I lay sprawled and immobile on the tan plaid couch where my college boyfriend and I used to both screw and study. Now Mom lifted my head gently to wedge another pillow under my unwashed, dark, curly hair. I’d moved back home three weeks ago after being rushed to the emergency room, dizzy and unable to walk.
Mom sat down on the coffee table and looked at me.
“Are you comfortable, honey? Should I open the curtains? It’s so beautiful out today.”
Seattle was unseasonably warm that September 1991. But the sunlight felt like sandpaper against my eyes.
Like most twenty-four year olds, on any given day, I was alternately fearless and terrified. Unlike most twenty-four year olds, I was pinned flat by air that seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. This wasn’t mere exhaustion or fatigue but a different beast entirely: gravity. It had gone feral and made me its prey.
My mouth, however, remained impervious.
“This better not be anything that requires a telethon,” I said. “Or forces me to learn to steer a car with my feet—I’m a crappy enough driver just using my hands.”
“Mia—”
“And if 60 Minutes does a thing on it, I won’t be one of those sick people who smiles for the camera and says I still feel lucky because once I saw a butterfly land on a daisy in front of a rainbow and at least I’m still alive. Not happening.”
“First of all, we have to get you to the neurologist’s office in two hours, so let’s not worry about telethons right now, okay?” Mom was a longtime public defender, on leave to take care of me. She cared passionately about those who couldn’t afford counsel and was one of the best trial lawyers in the city. She also stuck to the facts like shrapnel in a wound. “Secondly, you won’t have to steer a car with your feet. Where do you come up with these things?”
“I saw it once in a documentary at the film fest—”
“Honey, do you want the curtains open? Yes or no?” she asked again.
“No, not right now. My eyes still hurt too much.”
“Okay then. Let’s stay focused on that,” she said and touched my cheek.
——————
A mobile hung above Dr. McMillan’s exam table. Pink and blue papier mâché birds dangled listlessly while I mustered all my strength to sit up. My hospital gown hung open in the back. I thought about all the people who’d worn it before me and wondered how many of them were dead now.
“I need you to squeeze my hand as hard as you can,” Dr. McMillan said, continuing our exam. She held her right hand in front of my left.
I squeezed her hand hard, and she looked both surprised and pleased.
“That’s good, that’s good,” she said. “Now let’s try the other one.”
We each reversed hands, and I squeezed again.
“Whoa! Someone’s going to the Olympics!” she said.
I knew she was trying to be kind, but three weeks ago, I’d been a Domestic Violence Victim Advocate for King County, writing freelance at night and working out each day. Less than a month later, I got kudos for finger-squeezing and wore potentially dead persons’ hand-me-downs.
“What are the birds for?” I asked.
“The birds?”
I nodded at the mobile.
“Oh, that. I find it helps soothe patients. Gives them something nice to look at during procedures.”
“It helps with finger squeezing?”
Her voice remained steady as she reached for the small, pointed mallet from her instrument tray.
“Well, I try to keep things pleasant. Because sometimes I get to deliver good news, and sometimes the news isn’t so good.”
“Oh.”
I stayed quiet while she tapped my ankles, knees, and the bottoms of my feet with the mallet. I remembered she was trying to see if my near-paralytic inertia and constant dizziness arose from brain problems.
I couldn’t think of any mild brain problems.
“Do you think the news will be good today?” I asked, allowing myself a tiny bit of hope, as if it were rationed.
I was completing my eighth doctor appointment in twenty-one days, not including the emergency room physician who’d sent me home with a cane, an antibiotic prescription, and a shrug. So far, the news had been disturbingly neutral. My test results were normal, and no one knew anything.
“Go ahead and lie down,” she said, ignoring my question. “I can tell you’re getting wobbly.”
I tried lowering myself to the exam table, but my arms gave way and I banged my head on its surface. It hurt like hell and compounded the dizziness—I’d be the only neurology patient to get a brain injury during an appointment.
“Oh, Mia! Are you okay?” she asked.
“GodDAMNIT,” I said, then thought better of it. “I’m sorry. I’m probably not supposed to swear in here.”
“Believe me, I’ve heard worse,” Dr. McMillan said with a trace of a smile.
“You know, Mom is in the waiting room and she’s an attorney,” I said. “If you kill me, she will gut you like a fish.”
Dr. McMillan paused.
“I’m kidding,” I said. “Well, I mean, she is an attorney and she’s waiting for me, but the fish-gutting part is a joke.”
My verbosity was directly proportional to my vulnerability. Maybe my words could obscure the fact I couldn’t even lie down without falling.
“Unless you do kill me, and then, look out. We’re Greek. You kill her daughter, and you will be lucky if she only guts you like a fish.”
Dr. McMillan looked at me patiently. “It’s okay if you’re scared,” she said.
“Should I be scared?”
She sighed. “Why don’t we start from the top? Tell me all your symptoms again.”
I knew I was slipping through the membrane between health and sickness.
I looked at the pink and blue birds.
They actually were kind of pretty.
Litsa Dremousis (she/her) is the author of Altitude Sickness (Future Tense Books). Seattle Metropolitan Magazine named it one of the all-time “20 Books Every Seattleite Must Read.” Her essay “After the Fire” was selected as one of the “Most Notable Essays 2011” by Best American Essays, and The Seattle Weekly named her one of “50 Women Who Rock Seattle.” She recently left The Washington Post, where she’d been an essayist who wrote extensively about Myalgic Encephalomyelitis.
Her work has also appeared in The Believer, BlackBook, Bookmarks, Esquire, Flash Fiction Magazine, Filter, Hobart, Jezebel, The Literary Underground, The Manifest Station, McSweeney’s, Monkeybicycle, MSN, New York Magazine, The New York Times, The Nervous Breakdown, Nylon, The Onion’s A.V. Club, The Organ, Paper, Paste, PEN Center USA, Poets & Writers, Publishers Weekly, The Rumpus, Salon, Slate, Spartan Lit, The Weeklings, several anthologies, myriad other outlets, and on NPR, KUOW, and additional radio programs and podcasts.
Website: litsadremousis.com
Bluesky: @litsadremousis.bsky.social
Instagram: @litsadremousis