For years, I showed up. I kept every appointment, filled every prescription, and adjusted every dosage exactly the way I was told to. I wasn’t the difficult patient in anyone’s notes — I was the cooperative one, the one who did the homework. For a long time, I assumed cooperation itself was the path back to normal.
It took a while to notice something uncomfortable sitting underneath all of that effort: I was busy, I was compliant, and I still wasn’t arriving anywhere. There was always another test to run, another medication to try, another follow-up to schedule. Progress kept getting redefined as “still in process.”
This isn’t an argument against medicine. Plenty of people working inside that system genuinely want to help, and some of what I’ve been given along the way has mattered. But somewhere in the middle of doing everything right, I started asking a harder question — not about any single doctor or decision, but about the pattern the whole experience kept producing.
The Pattern Underneath “Doing Everything Right”
Being a “good patient” sounds like it should lead somewhere. You follow instructions, you don’t skip visits, you report your symptoms accurately instead of minimizing them. Somewhere along the way I absorbed the idea that if I just did my part well enough, resolution would eventually show up — not perfect health necessarily, but some kind of stable, settled place to land.
What actually showed up instead was momentum. Something would shift enough to feel like progress, and then a related problem would surface, or the original one would return wearing a slightly different face, and there would be a new recommendation waiting. I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make this sound like a conspiracy, and it isn’t one. Nobody sat across from me and planned to keep me circling. What I noticed instead was structural: a system built around the next intervention is very good at producing next interventions. Resolution was never really the deliverable.
What Gets Measured Isn’t Always What Gets Lived
Somewhere in those years I learned to read a lab report the way I once read a report card — scanning for the number that would tell me whether I’d done well. And often enough, the numbers looked fine. Levels within range. Nothing acute. On paper, a reasonable person reviewing my chart might have concluded that things were basically under control.
A normal-looking lab result doesn’t capture the fatigue that reorganizes an entire day, or the quiet vigilance it takes to manage a body that doesn’t always behave the way it’s supposed to.
That paper version of me and the actual version of me weren’t always describing the same life. This gap — between what gets measured and what actually gets lived — isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault. Metrics exist because they’re useful, and some of them genuinely are. But when a measurement becomes the whole conversation, the person attached to it can start to disappear from view, including in their own assessment of how they’re doing.
A Different Question Worth Asking
For a long time, the only question I knew how to ask was “what should I try next.” It’s a reasonable question, and it kept generating reasonable-sounding answers. What it didn’t do was help me evaluate whether the overall approach I was inside of was actually built to get me where I wanted to go.
The more useful question, when I finally got around to asking it, was different: is the structure I’m currently operating inside of capable of producing the outcome I actually need? That’s not a question about any particular treatment. It’s a question about architecture — about whether the system, the routine, the relationship with care I’d built, was designed with an endpoint in mind at all, or just with the next visit.
Scripture has a lot to say about seeking real wisdom rather than settling for the first available answer. As James 1:5 puts it (NASB 1995): “But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him.” I’ve come to think that applies as much to how we evaluate the systems we’re inside of as it does to any single decision within them.
Where This Leaves You
None of this means walking away from your doctors or deciding cooperation was a mistake. What changed for me wasn’t the willingness to work with a system — it was the willingness to periodically step back and ask whether the system I was working with was actually structured to resolve what I brought to it, or just to manage it indefinitely. Sometimes the honest answer is that it’s the right approach and I need to stay the course. Sometimes it isn’t, and that’s worth knowing sooner rather than later.
If you’ve been doing everything right and still can’t locate the resolution you were promised, you’re not imagining the gap, and you’re not failing at compliance. It might just be time to ask a different question than the one you’ve been asking. I’ve written elsewhere about what a non-linear, still-genuinely-healing path can actually look like from the inside — Why Healing Isn’t Linear — And Why That’s Not a Failure — if you want to see where that different question eventually led me.
Read the Full Story
This post touches one chapter. The full argument is in “You Do You.”