chapter twenty-five
SEEKING BOUNTEOUS SPARKS
SHE SHIVERS AS she lets the door close behind her. It’s a long walk to the bus stop, and it gives her time to process what she’s done. She’s fired Dr. Jones. She hadn’t said that in so many words to him, and it’s taken her almost a year to do so since that day last July when she saw no more hope for her in his eyes. But she’d done it her way. She’d begun by paying for her appointments several months ago, using her credit card like all good debt-carrying Canadians. And today she had told him that she’d call later to book her next appointment, that she wasn’t going to come automatically in her regular weekly slot. It wasn’t a big deal for him because a few times already this year, including today, he’s rescheduled her appointment. She isn’t too pleased that she had to come on this June Tuesday morning. She’d shaken his hand as usual, paid with her VISA card, and walked out. She feels released.
The cool damp air seeps into her bones; the cloudy sky reflects flat light into the city. But neither dispirits her. She knows this decision is right. When she’d seen that loss of hope in Dr. Jones’s eyes, and although she hadn’t seen it again since, she knew that she had to act on it. It was hard though. First, she had to realize that she had a decision to make and then to figure out which way to go. But ultimately sticking with something that is no longer working simply because he had been so good to her and she had found him empathetic was not good enough. She had to get better. She had to.
She likes that today will be the last time she has to make the long trek of streetcar, subway, bus, walk to Haoma, and back again. She looks forward to swanning around her home with Smokey on Dr. Jones’s days. The TTC for once deposits her near her street expeditiously. And she looks forward to collapsing on her couch. But as she gazes upon the long skewed line of piggy-sized dark blue recycling bins and pint-sized disgusting green bins hogging the sidewalk from St. Clair Avenue to her doorstep, weariness sags her. The garbage trucks have been by; the bins are bad enough when first put out, but after being emptied, they’re left at the edge, in the middle, diamond-angled, with bits of paper, squeezed pop cans, and used Kleenex fluttering underneath. Eau du bin effluent hangs in the air. She tries to squeeze between the bins and the road. But some are so large, there’s no room; smaller ones allow her to shuffle past on the edge of the sidewalk, but it’s an up and down affair as she walks on the flat of the concrete and then on an angled driveway and then on the flat. It challenges her balance, and she teeters at one point as she walks on the edge. She fears walking on the road, with the cars zipping up behind her, speed bumps be damned, but after being shoved off the sidewalk for the third time by a bin, she turns down the Queen-like strains of Masterpiece Theatre II by Marianas Trench on her iPod Mini and resigns herself to using the road with many a glance behind her as she walks along it.
At last, she’s home. She closes her door against the insanity outside, Smokey barely cracking open an eyelid when she walks in. It’s the middle of the day, and it’s too cold to get out of her warm chair in the sun room. Smokey is not happy that she’s turned off the heat — to save her dwindling savings — and the June air remains stubbornly cool. This summer is shaping up to be a miserable one.
She goes upstairs to shed her going-out gear and to put on warmer, softer, non-restricting sweatpants, T-shirt, and sweatshirt: a thick winter-weight sweatshirt. Back downstairs she munches on a piece of toast with jam and slurps a cup of coffee while she stares at the dining room wall from her seat. She always needs to decompress after one of Dr. Jones’s sessions. He likes her to do nothing for twenty minutes after therapy so as not to overstress her mind and body. She always has to fight the inner urge to ignore his advice and check her email on the computer over and over like a hamster in a wheel in case someone, some old friend, some long-lost relative, has emailed her. Sometimes it happens. Or not. Today though she takes his advice.
Now that she’s pulled the safety net from under herself, she has to succeed. And to do that, she needs rest. Swallowing the last bite of toast and brushing her hands on her pants, she walks upstairs to her desk, pulls out her chair, sits down, takes a deep breath, and turns on her computer. Crap. She should’ve done this when she first came in. She slumps against the back of the chair and watches the changing screen as her computer chugs on, Windows whirs into glacial action, the antivirus software updates itself and prevents anything else from working. But finally the clicking shuts up, and she can start Firefox. She waits for it to load, impatient to begin what she’s been doing for at least a year: spend fifteen minutes — the maximum time Akaesman lets her search before draining her so much that she can no longer make sense of words — Googling Akaesman syndrome for treatment options. It’s been fruitless so far. She lets her eyes unfocus and herself slip into a trance, while the Google website blossoms into readiness in front of her.
