Chapter
22, Part 2 (Part 1 was in Blog # 95, June 25, 2018)
Sam snored softly in his sleep. I tossed, turned and
then gave up. Quietly, I rose in the darkness and slid into my slippers and bathrobe.
I tiptoed down the hall. Madison’s and Conner’s still forms and the sounds of
soft, regular breathing comforted me.
The study doorknob felt cold as I closed it. I
switched on the desk lamp. It illuminated the sheets of notes I had already
made on my seizure research.
I drummed my fingers on the desk as I looked out
into the cold, clear, indigo March night sky. I loved the color the sky was
now. An occasional wind buffeted the windows. I shivered and wrapped my robe
tighter around me as the computer screen came to life. The desktop screen
showed my favorite picture of the kids taken last summer. They smiled in their
vegetable garden out back. I clicked on the Internet Explorer icon. It was time
to find out about Conner’s neurologist.
I typed “Hal O’Rourke.” The screen filled with pages
of references for those key words. I scrolled down until I found a link for the
neurologist’s website. The homepage displayed
a photograph of a smiling, avuncular, clean-shaven middle-aged man. He wore a
white doctor’s coat over a blue buttoned-down shirt and a bright blue, red and
yellow-striped bowtie. I smiled. One didn’t see bowties very often. I leaned
in.
Dr. O’Rourke was a full professor of neurology. He
had been in practice for more than twenty-six years. He had done a
tropical-medicine fellowship in Papua New Guinea as a medical student. I
wondered if there were cannibals and headhunters over there. Conner would be
intrigued by this. He and his friends were always watching TV shows about
exotic animals and people who lived in jungles.
The next page showed several pictures of Hal
O’Rourke as a young medical student in a primitive world doing medical things
and tramping around tropical forests. In one photograph, he posed with a large
white parrot on his arm. In another, he held a huge hypodermic needle stuck in
the side of a native lying on a table in a mud-floored, jungle operating room.
I squinted at the monitor. I was horrified to see that there were no screens on
the windows. People leaned through them to watch. I guessed that was how they
lived there. I would be dead in a week without modern conveniences.
The
bibliography of Dr. O’Rourke’s research papers went on for several pages. I
read a list of his research articles. They were about headaches and other unfamiliar
medical conditions published in medical journals.
What followed was a little astonishing:
a section called “Shakespeare and Neurology.” It listed Dr. O’Rourke’s articles
about that great dramatist. If he was
doing all of these other things—and this literature research—did he have enough
time to be a really good doctor? Did he know enough about seizures? According
to the article, Dr. O’Rourke had studied every neurological symptom that had
ever been mentioned in Shakespeare’s works.
The English major in me was immediately fascinated.
As I continued to read my confidence in this neurologist returned. Othello and
Julius Caesar had epilepsy. King Lear had delirium and “an epileptic visage.”
Juliet’s nurse got migraines. Shakespeare even described how alcohol’s damage
to the liver affected thinking. A character in another play had double vision.
Others were incontinent and a few were demented. I laughed quietly. This was
wild.
The last page listed awards and some lectures he had given at
medical conferences around the world.
My gut instinct—a mother’s instinct—spoke to me. My
Conner would like him. Dr. O’Rourke could be the man to make everything all
right again. He had been doing this for a long time, after all. One more day
and then we would get some answers.
My eyelids drooped and my head started to nod. I
leaned back and closed my eyes. Once again, haiku images coalesced: huge waves roaring in—crashing over jagged
rocks—a swimmer reached home.
Lance Fogan, M.D., is Clinical
Professor of Neurology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “DINGS”
is his first novel. It is a mother’s dramatic story that teaches epilepsy, now
available in eBook, audiobook and soft cover editions.
