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Show simple and familiar pattern of movement were like some complicated dance that needed to be choreographed mentally before it was attempted physically. "I am 97% sure," he is saying. The tests he had ordered in the weeks before are back and he is absently thumbing through the pages of results. He has finished with his reviewing of my legs, my eyes, and he is sitting on his short stool not looking at me. He is 97% sure of something important and his carefully measured voice defines the gravity of this pronouncement. "...that this is multiple sclerosis..." I am not hearing anything more although he is still mouthing words. I had once witnessed young Jacqueline Du Pre playing her cello with synchrony and abandon, tenor tones arching and bending into aural rainbows. She was a prodigy, the next Pablo Casals. Then she died many years too soon, of multiple sclerosis. He is only 97% sure, he had said. That means, I am thinking, that he has a three percent doubt. Three percent of a cage left unbuilt at the zoo means the lion is out. Three percent missing from the recipe means the combread will not rise. Three percent gone from my garden, and there would be no primroses to color frosty spring mornings. |