Suddenly she sits up and clicks in the Google search box. She types in “Akaesman syndrome treatment.” It brings up a lot of American sites, some non-related Canadian sites, and some Canadian sites that offer the same kind of therapy she’s been spending all these years on. She sighs. She looks over at the clock on the bookshelf to her right and watches it tick off the minutes inexorably. She looks back at the screen. This is not working. She must try something new. Something different. How does she feel? What is her overriding symptom? She studies her inner scape, hears the clock tick, notices a bird fly by the window in front of her, studies her inner scape, hears Smokey shifting in the chair, feels the coolness of the air, licks her lips and tries to moisten her mouth, studies her inner scape. A comment Dr. Jones made knocks at her consciousness. Oh yeah, she recalls. He’d noticed early on that she was hearing people talking outside the office door, his clock ticking, things happening outside his window; he’d seen her attention wander with each stimulation calling her attention. That was it, wandering attention. Or ADD. But no, ADD is a physical or brain ailment. She frowns and considers again. Akaesman is a being, a visitant; he’s inhabiting her. He’s affecting her mental and physical functioning, but he’s the problem. If there’s no direct treatment to get rid of him, then maybe she should look up something related to him. She frowns against her rapidly woollying thought. She fights it, forces clarity back into her mind. And she sees. She’ll look up illumination or light therapy, something to light him up, illuminate him, distinguish him from her own self. Maybe something along those lines could help her. It isn’t like she has lots of options.
She types in the search box at the top of the web page, “illumination light treatment.” A new search results page loads, filling the screen with rapidly appearing lines of type. At the top is “Spenta Empowerment.” And it’s in Toronto.
She clicks on it. She scans their welcoming message. She doesn’t see Akaesman mentioned. But what the heck, she’ll call them. She looks for their Contact page, clicking on one tab after another, starting to panic a little as her fifteen-minute window of alertness closes down. Finally, she realizes their phone number is at the bottom of each page. She picks up her handset and carefully copy-punches the number in.
“Spenta Empowerment, Dr. Luce speaking.”
“Oh. Hi. I’m wondering if you could help me.” Damn, she should’ve written down her spiel. Now she’ll have to wing it, which means lots of stuttering and stammering like an idiot.
“Certainly, we’re here to help. We provide treatments for several conditions. What is it you need help for?”
“Akae-Akae-Akaesman s-s-syndrome.”
“Ah yes. Our clinic has recently been getting good results with the few cases that we’ve had. And we recently published a single-subject case study on our work with Akaesman syndrome. What are your specific symptoms?”
She lists them. Dr. Luce’s soft, empathetic voice settles her mind down, calms her nerves, and lets her focus on answering her simple questions.
At the end of her questions, Dr. Luce says, “It sounds like you’ve had quite a ride, and you’ve made great progress. I’m
hopeful that we can help you focus on your task, that is to fight Akaesman and force him to leave you before he’s ready to leave on his own, before he changes you permanently. With more and more clients coming to us for help, we’ve done extensive study on his habits, what he does, and how people are during and after the syndrome he causes. We don’t fully understand the reasons why it happens, but we’ve, that is the spiritual community, has noticed that he doesn’t invade the spiritually strong. We’ve also noticed that he acts to weaken your cognitive functions, making you fail and then doubt yourself, which breaks your spirit. He then works to change you into a malleable person who takes on his characteristics before leaving you. This is often a quick process in a spiritually weak person. But some, like you, spark to life instead and resist, and it takes him some time to effect the changes. Our goal here is to empower you by strengthening your higher cognitive functions, like concentration and memory, to restore your self-confidence, and to heal your spirit. That last is particularly important so that you can learn to distinguish yourself from him. You can’t fight what you don’t recognize as not yourself. All of our work is experimental when it comes to this syndrome, but we’ve had good success so far. If you’re interested and willing to be a guinea pig, we’d be happy to assess you and then give you a more complete answer. How does that sound?”
“So-so-sounds good.”
“That’s great. I’ll just check our calendar. I believe we had a cancellation. We normally have a six-month wait, but I’d like to slot you into this cancellation, get you in here as soon as possible. You will find your pain levels will go down with our work as well, and that will help restore some of your energy and ability to fight him. Ah, here we are. Yes, we did have a cancellation. A Dubai family was coming for an assessment of all the members and an introductory treatment program. But border issues forced them to cancel. It is in three weeks, on the twenty-fourth of June. How does that sound?”
“Sounds good.” She writes it down in her phone notebook with the intent to transfer the details to her aging Palm later.
“We start the assessment at 9:00 a.m. sharp. We ask that you not be late. It’ll be all day. There are lots of places for lunch around here, or you can bring your own and eat in the park across the street. Now, are you aware of our assessment fees?”
“No.”
“Are you covered by insurance?”
“No. That is, I am. I’m, I’m f-f-fighting the Shadow Court, but they’ve s-s-stopped all treatment payments. And my own s-s-savings are going down — that is, I’m, I’m living off my small trust fund income, what’s left of my RRSPs, and my grandmother, my grandmother, sh-she-she pays for groceries and s-s-stuff.”
“What I’ll do for you then is charge you half our regular assessment fee, and then if you’re a good candidate for treatment, we’ll invoice you only at cost. We need to recoup our expenses, but you’ve worked so hard, and you sound like an excellent candidate that I’d like to give you a break.”
