Free The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison Page A
Authors: Leslie Jamison
could be proven by its manifestation in others.
One of the strangest corners of the Morgellons online labyrinth—a complicated network of chat boards, personal testimonies, and high-magnification photographs—is the “Pets of Morgellons” website. I realize quickly that it’s neither a joke nor a feel-good photo album. It’s not just “pets of [people who have] Morgellons” but “pets [who also have] Morgellons.” In a typical entry, a cat named Ika introduces herself and her illness:
I have been named [for] the Japanese snack of dried cuttlefish … Typically I am full of chaotic energy, however lately I have been feeling quite lethargic and VERY itchy. My best friend / mommy thinks that she gave me her skin condition, and she is so very SAD. I think she is even more sad that she passed it on to me than the fact that she has it covering her entire face.
The list continues, a litany of sick animals: a sleek white dog named Jazzy sports itchy paws; two bloodhounds are biting invisible fleas; a Lhasa apso joins his mother for stretches in an infrared sauna. One entry is an elegy for an Akita named Sinbad:
It appears that I got the disease at the same time that my beautiful lady owner got it. And after many trips to the vet they had to put me down. I know it was for my own good, but I do miss them a lot. I can still see my master’s face, right up close to mine, when the doc put me to sleep … I could sniff his breath and feel the pain in his eyes as tears rolled down his face. But, it’s ok. I’m alright now. The maddening itching is finally over. I’m finally at peace.
The ending paints resolution over pathos. We read, I’m finally at peace , and imagine another who probably isn’t: the master who cried when he put his dog to sleep. Who knows what happened to Sinbad? Maybe he really did need to get put down; maybe he was old, or sick with something else. Maybe he wasn’t sick at all. But he has become part of an illness narrative—like lesions, or divorces, or the fibers themselves. He is irrefutable proof that suffering has happened, that things have been lost.
The second day of the conference kicks off with a Japanese television documentary about Morgellons. Over there they call it “cotton erupting disease,” suggesting a stage prank—a great poof! —more than the silent sinister curling of microscopic fibers. The program has been loosely translated. We see a woman standing at her kitchen counter, mixing a livestock antiparasitic called Ivermectin into a glass of water. The Japanese voiceover sounds concerned and the English translator fills in: she knows this antiparasitic isn’t for human consumption, but she’s using it anyway. She’s desperate. We see a map of America with patches of known cases breaking out like lesions over the land, a twisted Manifest Destiny: disease claims community, claims the disordered as kin. Just as fibers attach to an open wound—its wet surface a kind of glue—so does the notion of disease function as an adhesive, gathering anything we can’t understand, anything that hurts, anything that will stick. Transmission by Internet , some skeptics claim about Morgellons—chat boards as pied pipers, calling all comers. It’s true that Morgellons wasn’t officially born until 2001. It’s grown up alongside the Internet. Its online community has become an authority in its own right. People here don’t necessarily agree about the particulars of their shared disease—bacteria, fungus, parasite—but they agree about a feeling of inescapability: wherever you go, the disease follows; whatever you do, it resists.
A woman named Sandra pulls out her cell phone to show me a photo of something she coughed up. It looks like a little albino shrimp. She thinks it’s a larva. She photographed it through a jeweler’s loupe. She wants a microscope but doesn’t have one yet. She put the larva on a book to give a sense of scale. I try to get a good look at the print; I’m
One of the strangest corners of the Morgellons online labyrinth—a complicated network of chat boards, personal testimonies, and high-magnification photographs—is the “Pets of Morgellons” website. I realize quickly that it’s neither a joke nor a feel-good photo album. It’s not just “pets of [people who have] Morgellons” but “pets [who also have] Morgellons.” In a typical entry, a cat named Ika introduces herself and her illness:
I have been named [for] the Japanese snack of dried cuttlefish … Typically I am full of chaotic energy, however lately I have been feeling quite lethargic and VERY itchy. My best friend / mommy thinks that she gave me her skin condition, and she is so very SAD. I think she is even more sad that she passed it on to me than the fact that she has it covering her entire face.
The list continues, a litany of sick animals: a sleek white dog named Jazzy sports itchy paws; two bloodhounds are biting invisible fleas; a Lhasa apso joins his mother for stretches in an infrared sauna. One entry is an elegy for an Akita named Sinbad:
It appears that I got the disease at the same time that my beautiful lady owner got it. And after many trips to the vet they had to put me down. I know it was for my own good, but I do miss them a lot. I can still see my master’s face, right up close to mine, when the doc put me to sleep … I could sniff his breath and feel the pain in his eyes as tears rolled down his face. But, it’s ok. I’m alright now. The maddening itching is finally over. I’m finally at peace.
The ending paints resolution over pathos. We read, I’m finally at peace , and imagine another who probably isn’t: the master who cried when he put his dog to sleep. Who knows what happened to Sinbad? Maybe he really did need to get put down; maybe he was old, or sick with something else. Maybe he wasn’t sick at all. But he has become part of an illness narrative—like lesions, or divorces, or the fibers themselves. He is irrefutable proof that suffering has happened, that things have been lost.
The second day of the conference kicks off with a Japanese television documentary about Morgellons. Over there they call it “cotton erupting disease,” suggesting a stage prank—a great poof! —more than the silent sinister curling of microscopic fibers. The program has been loosely translated. We see a woman standing at her kitchen counter, mixing a livestock antiparasitic called Ivermectin into a glass of water. The Japanese voiceover sounds concerned and the English translator fills in: she knows this antiparasitic isn’t for human consumption, but she’s using it anyway. She’s desperate. We see a map of America with patches of known cases breaking out like lesions over the land, a twisted Manifest Destiny: disease claims community, claims the disordered as kin. Just as fibers attach to an open wound—its wet surface a kind of glue—so does the notion of disease function as an adhesive, gathering anything we can’t understand, anything that hurts, anything that will stick. Transmission by Internet , some skeptics claim about Morgellons—chat boards as pied pipers, calling all comers. It’s true that Morgellons wasn’t officially born until 2001. It’s grown up alongside the Internet. Its online community has become an authority in its own right. People here don’t necessarily agree about the particulars of their shared disease—bacteria, fungus, parasite—but they agree about a feeling of inescapability: wherever you go, the disease follows; whatever you do, it resists.
A woman named Sandra pulls out her cell phone to show me a photo of something she coughed up. It looks like a little albino shrimp. She thinks it’s a larva. She photographed it through a jeweler’s loupe. She wants a microscope but doesn’t have one yet. She put the larva on a book to give a sense of scale. I try to get a good look at the print; I’m