My Body by Emily Ratajkowski

Author:Emily Ratajkowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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My father always joked about dying early. “I won’t be at your wedding,” he’d say. “Big guys are like big dogs! We don’t live that long.” But over time, as I became twentysomething and my parents hit their sixties, it became apparent that his health was actually stellar. My mother, on the other hand, was beginning to have more and more complicated health problems with each passing year. Her father (“a small dog,” my dad would have said) had lived to 103 and had not had so much as a single cavity over the course of his life. We’d always assumed that my mother’s later years would be much the same as his had been. She was wiry and driven, and her hair was still thick and grew lusciously on her head. At first, her sixties seemed to suit her, as if she’d reached the age she was always meant to be. She looked like a poster child for the Golden Years: she was going to finish the book she’d been trying to write since the Berlin Wall fell in 1991 (my birth year); she was going to start working out and making new (women!) friends.

But instead of long lunches with these friends or afternoons spent writing at her desk, she became increasingly preoccupied with arranging medical tests and meetings with specialists, trying to find ways to manage the pain she had begun to feel in her back and hips. Doctors were quick to diagnose and cut open my mother’s body: she had three hip replacements and neck and back surgery in five years. It seemed every ailment led only to more complications. As her energy faded and her pace slowed, she became steadily more infirm, depressed, and confused.

The first sign of a grave illness appeared in my mother’s hands, which began to go numb in her sleep. I’d always admired her hands; they were the same as her mother’s hands: elegantly shaped and feminine without being dainty. I have a version of them, too. She’d wake up to find them curled into each other and close to her face, arms braided together on her chest. She was folding into herself like a flower in a time-lapse video, collapsing in an unnatural rhythm.

Next came the blisters, bold and dark and hard. They appeared when she used her hands: she’d open a jar and an angry-looking blister would show up on the inside of her thumb. Press a button too hard and a blister would emerge at the tip of her finger, purple and flat.

I’d wake often in the middle of the night, worrying, and turn to the task of attempting to diagnose my mother’s illness. I’d search “blisters on hands” and find myself looking at dire WebMD descriptions and frightening images of old men with deep purple circles around their eyes.

After years of my mother accumulating bizarre symptoms, for which her doctors in San Diego offered contradictory diagnoses, my parents and I resolved to go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, to see if someone could make sense of her condition.

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