Laser Bagel Symphony

and the relief of the diagnosis

I’m sitting on the paper-covered exam table while a nurse spends twenty minutes trying to find my veins. I keep explaining that my arms aren’t the bullseye, it’s the front of my hands. I’ve been doing this long enough to know the drill. She doesn’t listen - which, unfortunately, is a recurring theme in medicine. My delicate little veins have apparently triggered a full existential crisis. At this point, I’m used to it.

I’ve been fainting since I was 7. I’ve had PMOS (formerly PCOS, but now we’re admitting it can fuck with your metabolism) since at least 19. I get chronic vertigo from hypermobility. I have a pineal cyst in my brain I have yet to name, though I’m accepting submissions. And then there’s the rest of the grab bag of ailments that, when I was younger, I and several doctors lovingly filed under: too sensitive.

Which is female patient code for: “SOS y’all, something is definitely wrong.”

The fainting that happens to me as a part of dysautonomia is called Vasovagal Syncope, which my brother once misheard on the phone as Laser Bagel Symphony. Honestly, if I have to periodically lose consciousness, I’m glad at least one diagnosis sounds like an indie folk band I wanted to join in 2010. It is? Absurd. Just about as absurd as having a body that breaks down whenever it wants, so the name stuck.

Having this melange of issues is not exactly shocking: Everyone in my family has some kind of autoimmune disorder or adjacent bodily rebellion. We were each apparently assigned our own special conditions like Captain Planet rings. With our powers combined, we become: A FAMILY WHO KNOWS TOO MANY SPECIALISTS!!

But this week, I started to get diagnoses that have had me in my feelings of some sort. Nobody panic, it’s nothing “new,” it’s just names for things I’ve been experiencing consistently, and at a higher level since moving to New York. It could be environment, it could be stress, it could be aging as I inch closer to the haunted corridor to perimenopause (when the hell does that begin, anyway?).

There’s something people don’t always talk about: the grief inside of relief. There is relief in a diagnosis. And on the amount of heavy crying I’ve done recently, I’d say I’m feeling that pretty deeply.

I have known my body has been off for so long, but questioned constantly if this was all in my head. And this week, for some god-given reason, doctors are believing me. Suddenly, there are names for these things. Suddenly, specialists I can see. Suddenly, friends who can share their stories, woes, their hacks.

Editor’s Note: I’m not sharing any of this for sympathy. Truly. I also really don’t want anyone worrying. In fact, I’m writing a solo show about exactly that impulse. Called Laser Bagel Symphony! I digress.

I don’t want to become a Chronic Illness ambassador. I don’t want to become a mouthpiece for hEDS. I don’t want to accidentally become a gut health influencer. I don’t want my identity to become Dysautonomia Girl. POTS Princess. And I really, really don’t want to start a support group.

I want to act. I want to write movies. I want to buy variegated tulips and go on dates. I want to write smutty romance where my characters get plowed against kitchen counters by devastatingly hot people of all genders and vague mystical significance, and the only reason someone feels faint is because they just spent all their energy fighting for the good of the kingdom.

I want to spend my worrying on the well-being of the planet.

But I made a decision a long time ago that I wanted my work to make people feel less alone. And annoyingly, surprise surprise, sharing this is one way to do that.

Chronic illness can be exhausting, lonely, humiliating, boring, expensive, and profoundly confusing. It is constant mental math. Did I eat enough salt? Did I drink enough water? Why am I dizzy? Is this anxiety? Is this a migraine? Is this histamines? Why are histamines so dramatic?

Some days your body simply stops cooperating. Half the day is normal, and then suddenly, you fold. And save for a face rash that shows up from time to time, you don’t tend to “look” sick.

Midday lie downs, a pastime in this house

The strangest part of being sick is how small it makes your world. What was once a big life becomes apartment, Uber, urgent care, doctor’s office, back to apartment again. What was once New York City becomes bed, couch, bathroom floor.

Your life starts shrinking in invisible ways.

You miss spontaneity. Dance class. A Mexican restaurant with friends. A date you didn’t have to mentally calculate around hydration, dizziness, exits, whether there would be a place to sit if things went sideways.

You start thinking: Will I fall if I go? Will I ever be okay? Can I perform again? Will people still find me funny? Will someone want to build a life with me if sometimes that life includes me unexpectedly horizontal?

I have felt deeply alone in this. Despite loving friends. Loving partners. Loving parents. Right now, unless someone shares some version of these ailments, there are moments where I feel a wide chasm between us. It’s not their fault. A lot of it is my own lack of self-compassion when I cancel last minute because I’m nauseous again, or the vertigo is back. Or [insert Russian roulette of body surprise here].

Our world was not built for people with ailments. But here’s the kicker: so many people are struggling with this. We’re all just walking around trying our best to hold everything together, thinking we’re the only ones in the world who feel like this.

In a surprise to absolutely no one - the moment I talk about chronic illness, people appear. Doctor recommendations. Supplements. Friends who cry with you, scream with you, warn you, comfort you, and remind you that this ride is brutal but crowded. They have saved me over and over.

I don’t have a clean resolution here. I have a notes app full of angry rants after reading things like heal your gut naturally while crying between sips of Liquid IV. I have a phone full of people who love me fiercely. I have a brain full of fear that my dream of being an actor could be limited by my DNA. I have a friend on their way over right now to sit with me while I cry, and walk my dog with me in case I fall. I have so much joy in this life.

I am on the very long journey of befriending a body I spent years resenting for not being thin enough, before I ever understood how hard she was already working to keep me upright.

I hope she’ll take me back, this body. I love her so much. She is the house I grew up in.