Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed

Lori reveals that for years she has been suffering from strange physical symptoms that specialists couldn’t diagnose. Just before she met Boyfriend, the symptoms started with a simple rash that kept spreading, and each new test uncovered something new that was wrong with her, but not sufficiently wrong to diagnose: “Something seemed to be lurking inside me, attacking my body over the next several months while I looked the other way” (426). She calls the experience the Medical Mystery Tour.

One of the specialists concluded she suffered from a conversion disorder (“a person’s anxiety is ‘converted’ into neurologic conditions” (432)). Lori contrasts this with factitious disorder (where patients wish to appear ill, even if they do not feel like it), because both have roots in what in ancient times used to be blamed on a “wandering uterus”—a female condition that caused hysteria (from the Greek word for “uterus”). Cures included aromas and spices, massages and even exorcism. Lori hid her troubles from everybody “because I wanted to avoid being a woman suspected of having a wandering uterus” (438). She also suspected Boyfriend, who once broke up with a woman because she had joint pains, would leave her if he thought he would someday have to take care of her.