Level Up

Emilee Herringshaw

352. Is it thirteen days short of a calendar year? The reading on my blood sugar? The number of days until the anniversary of the diagnosis of my diabetes?

18 years, and counting. October 14th. Time paused as the fruity vapor leaving my dehydrated mouth uttered the clue that I was in for it. For the long run. The war comprised of a series of battles. Each of which are fought with knowledge, experience, rationale and then some medicine.

Three. The number of members in my immediate family that have been wrapped in the amalgam of numbers that are supposed to attribute meaning to the state of my health. Two parents. One brother. And yet, the numbers don’t make much sense. At least, not when the continuum of measurement is subject to fluctuations, unanticipated swings and inevitable dissatisfaction.

Part of it is the insufficiency factor, the always less than complete. Chronic illness means that the body is functioning at compromised capacity, less than 100%. So does 85% become the normal? The standard? Me optimized? My best being good, good enough, I guess.

But when it comes down to it, the number is one. Myself. The matrix that I live in isn’t comprised of a neat array of numbers. Order is fleeting. Isolating. Disconnecting. Most days, I can make sense of the fragments. I find how to hook it all together. Then other days, the lapses surface and dominate. Glucose readings wander, thoughts run. And the number one looks so small, especially next to 352.

Emilee Herringshaw is a first-year medical student at UMMS. She co-founded The Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College with the intention to develop a platform to interrogate issues of health, illness, bioethics and caregiving through multiple genres. She enjoys narrative medicine as a means to explore the patient voice, as well as the representation of the complexities embedded in the health care setting.