Page 45 of My Heart to Find

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Cara

ACCORDING TO THE NHS, I am a hypochondriac. Therefore, I still have to see a psychiatrist regularly.

I haven’t been looking forward to this next appointment with Dr. Fallon. Mum’s here with me, because I know better now than to go to these alone. The ones I’ve attended with Dr. Fallon alone are the ones where he’s bullied me—where I’ve left in tears. And crying in front of him only fuels his certainty that I am just an anxious/depressed/psychotic girl. Never a woman, according to him. Always agirl. And not in the friendly way Jana and River say it.

“This is going to be very distressing to hear,” Dr. Fallon says. He sits in his swivel chair behind his desk and clasps his hands together in a steeple fashion. “And it is a difficult conversation to have. But as I have told you before, all these symptoms you are experiencing in your body are due to anxiety. You are so very traumatized that this is your mind’s way of coping with it, projecting these ill feelings onto your body. Making youthinkyou have got pain.”

Dr. Fallon the Fake. Dr. Fallon the Fraud. Dr. Fallon the Foul.

“But Ihavegot pain.” I grit my teeth. I can’t help myself. I shouldn’t argue with him—but I need him to listen. Sooner or later, the money for the private treatment is going to run out, I know that. And Dr. Singh said it would take years—plural. My goal has always been that by the time my funding for private care is depleted that I’ll somehow have managed to persuade the NHS to continue my treatment. Wishful thinking, I know, given practically no one in my online support group has managed this.

But I have to try. And maybe if I can get them to recognize my case of chronic Lyme, then they’d recognize others’ cases too. More people would get help instead of being left to suffer needlessly. It’s criminal, what they’re currently doing.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the NHS is all bad. It’s great for emergencies, broken legs, that sort of thing. It’s just their line of reasoning when they can’t find the answer is wrong: if they don’t know what it is, they say it doesn’t exist—it being a physical disorder—and tell you it’s anxiety. If it’s an illness that the NICE guidelines don’t cover, they say it doesn’t exist, that it’s just your mind going wrong.

Something needs to change.

And, so, I have to keep up with these appointments. If I skip these psychiatrist sessions, I risk being refused NHS help later.

“Cara, you think you are in pain, but you’re not.”

“I am in pain,” I persevere, and I picture the caricature of him I’m going to draw later—him, wearing cartoon jail clothes, and a top hat, and holding a sign that reads ‘I am a fool.’

It’s silly, but it’s how I cope when people don’t believe me. Before, I used to draw caricatures of everyone, and I’d make them funny and amusing. But now I’ve got a whole collection of these ‘mean caricatures,’ where I’ve drawn everyone who upsets me or tells me I’m wrong or imagining it all. Dr. Fallon features in the pile of them a lot. As do many of the NHS doctors—not all of them though. Some are nice.

“Right now, I have got kidney pain,” I say to Dr. Fallon. I mean, I could reel off a whole bunch other body parts that hurt—my neck is stiff, my lower back is throbbing, my left hip is painful—but I know there’s no point in that.

Dr. Fallon leans back in his chair. a wistful look takes over his eyes. “The kidneys are a funny thing.”

Yes, the kidneys are hilarious.

I give him a blunt look, or what I hope is a blunt look.

“You can feel pain in your kidneys even when your kidneys are fine—as blood tests have shown you.”

“But blood tests have also shown I’ve got Lyme.”

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