. “Let me see if we can get a bed for her. It may be a while—we have a discharge today.”
“How long will I be here?”
It’s the doctor’s next words that, I know, even then, will echo inside of me for years to come.
“We don’t know,” she says.
She turns to leave, leaving me to the hardest fight of my life, a fight that will last longer than the week they place me on bed rest, longer than the years ahead in and out of hospitals.
But I don’t know this yet, and I’m still fighting to return home, to return to that morning before the snow started to fall, before the roads we traveled were covered in the inevitable weight of winter.
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Erin Jamieson’s writing has been published in over eighty literary magazines, and her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut novel, Sky of Ashes Land of Dreams, was published by Type Eighteen Books (Nov. 2023). Twitter: @erin_simmer
