Leo arrived three hours later.
He walked into my hospital room and did not ask what the doctors had said. Did not ask if I was in pain. Did not look at the monitors. He asked when I would be released because the house was a mess from the party and his mother was really upset about how the evening had gone. Then he sat in the corner chair and checked his phone for twenty minutes.
I lay there watching my husband scroll through what appeared to be a bowling league group chat while I could not feel my own legs, and I thought: this is the man I chose. This is the man I married. Sometimes your judgment is so thoroughly compromised that you cannot even locate the moment it went wrong.
A nurse came in around nine. She asked the standard screening question, the one they ask everyone, about whether I felt safe at home. But she asked it slowly, making eye contact, leaving space after it. I said yes automatically, the way you do when the question has not yet made contact with anything real. But it sat in my chest afterward, that question, heavy and refusing to dissolve.
While I lay there, I logged into our joint bank account on my phone. The twelve hundred dollars was still labeled car repairs. But now, with nothing to do but stare at a small screen in a hospital room while my husband was in the corner chair ignoring me, I noticed something I had missed before. Small ATM withdrawals, sixty dollars at a time, from a machine in Florence, Kentucky. We did not live in Florence. We did not shop in Florence. I did not know a single person in Florence. The withdrawals went back four months with the regularity of a subscription payment.
I did not sleep that night.
Around six in the morning, the door opened. The doctor came in, and behind him were two people I had never seen: a woman in scrubs who introduced herself as the hospital’s patient advocate, and a woman in a dark blazer with a badge on her belt. The doctor pulled a chair close to my bed and sat down, and I knew, because doctors do not pull up chairs for good news, that what came next would require me to be sitting still.
The woman with the badge was Detective Altha Fam, Kenton County Police Department, with the kind of face that had probably not looked surprised since the nineties and did not appear to be auditioning for surprise now. The doctor spoke first. He explained that the MRI showed progressive damage to my peripheral nervous system, specifically demyelination of the nerve fibers, the protective coating around my nerves being systematically stripped away. He said the pattern was not consistent with multiple sclerosis, not Guillain-Barré syndrome, not any autoimmune condition they could identify. The pattern was chemical.[]
