I went from doctor to doctor looking for answers, but overnight I had gone from being a trusted rabbi and chaplain (who works with seriously ill and dying people on hospital medical teams) to a “hysterical” chronically ill person. Though I had seen it happen to my clients, I now understood firsthand that being disbelieved is nearly universal for people with chronic illnesses, especially those that are largely invisible or hard to diagnose or both. I had believed that as a health care professional, equipped with skills and advocates to navigate the system, I would be treated differently. I soon learned how hubristic that was.
Eventually, because of the tireless advocacy of my wife, I was diagnosed with central nervous system lupus (an autoimmune disease that attacks the brain and central nervous system), as well as fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and complex migraines. My lupus diagnosis would later be taken away and then given back countless times as suited the needs of health insurance and disability insurance companies to sort and manage me and decide how much care I was entitled to. The needs of my body were virtually irrelevant in this process as my diagnosis become a monetized affair where I had to jump through increasingly difficult hoops to “prove” it.
