One incredibly long, verge-of-ecstatic pee later, Mom all but forced me to sit back down on the bed before allowing Harrison to fill me in on exactly what I’d missed.
“Before we start, should I introduce myself again?” he asked, without any sort of embarrassment or impatience. To which I flushed, feeling enough for the both of us, and replied, “Probably.”
“Thought as much: Guy Harrison, intern.” He offered me his hand so we could shake, and then turned my wrist over to check my pulse. “All right, that’s better. You were airlifted here from a clinic in Chaste, after an episode at somewhere called the Vinegar House. . . .”
“Yeah, that much I’ve gathered. Any idea why?”
“Well, good news first—we gave you an MRI, and there’s no sign of epilepsy or tumours, plus no ischemic effects, so there’s not likely to be any immediate alterations to your overall health. That said, bad news is, we’re still not sure what caused the seizures, and since we’re talking more than one, that’s worrisome. Blood work hasn’t shown any signs of natural allergens or poisons, though I’m not too happy with the amount of medications you’ve been mixing on the regular.”
“Medications? I mean, Mobicox and Tecta, that’s basically all I’m on—”
“By prescription, yeah. Except you told me yourself you’ve been topping that off with all sorts of over-the-counter pills: Robaxacet, Maxidol, migraine-level ibuprofen. Robaxacet alone you’re not supposed to take more than three caplets per twenty-four hours, and you’ve been taking upwards of six, seven, eight. Add in the others, and that’s quite a tolerance you’re courting.”
“How would you—?”
“Because you told me, Ms. Cairns. ‘Keep going till my lips go numb, that’s the standard.’ Ring any bells?”
Again, the quote did sound like me. I didn’t want to look at Mom, to see her reaction to this little piece of information, so I looked at the floor instead. “Are you saying that had something do with . . . whatever happened to me?”
“There’s no proof of that, no.” Continuing, as I opened my mouth: “But before you speak, there’s no proof to the contrary, either. We have no idea what set your first seizure off, let alone your second; every person’s biochemistry is unique, and mixing medications is generally a bad idea. My recommendation, therefore, is that you try to cut back as much as possible—reduce your doses, scale down. Maybe even stop everything except the prescriptions.”
“I . . . just don’t think that’s going to work, for me. I mean . . .” I exhaled through my nose, thought a moment, then continued. “I have a job, a kid. I need to be functional, for both of them.”
“You can be functional. It might take time to detox, but—”
“Detox? For Christ’s sake, I’m not an addict!”
“Anything you do alone, anything that becomes unmanageable, anything you regularly lie about to others, or yourself . . . that is an addiction, Ms. Cairns, no matter how low level it seems right now. But you don’t have to beat yourself up about it; we all want control. Things like these are your body and your mind fighting each other for control, and developing bad habits along the way.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Mom nod, and felt a wave of unreasonable anger lap up over me: oh yes, of course, classic Twelve-Step jargon. We understood we were powerless against our compulsions, took a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves, turned ourselves over to a higher power as we understood it. Next thing I knew, it’d be meetings and sponsors and what have you, spilling my guts to strangers in church basements full of bad coffee. All of which had worked just fine for her, thankfully—but me? No. The only therapy I’d had thus far had always been on my own terms; if I wanted counselling, I’d damn well pay for it.
“There are lots of programs for chronic pain,” I only then realized Dr. Harrison was saying at the same time—great minds, as ever. But I just shook my head and snorted.
“‘Chronic pain’ sounds a little . . . elevated, frankly,” I told him. “Like describing a bad review as bullying. This isn’t anything I can’t handle, but believe me, if it ever gets to that point, I’ll take it under advisement. Right now, though, I just—”
“‘Don’t have the time,’ yes, a lot of people say that.” Harrison sat down, leaned back in the chair, eyes fixed on me. “You know, people say men are the stoics, but you’d be surprised how muc
h effort it takes to get some women to think about themselves for a change. Look at your situation objectively. Your physical condition is bad enough to cause habitual sleep disruption, you spend hundreds of dollars on pain relief you can’t even claim on your husband’s health insurance, and by your own admission, this has been going on for years now. As the parent of a special-needs child, you’re under exceptional mental stress, while your emotional state sounds borderline manic-depressive.”
“Again, no. I had a friend who was manic-depressive. That’s something chemical, something real, diagnosable. They gave her pills for it.”
“Ah. And what happened then?”
I sighed. “She’d even out, stop taking them. Eventually, she jumped off a bridge.”
He smiled. “Well, at least you haven’t done that.” To which Mom chimed in from behind him: “Not yet.”
Not fucking helpful, I wanted to snap. But the fight had already gone out of me, all at once: a body-wide slump, breath hissing out, energy sapped like a switched-off light. Not just because I knew everything he’d said was undeniably true, but most specifically because I couldn’t remember telling him.
Sometimes you can tell the truth in advance—lie that you’ve done something, then make it so. I’ve done it most of my life, and I don’t feel guilty. But nothing will put a pattern of misdirection back in place once you’ve been dumb enough to map it out for someone, however tried and true; it’s like a cracked bone. Might heal right eventually, but you’ll feel it the rest of your life, especially when the weather starts to turn.
Mom was studying me now, looking for places to press on while I was weak, to force her case and make it stick even after I’d recovered enough to rebuild my defences. But I wasn’t going to give her the chance.
Harrison leaned forward, probably unaware of any of this. “What I’d like you to consider, Lois—may I call you Lois?—is that if you’re in constant pain for a long enough period, your overall tolerance for stress and discomfort rises so high, any sense you might have had of what’s ‘normal’ gets reduced to what’s bearable. And by that point, you simply expect to hurt, so complaining about it feels inappropriate. Nobody should live like that, if they don’t want to.”
I laughed, wearily, bitterly. “Think that’s what I want, huh?”
“Of course not. But if you’re suffering yet you truly feel like you just can’t manage to put yourself out enough to do something about it, then there’s a bit of a problem, wouldn’t you say?” He sighed. “Listen, I’ve watched your mother sit vigil, off and on, for the last two days . . . her, your husband, and that friend of yours, the girl who brought you in. Going by that alone, there are people who love you, who want to see your quality of life improve—but that’s not going to happen unless you make it.”