On the desert

The Channeled Scablands in Central Washington, 2019

DKRKaynor / Wikipedia

I've recently moved to the desert. Actually, the place I live is broadly called the Scablands. It’s a landscape shaped by ancient catastrophic floods that left behind stark basalt formations, dry coulees, and wide-open sky. It's beautiful in a way that requires you to look. Not everyone sees it.

I chose this place. I love the sunrises and the sunsets here, the way the light changes the land morning, noon, and night. But I've come to realize that "desert" describes more than geography.

There's the medical desert - living across the mountains from specialists, with limited options for care. When you're a complex patient in a rural area, you take what's available and hope for the best. And sometimes you must fight for basic care and respect.

There's the diagnostic desert - years of wandering without answers, without a name for what's happening in your body. Decades of being told to lose weight, that it's probably anxiety, that nothing is really wrong. That it’s my hormones. The aridity of knowing something is off while everyone with credentials insists you're fine or you’re imagining the challenges you face living in your own body.

There's the emotional desert - the isolation of chronic illness, even when you're technically not alone. Friends who drift away. Support systems that don't materialize. The particular loneliness of being sick in ways that don't show up on standard tests.

And there's the institutional desert, the systems that should help but don't. The complaints that go nowhere. The doors that close. The authorities who are as dismissive of the law as doctors are of your symptoms.

Desert is also a verb. To desert: to abandon. To leave someone without support. I know what it feels like to be deserted by the people and systems that were supposed to help.

And then there's the old phrase - "just deserts." What you deserve. What's coming to you.

I was treated as though I deserved to suffer because of the way God made my body. I didn't. No one does.

This blog is for those of us wandering in the desert - the medical zebras, the undiagnosed, the dismissed, the ones who've been told it's all in our heads. You're not imagining it. You're not alone.

Even here, we find each other.