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Show 74 The Orange Notebook Victor has stomped into my room and, despite all precautions to the contrary, both medical and professional, thrown the large orange notebook onto my bed, hitting my misshapen foot in the process. He does not apologize. "If you can find a protocol for troubleshooting the pump in there, then we'll do it," he is saying. His words are tightly enunciated, consonants spitting. I am trying to be brave in the face of this hostility. I have been sitting in this bed, in this hospital, for over six weeks now, suddenly once again quite contracted and stiffened, and startling into massive whole-body spasms with unfortunate regularity, and they are telling me that there is nothing wrong with either the pump or the catheter. They say they know this because of a flat X-ray they took when I first arrived. "It cannot be broken," the mouthpiece of the huddled white-coated entourage told me so very long ago, holding up the negative image of my insides. "We just replaced your catheter three months ago," they said. They are saying that my disease has simply progressed beyond all helping and that I must simply accept this fact. I have since been asking them to follow the troubleshooting procedures Dr. Chappie used successfully several times, before she sent me up here, in order to spot leaks in the catheter. She explained the procedure to me as she did it, to comfort more that educate, I suppose. But I now regret any comfort I may have taken from her explanation in exchange for what possible scientific |