Two: The Book

The telling would not be possible without the book. A three-ring binder that serves as a sort of reference manual. Painstakingly assembled by the Redhead, a left-brained mathematical genius who can account for every penny on a balance sheet and has never met an equation she could not solve. Quite a catch for a right-brained word-man who can see the forest from the trees but cannot see the solution for the numbers.

The book is a chronological presentation of every medical visit, every test, every doctor’s summary, over the course of two years. There are spreadsheets she has constructed that compare blood test results by date for every component and how the numbers fluctuate – normal, abnormal, normal, abnormal – clues in search of a crime.

The analysis has been ignored or shrugged off by the medical community, most who seem to be more interested in moving things along so that they can get to the next beef in the slaughterhouse line. Let’s go folks, I have other patients to bill.

I offer this explanation to tell you how I know the order of events. Without the outline, the story is disjointed, the sequence and cadence lost. One of the effects of the illness has been a loss of short-term memory. Names and dates, mostly. I carry a little pocket-journal to help with that. Something a writer should do anyway. Stories and observations are often in the moment, and time blunts the imagery.

It is from this record that I know the exact date that this story began. How I can move from “Once upon a time” to June 5, 2021.

I had spent that week in the office, and a hot, lazy Saturday afternoon was just what the doctor ordered (no pun intended) for a forester and his dog. Just a short walk to a creek through a little patch of woods in Tallapoosa County, Alabama. The dog was protected from fleas and ticks. The forester, not.