[img]2553|right|Diane||no_popup[/img]Dateline Boston – Our month-long dream of a meaningful audience at Massachusetts General yesterday with a premier neurologist intimately knowledgeable about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis enveloped both Diane and me emotionally.
The difference is that she is emphatically internal. My accent, lifelong, has been on the opposite, less cerebral scale.
Going in, at least one of us could not have been wound more tightly if you had wrapped a 20-foot steel belt around my head. If I told you I was on shpilkes, you would not require an interpretation.
The buildup was so disproportionately, so unreasonably, ambitious that feeling psychologically disfigured afterward was inevitable, but not less painful.
This was not the fault of the erudite neurologist. Mine. My undisciplined hopes unrealistically were flying closer to heaven than earth when we arrived on the eighth floor of the Wang Building for our late-afternoon date with what I hoped would be one more miracle.
Unfairly, my dauber probably would have been gutter level if the neurologist had made any pronouncement less momentous than “You are cured of ALS.”
The master neurologist gave us the most wisely invested hour and 45 minutes we will spend in our joint lives.
I was looking for a home run. The neurologist, instead, cleverly was hitting a blizzard of imaginatively placed singles between and just beyond the reaches of fielders.
There will be no clinical trials for us, at least on this side of the country. For complex reasons that were sophisticatedly, and privately, diagrammed, he irrefutably confirmed Diane’s ALS diagnosis two months earlier. Stressing the vast and discouraging uncertainties of confronting ALS, he advised us of paths to pursue, none ending in the sunshine.
Stretching a life that is wearing the badge Incurable is inarguably sensible because who knows what can happen during the extra time you have bought. I told you I believe in miracles.
Perhaps my main takeaway was not insignificant – he apparently changed Diane’s mind about a difficult decision she recently made. This move towered in life-together importance over every breath we have drawn since leaving LAX Tuesday just past dawn.
I remain haunted by Diane’s unsurpassable response April 8 when the first neurologist pronounced her with ALS. “I am not angry,” she said. “But my heart is broken.”
