I was sitting in a waiting room, again. Sometimes I had the feeling that my life was a chain of waiting moments. For the umpteenth time I read the symptoms of diseases that were listed on posters. When you stared at those posters out of necessity for fifteen minutes, you started putting your own complaints into perspective – or you began believing that you had, in fact, all those diseases. I paged listlessly through the stack of old, dog-eared magazines. The latest summer hairstyles. Losing weight after the holidays. In love with my ex.
My gaze wandered towards the man sitting straight across from me. He was a tall, slender man, but he was not so tall or slender to make him stand out. His black hair was neatly combed back and his face was not unattractive, but certainly not strikingly handsome. In fact, there was nothing remarkable about this man. And yet he stood out to me. He stood out so much, that my gaze kept wandering back to him. He didn’t notice – or did he pretend not to?
‘Miss Green.’ The head of doctor Peeters appeared in the doorway. I stood up without thinking and shook his hand, even though I always considered it strange to shake my doctor’s hand. It seemed as though we sealed a pact with it, a secret deal that implied I agreed with everything he said.
‘What can I help you with, Carine?’
I stared at the pictures on the cabinet behind him. An intimate hug with his wife, the Eiffel tower in the background. A picture of his children together with Mickey Mouse. Underneath that costume there probably was an underpaid working student with stubborn acne, wearing a Metallica T-shirt. Doctor Peeters often replaced these pictures. And they were always holiday snapshots. Me, I hadn’t been abroad for years. Traveling wasn’t that much fun if you woke up every morning to the feeling of having been run over by a London double-Decker bus.
‘The question is whether you can help me.’ I laughed. Doctor Peeters didn’t. I was semi-serious. He knew.
‘Do you feel some kind of improvement yet?’
I shook my head. At my previous appointment, one month ago by now, he had prescribed a new medicine. With shaky hands I had handed the prescription to the pharmacist. At home, I placed the small container on the cupboard and looked at it for a long time. ‘A mild antidepressant,’ doctor Peeters had called it. The words echoed through my head. That night, I stared at the ceiling for hours, like I usually did. I didn’t want to take them. And yet I did. Half a pill a day. With a glass of water and the courage of desperation.
I wasn’t depressed. Several specialists had confirmed this. But the pills should be able to help control my symptoms, such as muscle ache and fatigue. Should be able to help. They weren’t even certain. For the umpteenth time, I felt like a laboratory animal.
‘You have to give it some time,’ doctor Peeters said, using the soothing tone I so hated. As if I were a child. Sometimes I wanted to scream. That my physical ailments had no influence on my IQ or the capacity to make my own decisions.
‘I’m so tired of hearing that sentence.’ Much to my annoyance, tears started to form in my eyes. Angrily I wiped them away with the sleeve of my sweater. ‘What if these pills don’t work either? I’ve tried so much already.’
Doctor Peeters pursed his lips. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Your body needs some time to get used to this new medicine. I will give you a prescription for a new dose. Do you need anything else?’
With that question, doctor Peeters invariably ended his consultation. And although it wasn’t an illogical question for a doctor, there was something about his tone that surprised me every time. As though we were sitting in a restaurant and he asked me if I wanted a dessert. I repressed the inclination to reply contemptuously. ‘I still have plenty of painkillers. And they don’t help anyway. They only give me a stomach ache.’
He ignored that last comment, shook my hand and steered me out of his office. The door fell shut behind me. He was rid of me again for a few weeks.
I took a deep breath and exhaled to calm myself. I started when someone lay his hand on my arm. It was the tall man who looked up at me from his chair next to the door. ‘Are you alright?’
It had been so long since someone had asked me that question and now that it happened, I didn’t know what to answer. ‘Yes.’ My eyes filled up with tears again.
The man looked at me with a face that didn’t show any emotion. ‘Doctors don’t have all the answers. And you shouldn’t expect them to.’
‘Then why do I pay him?’
‘Because you hope that he will one day be able to help you.’ He stared at me with an inscrutable look.
‘That makes no sense at all.’
He smiled affably. ‘Man is an irrational being, even though he likes to tell himself otherwise.’
‘Some are more irrational than others.’ It was a somewhat dumb comment.
The man, however, looked at me with a straight face. ‘Let me guess: you’ve been struggling with all kinds of vague complaints such as pain, fatigue, a bad digestion and insomnia. They can’t find a clear reason for these complaints. You’ve been to quite a few doctors, physiotherapists, and tried several different pills, but you still feel just as miserable.
Astonished, I stared at him. He had gray-green eyes. ‘How did you know?’
‘I can help you.’ He handed me a business card. ‘Call me.’
I was too surprised to react. Only when I reached the corner of the street, did I look at the card in my hand. J.P., it said, and a mobile number. That was it.
