My first encounter with medical specialists came once I hit puberty. I developed a problem that couldn’t be ignored: I had acne. Unlike headaches, which were in my head, hard to describe, misunderstood by others, and easily dismissed, my acne was on my face and needed no explanation. I had deep, cystic zits that I could feel on the bones of my jaw and forehead weeks before they made their way to the surface to annihilate my self-esteem. When I would feel one coming on, I was consumed with dread, knowing I’d have to spend the next three weeks trying to manage, hide, and emotionally abuse the zit into submission. Once the pimple became red and bulbous, I could not for the life of me keep my hands off it, so I’d pop it, and by pop it, I mean dig into the swollen area with my grubby press-on nails well before it was ready, sometimes cutting into the skin and of course making it much worse than it ever would have been. I’d then make that even worse by caking drugstore concealer into it, filling the hole I left with overpriced chemicals, alcohol, and oil the way most people would put caulk into a wall.
Sometimes I had to sleep as if I were in a casket, looking straight up at the ceiling, because putting my face on a pillow was too painful. At around fourteen I discovered the Molotov cocktail of skin creams, Retin-A. It’s a topical ointment that dries your skin out with alarming speed and intensity. Seriously, I think it’s much better suited to remove graffiti from buildings or poison your enemies than to be applied to human skin. To save my life I couldn’t comprehend moderation, so I would obsessively apply it throughout the day, even though the prescription said to use it only twice a day and the number to call poison control was on the side of the box. I was so obsessed that I’d set my alarm to wake myself up in the middle of the night to apply it. Of course this insane behavior just made it look like a blind person had repeatedly put cigarettes out on my chin, but that didn’t stop me. Covering these with makeup was trickier because my skin was flaking off, so I had to develop a system: First I’d put beige lip gloss all over the charred spot as a way to sort of fill in the dried crevices, then put foundation on top of that, then concealer, then powder, then bronzer. By the end of it, I looked like exactly an Entenmann’s crumb cake.
The pain of bad skin managed to eclipse the pain of my headaches, so I begged my mom to take me to the dermatologist. There were about five other medical specialists I should have gone to first—a psychiatrist, a psychologist, an orthopedist, a dentist—but according to my insecure brain, those problems mattered way less than my skin. It would be another ten years before I saw a doctor for an idiopathic pain in my right foot that had bothered me ever since I was eight. Every three weeks or so, I’d feel a spastic sharp stab in the arch of my foot, so much so that I’d frantically scrunch my shoulders and punch outward around me like the drunkest person at every wedding. It’s so bad that I’ve actually hit a couple boyfriends who were in bed with me when it happened during the night, but given the type of lad I dated back then, they were probably into it. When I was twenty-four I finally went to a podiatrist, who told me I needed insoles because of my high arches. He put my foot in a box of watery clay until it dried into the molds. He told me to come pick them up in two weeks, but when I came back to the office to get them, they sprung it on me that the orthotics would be eight hundred bucks, so naturally I pretended I left my wallet in my car, left the office, and never returned. This also happens to be the least weird thing I’ve done to save eight hundred dollars.
About seven years later, I was in a writers’ room one day and was attacked by one of my foot spasms.
“FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK!” I screamed while falling to my knees and slamming my hand on the table. Five seconds later, the pain passed and I was back to pitching jokes. The people in the room were aghast.
“Okay, what page were we on?”
When a writer asked me what just happened, I said nonchalantly, “Oh, that’s just my foot thing. You know how, like, three times a week one of your feet feels like someone is stabbing a knife into it?”
They looked at me as if I was as crazy as I actually was. I either actually thought or had convinced myself that everyone just felt a shocking amount of pain in their feet like that every now and then. The horror on their faces inspired me to get my foot X-rayed just to prove them wrong, to show them that my foot was normal. Plus, I had health insurance now, so it was time to party.
Halfway through my time in the podiatrist’s office, I realized I was at the same doctor I had run out on seven years earlier when I heard the bill would be eight hundred dollars. I could tell he was trying to figure out how he knew me, so I immediately dropped into a bad southern accent, hoping it would throw him off the trail. I promise this was not conscious; it was like some automatic act of self-preservation over which I swear I had no control. I could tell he was onto my ruse, but he was too mortified for both of us to call me out. I felt like at that point, the only thing weirder than pretending to have a southern accent would be to stop pretending to have a southern accent.
I stood on the X-ray machine, trying to put pressure on my foot so it would flatten out and look normal on the scan. I don’t even know if that’s a thing, but this was the same logic I used to try and be heavier at the eating disorder specialist: magical thinking. When the doctor came in after the X-ray, he looked at me with a mix of shock and respect.
“You have an extra bone in your foot,” he said. “Haven’t you been in pain?”
Of course I had been in pain, but my migraines started so young that I had to kind of pick which pain I was going to give my attention to. As a woman, I always have a variety of pains to manage, so I often find myself prioritizing the most debilitating ones. Between migraines, cramps, my dumb knee, my hunger pangs, tooth pain from having braces, UTIs, and blisters from shoes designed by sadistic men, I had sort of gone deaf concerning which pain to listen to.