She hadn’t requested a list of symptoms. Your experience of your condition as a whole—that’s what she wanted to know. It was as if, in a single stroke, she were undoing the very premise of all the treatments that had come before, the idea that the suffering could be anatomized and its components addressed. Her question bypassed all the particulars—the chronic pain, the mental tension, the exhaustion—in search of something else, of the person beneath all that, the one who endured the affliction.
