To be sick in this way is to have the unpleasant feeling that you are impersonating yourself. When you’re sick, the act of living is more act than living.

When we suffer, we want recognition. Where science is silent, narrative creeps in.

To the degree that my quest had an object, that object turned out to be learning to live with uncertainty and incapacity.

Being heard by your doctor isn’t just an emotional need but a physical one: patients benefit clinically from feeling cared for. The emotional and the physical, science is learning, are more intertwined than we once understood. Many studies have suggested that emotional care—interpersonal warmth—has a measurable effect on patients’ outcomes. For

If neurasthenic sensitivity was the hallmark of nineteenth-century invalidism, a kind of hyperpersonalized concern with wellness is the hallmark of twenty-first-century invalidism—a quality that lets the rest of us dismiss the invalid as fussy or oversensitive while we get back to our frenetic, endlessly connected, productive lives.

One of the most important discoveries I made in the process of being ill is that solitary striving, my American habit of self-focus, was in some fundamental way a degradation of the most powerful aspects of our lives, which now seem to me to be our interconnectedness and need of others.

modern medicine’s stigmatization of patients who lack clear-cut test results continues to be a chief shortcoming of the American health care system, which, in its understandable embrace of authoritative answers, struggles to acknowledge what it does not know.

a lived experience that in some ways resists description,

Thinking about disease as a complex individualized consequence of genes and infections and stress and our immune systems means living with uncertainty instead of diagnostic clarity.