Urgent call to health professionals: Help save Patient M.E.

This post was originally published in the Sudbury Star as "A Life-threatening Case of Malignant Narcissism" on Aug. 21, 2021

Back in March of 1979, I was pretty sure I was flunking out of first year medical school. But that wasn’t even my worst fear. In second year, I would have to present patient cases in front of actual doctors, a requirement so daunting I considered dropping out. To my own surprise, I survived it all. And now, forty-two years later, I stand before you to present the tragic case of Patient M.E.

Ms. M.E. is a 4.5 billion-year-old planet of uncertain gender, who conventionally uses the female pronouns she/her due to her notable mothering capacities. She presented to the Emergency Department about 30 years ago, with gradual onset of fever and unstable vital signs. Since then, she’s deteriorated rapidly, and we’re increasingly concerned that her life support systems may fail if effective treatment isn’t started immediately. That’s unfortunately proving difficult, and we believe that help from the world’s health professionals is urgently required.

M.E.’s past medical history has been turbulent. She was born by happenstance, conceived by gravity from the sun’s leftover rocks and dust. Her early life and development were chaotic, egged on by volcanic eruptions and the impact of asteroids and meteors. Through all of this, M.E. proved remarkably resilient. She developed oceans, and within a billion years or so, she gave birth to life. That remarkable event certainly put some oxygen into her atmosphere and began to calm her worst impulses. Eventually her solid surfaces greened and her offspring began to walk and fly. At many points, M.E. must have thought the worst was over. But frankly, nothing in her history has been straightforward.

A full synopsis of M.E.’s lengthy life would take hours, so I’ll limit myself to a few illustrative examples. About 715 million years ago, her CO2 levels dropped, and M.E. suffered a severe biphasic bout of chills and hypothermia. She became entombed in ice, a state of affairs that persisted for much of the ensuing 120 million years. She almost lost her life during that time, but inevitably, life flourished again, only to be felled repeatedly by events we still can’t fully explain. Then, a mere 65 million years ago, M.E. was struck by a giant asteroid. The resulting dust obscured the sun, her main source of energy. It was a particularly dark time for our patient and resulted in the tragic and irrevocable loss of her most impressive offspring to date, the dinosaur.

M.E. eventually recovered from this incident and went on to have countless other children. Some came and went. Others discovered the right balance of competition and collaboration and learned to thrive.

Twelve thousand years ago, M.E. emerged from another lengthy bout of chills, and settled into a period of relative stability. Things seemed to be going well until quite recently, when it became apparent that one of her offspring, an intelligent and nimble two-footed creature, had put aside any pretense of cooperation with its mother and siblings, and was beginning to display traits consistent with a particularly malignant form of narcissism: lack of empathy; a grandiose sense of self-importance; rapid proliferation, invasion and destruction; voracious consumption of M.E.’s energy and resources; and a complete disregard for any consequences. As you can imagine, all of this has been hard on M.E. She’s really stressed, and at the end of her tether.

We’ve done a biopsy of the cancerous creature, and a complete genetic profile. We know what treatments are required, but the creature itself has been neither willing nor compliant. This is puzzling, and seems self-defeating, but there you have it.

At this point, we’re hoping for a concerted effort on the part of the world’s health professionals, whether surgeons or psychiatrists, nurses or therapists, to get this malignant condition under control, and help keep M.E. in a livable state.