Communion

I am not an intimidating person, but I found my last patient of the day huddled in the corner of the examining room, as if awaiting an executioner. She was in her midtwenties, and she clutched a sheaf of medical records against her chest like a shield. She had made the appointment to our clinic herself. The face sheet on her chart said “chronic abdominal pain.”

I introduced myself, sat down, and began to take her history. She had had severe abdominal pain since her mid-teens, but her description of the pain was so vague that no specific diagnosis sprang to mind. And her records disclosed that other physicians had fared no better: She had been seen at every major gastroenterology clinic in town, had gone through all the tests, and had tried all the medicines. What, I asked myself, kept her trudging from doctor to doctor on this medical odyssey? And what could I possibly do for her?

As I questioned her, I studied her with growing fascination. She was anxious and withdrawn, but nonetheless she projected a desperate courage, like a cornered animal making a defiant last stand. She kept her gaze directed downward, but every now and then I caught her staring at me intensely, as if searching for something. She wore a drab, bulky sweater and oversized bluejeans, and her unkempt hair fell over her eyes. It struck me that she deliberately had done everything possible to obscure the fact that she was a very attractive young woman.

She seemed so uncomfortable talking about herself that I moved on to inquire about her family history. Her parents had emigrated from Italy. Her mother had died when she was a young girl, and although she was not the oldest child, it had fallen to her to play …