Your laughter, reverberating through the stream we float in, stops all at once. We pause. The moment you hear that passive-aggressive, gut-tightening remark your sister makes on the phone, we hear a message. A danger-signal from your brain. Within a nanosecond, we are alert, guarded, equipped. We multiply into a huge army, ready for action. Not for nothing, we’re called your first line of defense. We charge with one goal. To protect you.
When you get the diagnosis at the doctor’s office, you’re relieved, not shocked. You finally have a name for what you’ve been calling your “weird, debilitating symptoms.” We know there’s nothing weird about it, though. Your rheumatologist names a not-so-common autoimmune disease and starts to explain, “Your immune cells—” We beam. That’s us, we say to one another. Then, you try to describe your invisible, disabling symptoms to people you know. They look at you as though you’re making this up because you look normal. They don’t get it. No one does. That leaves you unheard. Alone. Obviously, we arm ourselves for the war within. The antibody-producing B-cells you read about? They’re our cousins, swimming along with us. They now echo danger-danger-danger. We join forces with the same mission, no longer important if we are B- or T-cells. Every time something triggers you, your neurons relay a message. And we act. But of course, to protect you.
Three hours into the workday, when you head home, you run into a coworker in the hallway. To his questioning look, you say the pain is so bad you can’t focus; your energy is so low you can’t sit up. He throws a half-teasing, half-serious comment at you. “Hey, you look good!” Yet another person labels you a hypochondriac. Your shoulders tighten. You don’t feel it. We do. Any out-of-place remark threatens you. Just like that. Fear-danger, sad-danger, pain-danger, worry-danger, your brain transmits all these messages to us, and we attack all invaders, everything that looks threatening in your body: tissues, cells, joints, organs. Ever-so-vigilant of any and all danger, you’re alert. Like us. We become one, you and us, fighting, fighting, fighting. Fighting the world outside and in. Your reasons for fighting might be real or perceived. Ours is clear-cut. To protect you.
At home, you eat leftovers for lunch. Part of it enters the stream. That thing you read about leaky gut and were grossed out? It’s okay if you didn’t quite get it. All you need to know is sometimes what you eat permeates into our territory. We don’t want what doesn’t belong here. You complain that, no matter what you eat, your gastrointestinal system starts acting up. It’s not everything that we attack. It’s some of it, like eggplants, bell peppers; they look shady. Nightshade plants, what a fitting name! Anyway, we don’t like them. You know this by now: anything that looks foreign, we attack. To protect you.
You toss and turn in bed, unable to sleep. We sense your struggle and continue our job with more zeal. Pain, inflammation, malaise, fatigue, sleeplessness. You group these in different combinations and call them vicious cycles. We try to tell you it’s only a chain reaction. You react, we act. You get stressed, we attack. Even on a rare night when you fall asleep, pain wakes you up. Your neurons bring us signals while you fidget in bed. We pick up our weapons. Attack, fight, attack. We go on and on. To protect you.
The next day, you’re even more wired and tired. Fatigue and brain fog and pain, everything skyrockets. You can neither deal with people, nor with regular chores. That leave-me-alone feeling happens on a cellular level, see? Your mitochondria choreograph all this. Now you’re eager to learn everything about mitochondria. Don’t worry about understanding it all. Suffice it to know that mitochondria (yes, the powerhouse of your cells) produce energy and, when needed, act as immune commander. Too much information? Well, you want to get to the root cause and know what’s happening to your body, right? So let’s try to simplify using a term you’re familiar with. Your mitochondria push you into that fight-or-flight mode to protect you from immediate danger. But when you’re in that danger-mode for too long (like the sustained long-term Trauma you went through—yes, Trauma with a big T), it leads to dysregulation of your nervous system. Then, mitochondria get overwhelmed and shut down. Add fibromyalgia to the myriads of diagnoses you’re given. You’re drained, left with no energy. Depleted. But know that we’re here. To protect you.
“Your system is dysfunctional,” a functional medicine doctor says. “You need to move on,” your sister says yet again, referring to your past trauma. Oh that push-button comment! It puts you in the hypervigilant state, once again. You know you’ve moved on in all practical ways, yet your body doesn’t heal. It happens. So we keep the battle ongoing. It might sound contradictory, but our goal is the same, yours and ours. We want peace. Normalcy. For that, we need to protect you.
