The glowing box on my screen said Waiting for host to start meeting.

I adjusted my pillow and tried to unclench my jaw.

It had been a year and a half so far. Eighteen months of my life, boiled down to a single digital waiting room.

This was doctor number twenty-four.

Part of me still held onto a tiny, quiet hope. The other part—the part that had been bruised twenty-three times before—just felt dread.

In my heart, I knew how this went. It was going to be another dead end. Another polite smile, another heavy silence, and another door shut in my face.

Please, I prayed in the quiet of my room. Just give me an answer. Just give me some relief.

The screen flickered, and my heart started pounding when a face filled the box. He was a middle-aged man with short, neat hair and a pleasant, professional expression. He looked warm and approachable, and that little bit of hope grew.

“Hello,” he said. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” I said. “I can hear you.”

He didn’t waste much time with small talk. After quick introductions, he asked why I had requested the appointment.

The question caught me off guard. I had been referred to him directly by another provider. My medical records were right there on his desk. I didn’t understand why I had to explain why I was sitting in his virtual exam room.

Still, I took a breath and opened the floodgates.

For the next few minutes, I word-vomited eighteen months of relentless, debilitating suffering. I poured my heart out, laying bare every terrifying glitch my body had experienced, desperate for him to see the whole picture.

When I finally ran out of breath, he looked down at a folder on his desk and began reading off a checklist.

“Are you having trouble swallowing?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Pain when you swallow?”

“No.”

“A hoarse voice? Any pain when turning your head side to side?”

“No,” I said again. “None of those.”

He stopped and looked directly into the camera.

“Well,” he said, tapping a pen on his desk. “Based on your answers, you don’t really have the symptoms for surgical intervention. To make a real determination, you’d have to come into the office for an in-person examination.”

My chest tightened.

I sat there on my bed, surrounded by the soft blankets that served as my daily world. I was disabled. I had been sick for so long that I barely left my house or drove around the block anymore. My car felt like a yard decoration where it sat undriven in the driveway.

Getting this Zoom call had taken weeks of phone calls and a formal disability accommodation request. The tertiary center where he worked was four hours across the state, and driving there was an impossible task.

And for what? To be physically examined for symptoms I didn’t even have?

I took a slow breath and leaned closer to the phone.

“What about the vascular variant?” I asked softly. “What about my jugular veins? My imaging showed there was compression…that there could be a real problem there.”

The doctor shrugged a little, his posture relaxed.

“Well,” he said casually, “people don’t really need their jugular veins, anyway.”

My whole body froze.

What?

I stared at his face on the screen, paralyzed by the sheer absurdity of the sentence.

“I’ve performed bilateral jugular ligations before,” he continued, as if discussing a simple cleaning at a dentist’s office. “Patients survive just fine without them.”

My brain stuttered. Just fine? Without the main blood vessels draining the head?

I thought of the pages of medical research papers sitting in my saved folder on my phone and the studies I had spent endless, exhausted nights reading. Every single paper disagreed with what he had just said.

A heavy realization settled over me. If he didn’t even believe jugular veins were important, he was never going to help me.

“So,” he said, wrapping his hands together, “if you want to be evaluated for surgery, you’ll need to schedule an appointment and travel up here for a physical exam. We need to see if you qualify for the non-vascular variant.”

“Okay,” I whispered. “Thank you.”

We said our goodbyes, and the screen went black. The call was over.

I sat alone in the quiet room, and my eyes burned with tears that were too tired to fall.

Another door shut. Another dead end with no answers.

I rested my forehead in my hands and let out a shaky breath. I had no idea where to go from here.

So, I suppose the only thing left to do is go back. Back to before the waiting rooms, before the twenty-four doctors, before my body became a puzzle no one wanted to solve.

Let me take you back to the beginning.