Monday, March 25, 2019

Blog # 104: DINGS Excerpted from Dr. Lance Fogan’s medical mystery novel, DINGS.


     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.

                                                                                                         


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