My mother brought me soup every day for ten years and it was killing me

Everyone called her a saint. The toxicology report told a different story.

I need to tell you about the Corelle bowls. The ones with the little blue flowers on the rim.

My mother has had those bowls since 1989. She got them from a yard sale in Soddy-Daisy for three dollars. She was very proud of that.

For ten years, she brought me soup in those bowls. Every single day. She drove twenty minutes from her house in Red Bank to my apartment in Chattanooga. She heated the soup on my stove because she said microwaves “kill the vitamins.” She sat in my kitchen and watched me eat.

She watched me eat every bite.

My name is Grace. I am forty-five years old and I have been sick since I was thirty-five. That’s ten years of my life I will never get back. Ten years of feeling like my body was slowly betraying me, which is funny because it turns out my body wasn’t betraying me at all. My mother was.

It started with fatigue. Not tired. Fatigue. The kind where your bones feel like they’re filled with wet cement and getting from the bed to the bathroom takes planning. Then came the nausea. Random, violent, gone by the next day. Then headaches behind my eyes that felt like someone was pressing their thumbs into my skull from the inside.

I saw eleven doctors over ten years. I spent $18,000 out of pocket on tests, specialists, co-pays, and prescriptions that didn’t work because they were treating symptoms that weren’t caused by disease. They tested me for everything. Lupus. MS. Fibromyalgia. Chronic fatigue syndrome. Lyme disease. Heavy metal exposure. Thyroid disorders. Every test came back the same way.

Slightly abnormal. Never diagnostic. Never enough to explain why I felt like I was dying.