It's all Dr House over here with a clusterfuck of neurologists and dermatologists and possibly allergists and rheumatologists all trying to figure out the Great Hive Seizure Mystery. Great minds don't think alike, at all, and everyone has a different suggestion for what ails Sophie. There will be more tests, and I'm getting just a teensy tinesy bit sick of all of it. Sophie has acquired a urinary tract infection while here which all conceded was hospital-borne. Charming.She is now on an antibiotic for that. She isn't getting any more Vimpat, so I guess at the very least we shall be skipping out of here on only one anticonvulsant in over eight years. That the one anticonvulsant is the benzo Onfi that we rather laboriously weaned her partially is a major bummer, but I'm not going to complain. There's still the hive thing, and the dermatologist who was literally the only physician that's appeared who's older than I am suggested that it was probably coincidence, I sighed and felt that momentary panic that is probably PTSD but has some validity as the real terror that once again, no one knows. Methusaleh had a six-pack of residents and students who were terribly sweet and earnest. One even asked me if I'd read Ann Fadiman's When The Spirit Catches You, and I almost told her that I read it probably before she was born and that despite its reputation for being culturally competent before that PC expression was even invented, I still feel it was biased toward the almighty Western medical system. Instead I told her that it's a beautiful book and smiled. Methusaleh talked about all kinds of things that hives can come from, and, frankly, I started to get a little nervous because it's all so -- well -- tentative and hypothetical. All suggestions are floated to me, sitting like some kind of dowager or dragon queen in a putty-colored fabric chair with a magnificent view of the mountains to my right, out of reach.I'm a dragon queen with a Bachelor of Arts degree in both English and French literature. I'm trying to finish a Norwegian novel called The Birds by Tarjei Vesaas but have felt so distracted the last few days that it's all I can do to ask why the food services department doesn't carry fresh fruit and only canned. My tail is curled up under the chair and a copy of Real Simple lies open on the purple plastic footstool to a recipe of Polenta Bake with Shrimp. But that's only a decoy as I'm actually plotting an aerial escape out the window with Sophie under my arm. Our cave is glinting there, under the setting sun and that long, purple cloud.
