and now it's eight years later and the thing that nearly killed her eight years ago has spent every last minute since sleeping. whatever it was it just slipped back beneath the surface without a sound. there are people like her. no one understands them. eight years later, massive studies full of thousands of people, trials and data and money money money and no one knows why sometimes it just works, people just get better. we call them lucky. she got the best treatments we had at the time and now we know better, know it shouldn't really have worked, know it really couldn't have worked. but it did. and she's at her appointment on time, in her jogging suit-- really the best thing to wear to your checkup: comfortable, easy to take off and put on in bits, doesn't get wrinkled, looks vaguely cheerful, suggests that maybe you're off for one of those brisk walks we're always on about. it is the outfit of an experienced patient. her knee hurts. it is a normal knee pain, not the scary kind-- not the kind that means more tests and jacking up the medicine and specialists pressing the joint and frowning at it and hushed voices two rooms away and another round of specialists in for second and third opinions. none of that. it is a normal knee pain. she got it working. she works now. and when she gets tired it is a normal tired. she is tired the same way that everyone else is tired-- at the end of a long day. and she has normal people high blood pressure, not scary high blood pressure, not we have to send you to the emergency room high blood pressure, not you have to save all your urine for twenty four hours and bring it to us high blood presure, not the kind that means biopsies and injections and ultrasounds and another couple of days in the hospital. she has normal people high blood pressure. one pill does the trick. and it's a fairly low dose. nothing much at all. and when you look at her you see her see you. in you she sees the monster breathing. you tell her, it's sleeping. the monster is sleeping. you tell her you know her fear. you tell her she is like a woman attacked by tigers who shudders when she sees orange out of the corner of her eye, or something stripey, or a stuffed tiger on a shelf. it sounds stupid coming out of your mouth but not to her. she laughs a little. then she starts to cry. you go further. you got better. no one is going to understand this. but this thing, it scared you to death. you were dying. but you got better. this is what we were hoping for all those years ago, when you were in the hospital and your kidneys were shutting down and this thing was about to swallow you whole and all we had were a couple of pills. this is what we hoped for. this is what we saw. we saw you. right here, right now. you. you living your life. you getting better. you with the disease leaving you alone to go out and live your life again. and no one is going to understand this but you have to change into this whole new person. when you got sick it was impossible. you were twenty-nine and nothing was ever going to hurt you. but then you had to become this whole new person who knew what it was like to look at death while death looked back at you all day long. you had to become a sick person. and everyone understood that that was going to be hard. but no one is going to understand that when you get better you have to become a whole new person again. you can't be the person that you were before you were sick. you are different now. you know what it is like to be very, very sick. you know you can die. you know what it is like to be afraid for your life for a very long time. and now you have to learn how to be better. we will never trust the monster. we will never say it is gone, really gone. we will never say you're cured. but, honey, you're cured. and we turned around. and neither of us could see it anymore. |
