Four years. Four years and one month. Four years and two months.

That’s how long I’ve been struggling in pain waiting for an answer. How long the answer took despite it being the original answer I suspected. And how long it will be until this pain is treated in surgery. Four years and two months feels like a long time for answers that don’t feel like an end, but yet another door to yet another limbo.

I expected to cry when I got the answer. I didn’t. I had cried over this being the possibility months before when I contemplated whether or not a wheelchair would be my most common mobility aid and all that means in a world that overlooks and dismisses difference too easily. A world that still looks at ability as value. A world where I had to grieve before I could accept what gave me freedom of movement again.

And yet, I think I’ve cried nearly every day since my surgery consult for so many reasons.

I’ve been blessed by a therapist who has held me like the empty egg I so often feel like. No internal support, just the fragile outside, tenuously held together. She has helped me refill that inside with answers about my body and my mind, strengthening and caring for that little girl that resides inside.

The medical answer, it turns out, mostly feels like a reminder of the fact that my body and my mind don’t see to be able to fit in the space they’ve been given. It took six months to be diagnosed the last time I could feel something in my body that couldn’t be medically measured. This time it took four years. My body and brain are a blessing—I feel deeply and I can tell quickly when something is wrong. But living in this body and with this brain has also brought almost constant trauma, particularly medically. My fragile, empty little egg has been crushed too many times.

I am beyond grateful for the team of medical professionals that seems to be building around me that see my fragility and see my knowledge of myself and listen. But even several answers haven’t been enough to erase thirty-two years of disbelief and dismissal.

And, so, when I should be celebrating—and genuinely desire to rejoice and celebrate—a big answer and a big step in potential recovery, I sit in grief and fear. Grief that yet again my body was trustworthy and not found to be so by the professional who I went to for help. Fear that this answer isn’t really the end. Too many answers have come before and have only been followed by new pains or issues.

When we consider medical diagnoses, too often we seem to regard them as an end. But to so many of us with persistent medical concerns, those answers are just one in a long line of answers we hope for and those outcomes are just a sporadic few in a long line of what we must maintain to keep our bodies going.

This isn’t an admonishment of either feeling—desire to celebrate or grief of what has been or what is. Instead, I hope this is a pillow for your fragile, empty egg. That you may hold the tension of the many, often warring emotions that may be held inside your shell—feeling like both the only thing keeping it from cracking apart and the threat that will cause it to crumble.

Although I’m but one person, may you be held by this other who feels all of the emotions that come with half a calendar filled with medical appointments and a half a calendar that can’t be filled. May you feel seen by this other who’s body and mind seem to betray and care for them. May you be able to sit, even virtually, with this other and feel known.

Even in this broken, fragile, constantly having to be put back together state, I pray—not loudly and boldly, but quietly, sobbing—God, may you heal me, but even if You don’t, I will still praise you. (Dan. 3:18) Because even in the immense amount of physical and emotional pain many of these things have brought me, He has always gently held my fragile-self, even when I had no strength to hold myself. He has been the soft pillow for my empty egg, from the very beginning. And because of that, I can hold on to the hope for joy while allowing the flow of the tears of grief that stem from the same answer.