You don’t give up, ever. We like that about you. Yet there are times you don’t know what to do. “I just want to feel well.” Your disheartened whisper saddens us. You feel like throwing your hands up, but you don’t. You won’t. You’re a fighter. Like us. But you don’t understand us. And we don’t understand why you don’t understand us. So now the fight becomes between you and us. Or so it seems. We’re not fighting you, though. When you realize this, when you let us be, we’ll calm down and go about floating peacefully inside you once again. The doctors and your sisters and your friends and coworkers, no one can say anything that would trigger danger signals. If only you could allow that, then it’d be so easy for us. To protect you.
You stir the vegetable soup, singing along with iTunes. We wish you’d do this more often. We love music, nature. It lets us be. Which is to say, you let us be. But you barely have time for such activities. You’re always on the go, constantly keeping us vigilant. How you tire us out! Yet we love what we do. Because all we want is to protect you.
You learn new techniques to manage pain. When you take deep breaths or tap on your meridian points, you calm your amygdala. You get out of your fight-flight-freeze mode. And we’re relaxed. But this state doesn’t always last. The moment you start worrying again, we multiply, your friendly soldiers that we are. Yet they call us “killer T-cells” or “attack cells.” Isn’t that crazy? We have to step up when regulator T-cells stop doing their job; like a broken cartridge in a faucet, they fail to function. The helper T-cells, like the force of the main water supply, continue to push us out and keep us running, running, running. The B-cells produce more antibodies, causing more inflammation. We’re now engaged in an unending cell-to-cell combat. And you are stuck in that hypervigilant mode. Naturally, as your sympathetic nervous system is activated, more adrenaline and cortisol flood through your body. We have no choice but to perform our soldier-like duty. It’s the only way to protect you.
Self-care becomes your next obsessive to-do task, Type A that you are. Lacking treatment options, your providers have given you a life sentence: Live with it. That’s not the answer you want. You turn to holistic healing. “Surrender,” they say on webinars, podcasts. You, a perfectionist, translate it to “give up.” You’re not giving up or giving in. You didn’t do that even when you were stuck in that Trauma. No, dear lady, you’re not giving in. You’re stopping to fight, is all. Because, really, there’s nothing to fight now. When you stop fighting, we stop attacking. Remember, our job is to protect you.
You’re back in your rheumatologist’s office; you’re more relaxed here than anywhere. This doctor listens to you, although there’s nothing much she can do for you. You’re fine with that as long as you’re not unheard. Unlike some doctors, she understands why you’re averse to medication. We certainly get it. Meds mess with our job, with the work of your brain, and we act. And when some providers imply it’s all in your head, you’re upset. You know your symptoms are real. The inflammation, the pain – now it’s in your nerves, now in your muscles, now your fascia, your bones, joints. You dash from specialist to specialist, because you’re aware they know more than you do. When they can’t find any evidence in most diagnostic procedures, you grumble, The doctors don’t understand. Fact is, science hasn’t fully understood us. Our function confuses some professionals and they say we are confused. That’s funny! Thank goodness, your rheum knows how we work. When she tells you to let go, she’s telling you to let us be. But you don’t get it. You hold on, tight, to whatever you’re holding on to. Your breath, a hurt, some wrongdoing you were subjected to? Trauma, for sure. We don’t forget trauma even if you do. See? That’s a big problem. You forgive easily. Which is good for us as well. Forgiving is easier than forgetting, everyone knows that. You even learn to forget. But we don’t. Your nervous system doesn’t, either. We hold information for years, decades. A lifetime, even. That’s our memory, not yours; the immune memory, which we use only to protect you.
Now, did we get something wrong?
You wait for the doctors and scientists to figure us out. We may not be “figureoutable.” That’s a nice word someone coined; is it in Merriam-Webster yet? Maybe we just need to be friends, you and us. And find that ever-elusive calm so we can flow and swim through the stream in you, and you through the stream of life. Until then, we’ll wait. We’ve been trained to be an ever-vigilant army. Who knows at what moment you’ll need us. To protect you.
Shanti Chandrasekhar’s words have appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Literary Mama, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Her new work is forthcoming in Please See Me and The Sunlight Press. She’s an alumna of Kenyon Review Fiction Writers Workshop, Masters Review Summer Workshop, Iowa State University (Fiction Writing), and continues to attend writing courses. She lives in Maryland.