I wouldn’t call him. Why would I? I didn’t know this man at all. As far as I knew, it was some kind of serial killer. Or maybe he was trying to hit on me. For days I wandered through my house. Occasionally I took hold of the business card. Who in God’s name had a business card with nothing but their initials and a mobile number?
On the third day after my meeting with J.P., a letter arrived from my former employer. They had paid me too much for my vacation bonus and I had to repay the sum that was overpaid as soon as possible. In disbelief I stared at the letters that danced in front of my eyes. How dared they? I had worked in that call center for nearly ten years, and I had constantly answered phone calls of upset customers. Our conversations were recorded and timed. Every month, we were sent an overview of our times. That way, you could see your performance for yourself, but, more importantly, so could your colleagues. That was supposed to increase our urge to prove ourselves. And no matter how frustrated and tense I felt, no matter how badly the customers raged at me, I always kept smiling.
I started getting tired and my neck and shoulders kept hurting. It felt as though my bowels were all tangled up and day after day my stomach hurt. So I swallowed pills. When I forgot my pills, I borrowed them from my colleagues. We all carried half a pharmacy in our purses. I kept smiling.
I went to the doctor, who told me that I suffered from seasonal depression. A few months later, I had the winter blues, and then it was summertime sadness. I went to a physiotherapist. When he wasn’t able to help me, I went to see an osteopath. It helped. A little. For a short while. But the complaints kept coming back. I let them draw blood and underwent tests in two different hospitals. The doctors didn’t find anything. The complaints remained. My employer took over another company, which made the number of customers increase enormously. I kept smiling.
Until, one day, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t work up the patience to deal with rude customers, my colleagues were working on my nerves and I started taking less and less phone calls. I asked my doctor several times to write me a sick note so I could stay home and afterward I felt guilty about it. My team coach asked me what was going on with me. I told him the truth: that I had no clue. A few days later, they fired me.
Now I’ve been sitting at home for half a year. Literally. I barely came outside. I just couldn’t bring myself to it. A new research had shown that I had chronic fatigue syndrome. At first I was relieved. Finally, a diagnosis. I wasn’t mad after all, I wasn’t imagining things. Then it turned out that they didn’t really know how to help me. That it was a vague affliction about which opinions varied greatly, even among different specialists. The doctor prescribed more pills and gave me tips on healthy eating. I had to be more active. The doctor just smiled contemptuously when I told him that being active is not easy when you’re suffering from muscle aches, and when you’re so tired that you can barely lift your arms.
The people around me didn’t understand it either. Things had been going bad in my relationship with my boyfriend, Koen, for months now. One day, he told me that I had to ‘get over it’. That comment resulted in a big fight and a decision that I had been postponing for months. I ended our relationship and was too tired and numb to really grieve. I had less and less contact with a lot of friends. People don’t like hanging out with someone who complains too much and who has no exciting stories about his or her cutthroat, yet oh so interesting job. More and more often I didn’t feel like getting in touch with people and I started pulling back into my own little world. I also hardly ever saw my parents. When I did force myself to visit them, my father regularly said things such as: ‘How come you’re still chronically fatigued? You don’t have a job, do you?’
The specialist who had diagnosed me made it seem as if it were all my own fault. I should have sounded the alarm bell sooner. I had gone past my limits for too long. With tears of anger in my eyes, I told him that I had been running from one doctor to another for years, but that I had never been taken seriously. That they had made me doubt myself, had given me the feeling that it was all ‘in my head’.
I carefully tore the letter of my former employer to tiny pieces, which I just left lying on the table. It was one of those days when I was so tired, that I could barely read, that I kept making slips of the tongue when I tried to talk and kept dropping things. It was eleven o’clock in the morning and I hadn’t even gotten to clearing the breakfast table. My gaze fell upon the business card of J.P. once again and before I knew what I was doing, I was dialing the number on my phone.
Virtually immediately, someone picked up the phone. ‘Good morning.’ His voice sounded neutral. Almost unnaturally neutral.
‘Um... hi. I hope I’m not interrupting. We’ve met this Monday in doctor Peeters’ waiting room. You gave me your business card.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Yes, well, um...’ I felt my cheeks turning red and stared through the window at my small courtyard. The only plant I kept there, badly needed water. ‘You told me that you could help me and that I should call you.’
‘Indeed, that’s what I told you.’
I waited until he was going to say something else, but it remained quiet on the other side of the line. ‘What did you mean by that?’ I finally asked.
‘I will explain. Tomorrow, at three o’clock. In the Antwerp Central Station, at the sitting benches in the middle of the hall with the train tracks, on the ground floor.’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow. See you then.’ He didn’t wait for my answer, but instead ended the call. I stared at the phone in my hand for quite a while.