Читать книгу Eyes Wide Open: How to Make Smart Decisions in a Confusing World - Noreena Hertz - Страница 40

I am sick, really sick. I look in the mirror and see hollow cheeks, eyes ringed with tiredness. I am weak. Walking to the end of my street feels like a huge effort. My weight has plummeted by thirty pounds in just three months. In swift succession I have transformed from slim, to thin, to very thin, to looking ill. On doctor’s orders I stuff my face with cream cakes, chips and plates of buttered bread. Yet my BMI remains dangerously low; I gain no weight. If anything, I am getting ever thinner.

I’ve done the round of doctors. From London’s Harley Street to New York’s Mount Sinai, from Chicago’s Mercy to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. I’ve been prodded and pinched, have put on and taken off paper knickers and back-tying hospital gowns more times than I’d care to remember. I’ve been ultrasounded, X-rayed, MRI’d and CT’d with contrast and without. My blood has been drawn so often we’re now looking for veins in my feet. I’ve swallowed a camera in a capsule, seen my guts in slo-mo and had tubes down my throat. I’ve been tilted and shocked, my hands have been heated and then plunged into ice. I’ve been pitched a variety of treatment plans.

Surgeons suggest a range of procedures, from exploratory fact-finding missions to the immediate removal of my (perfectly healthy, and I feel irrelevant to my symptoms) gall bladder this very week. The Professor of Nutrition (so revered he has a three-month waiting list) suggests I eat mainly sugar. The world-renowned gastroenterologist tells me of his personal success with Prozac, and recommends very strongly that I try that. At the impressive Mayo I have two weeks of tests and examinations, yet they suggest I come back and be tested more.

But I don’t want to live off sugar, am keen to pass on Prozac – my mental state is fine, while the famous doc seemed pretty loopy – and I would rather not succumb to more investigations. As for surgery – not that appealing, especially as I’m feeling so very weak. And what are they actually looking for? I’m not up for having body parts removed on a whim. And even if surgery is the right decision, which operation? And which surgeon?

What to do? Who to put my trust in? Which expert to pick? What to decide?