My Name is Lucy Rooney

When you get a diagnosis, it's a threat to well-being, to daily life, to the future; on the most profound level, it's a threat to your very identity. After the Diagnosis has a chapter, "My Name is Lucy Rooney," that addresses the ways people hang on to who they are despite the subversions of illness. "Lucy Rooney" was a name invented by a patient of mine, who kept a journal of her adventures through two years of hospitalizations and chemotherapy for a rare life-threatening vasculitis. As Lucy, this patient could resist the dehumanizing aspects of medical care; exercise her insight and sense of humor; express her darkest thoughts and her sunniest fantasies. ("Lucy," by the way, is fine, twenty years later.) Integrating illness into your sense of yourself is sometimes an uphill battle; the illness, and medicine itself, can conspire to reduce you to the thing you have. Hospitals hand you a johnny and slap on a plastic bracelet; doctors will refer to the melanoma in Room 12 or the lupus in Room 30. My own diagnosis, diabetes, comes with its own identity card: I'm a "diabetic." (The only other diseases that I can think of that come with such defining, and stigmatizing, labels are the mental illnesses-people are schizophrenic or bipolar or multiple personality. At least with some illnesses, like cancer or heart disease, you "have" it instead of "are" it.) But whatever your illness, the diagnosis invites you to be that illness-to let it define you completely. Even support groups, which are wonderful places to share stories and gain strength, can unwittingly deepen the hold of an illness identity. People like Lucy, with one foot in the world of medical treatment and an alter ego firmly outside it, or another patient, Tom, who became an expert genealogist of his family tree as a consequence of his genetic disorder, find creative ways to integrate a malady into a larger sense of self. Each person has to find a way to give the illness its due-acknowledge it, deal with it-and also go beyond it to a life that is larger than the disease. I'm a diabetic, yes, but also much more than that: doctor, teacher, scientist; father, husband; fisherman, boater, traveler. I would encourage you to make room for all your selves as you go forward after the diagnosis.