We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

by Samantha Irby

Twenty minutes later I was in a real room with a bed, my sister Jane, who’d met us in the waiting room, next to me yammering into her phone. The doctor pulled back the curtain and gave me one of those condescending sad smiles. The kind you give a child who says 2 + 2 = 7 and believes it. Apparently, I hadn’t had a heart attack. No, instead of “life-threatening cardiac event” the reading on the EKG came out “not right emotionally.” Not kidding, all those lines and squiggles on that mile-long piece of tape spelled out the words “MENTALLY ILL” like an electric Ouija board. Did you know that a panic attack can feel just like a heart attack? I didn’t, but I learned that shit quick as the phlebotomist jammed an IV into my arm and the doctor loaded a big dose of Ativan into my veins and knit his eyebrows together with concern while batting around words like “therapy” and “anxiety.”