Frustration

"Are you frustrated?" the doctor stated with a dry chuckle.

It wasn't really a question.

Yes I am.

I was buzzing with it. Trying to convey just how much things are not okay without sounding overly dramatic or alarmist. I ache with the need to be heard. I worry sometimes that I can't quite convey what we're experiencing. The sliver of a day we spend in an appointment can't get it across.

Because things are not okay, and they haven't been for months.

"You know, people think that doctors know everything, but we really don't. There's so much we don't know."

I know enough about science to know how little we really know. How we don't really know even how some simple things happen in the body, let alone the complicated ones.

I had a professor once who loved to tell us how to win a Nobel Prize. He would say, "if you could figure out how this works, you would win a Nobel Prize for sure. Or that. We don't know how any of it happens."

It takes a wise man to admit what he does not know.

I prefer being told we just don't know to being given excuses or half truths.

But I need to know.

"So I guess the question now is what do you do?"

What do we do, indeed. We just don't know.

(Mini Meerkat used to say, "I can't know!" when we asked her things. Now the script has shifted to, "it's a secret." I think both apply.)

I need to know how to help my sweet girl who endures so much.

The endless diagnostic testing and constant appointments encroach upon her freedom. But when she is free, she doesn't have the energy to run.

She used to run up and down the halls when she couldn't stay cooped in those tiny rooms any longer. She would make a break for the waiting room, wanting to play or escape to the elevator or just go back and forth in the long narrow hallways.

Now she curls in my lap or at my feet, sometimes inching under the chairs to hide. Muffled whispers of "I'm hiding" or "I'm tired" interrupted the doctors reverie.

"Well, I guess we'll call you if we think of anything. But that's part of the problem isn't it? Each specialist says it isn't their problem." He shook his head.

He had been thinking, hands pressed together and watching her closely as she sprawled across the floor.

My floppy girl, making funny faces up at me but too tired to support her own weight.

We walked away with no answers and no ideas of where to go from here.

To the next specialist, I suppose.