“Thank you.” She doesn’t know what else to say. She’s overwhelmed by such kindness when this doctor doesn’t even know her yet is willing to offer her such a deep discount on the strength of one call. “Thank you.”
“Not at all. I’d like to help you achieve your dream. That’s what we do here: help people achieve their dreams. Now, do you know where we are?”
“Um. Uh. No, I don’t think so.” She looks at her computer screen, searching for an address, but already the words are morphing into meaningless.
“We’re at Yonge and Lawrence, in the medical office building right above the subway station. You’ll be coming by subway?”
“Yes.”
“You come out of the subway, walk up Yonge Street a couple of metres, and then you’ll see a set of steps into the building. We’re on the seventh floor. When you get to the seventh floor, turn left, and walk all the way down the hall and enter the door that will be facing you. Our name is on the outside of the door. I look forward to seeing you in three weeks.”
“Me too. Thank you.”
Relief at finding help so suddenly and so quickly fills her with energy. She creates an event in her Palm for the coming appointment and then rotates her chair until she faces the bookshelves. Seeing their derangement, she considers decluttering them. Grandmother had, but clutter somehow builds back up. She’s scheduled regular times to combat new clutter. She does that to keep her home a Zen zone ever since Sunny had explained that a visually clean environment will make her energy rise. It’s not her scheduled day or hour to declutter. But today she feels released and relieved and daring to try. She stands up, letting the chair wheel backwards into the desk, descends her stairs, walks into the kitchen, and fetches duster, cleaning cloth, and dusting spray, steps back up the stairs, returns to the music room, and pauses. Yup, she’s ready.
Three weeks later, on a sweltering day, she’s ready to begin a totally different kind of treatment. She arrives at the Spenta Empowerment Centre right on time, burning in the humidex of thirty-two degrees, glad she doesn’t have to walk in the thick air for more than a minute, marvelling at how she managed to travel in it and on the crumbling TTC on this Wednesday morning.
Dr. Luce interviews her for two hours, asking her about that day she met Akaesman, her physical diagnosis, her neuropsychological diagnosis, her symptoms, her treatments, who she’s seen and for how long, her mental health, her emotional health, what she’s done for her spirit. It’s exhausting; but it is only the beginning.
Dr. Luce closes her file folder on the notes she’s been taking and says, “Alright, that’s all the questions for now. I find it interesting that you tell such a distressing story with such calm, like your emotions have been dampened. I haven’t seen quite that lack of affect before, and I’d like to work on that, as well as what we discussed on the phone. But for now, we’ll do some tests. I’ll have you do the first one now before lunch, and we’ll do the rest afterwards.
“Before we get started, I’d like you to understand what we’re about here. We are a holistic centre focused on empowering people. We work on mind, body, spirit. The tests I’ll be doing here will measure your cognitive and brain functions. The treatments for that will strengthen your brain and thus your body. But you will also need exercise. Exercise isn’t just good for muscles, it’s good for your mind and your spirit. So we have a trainer who has extensive experience with people suffering from all sorts of conditions. He has special knowledge of complete Akaesman syndrome after working with severe cases in a hospital setting. We’re fortunate to have him, and I’m sure you’ll like him. After you settle into your treatments, we’ll set up an appointment for you to see him, and he’ll monitor your progress quarterly in person and weekly by email.
“As for the spirit part, I like that you’re going to church. We find that having a faith makes a difference to recovery. We also find that having a spiritual mentor, someone who will walk with you from the spiritual side of things is very helpful. She is not here to counsel or advise you but rather to give you guidance as to how to recognize Akaesman acting in you, how to distinguish yourself from him, what exercises to do to build your confidence and your spirit so that you can resist him. You will meet with her regularly once we’ve moved past the twice-a-week phase of treatment down to once a week. We don’t want to overtax you.
“This is a long process. It’s going to require patience and perseverance on your part. How does that sound?”
She nods, receiving the information but not really understanding. “Good,” she manages to say. Dr. Luce gets up and walks over to a small desk at the other end of the large office. She follows. An old hulk of a beige computer sits on the desk that’s up against a blank wall. She follows Dr. Luce’s gesture and sits in the plain, pine chair. She takes the set of headphones given to her to wear and forgets to listen as Dr. Luce explains the test while she examines the earphones. Fading back in to what Dr. Luce is saying, she picks up on the fact that the computer will step her through the test. She’s
left alone as the test begins.
She puts on the headphones, and a male automated voice comes on telling her that it will flash or say the number “1.” When it does, she’s to press the left mouse key. The machine steps her through a practice session. Then it tells her it will flash or say the number “2” alternating with the number “1”; she is not to press the mouse key when she sees or hears “2.” It guides her through a practice with both numbers. And then it begins the fifteen-minute, excruciatingly boring test. At the end, she figures she’s done well. She was a tiny bit slow in responding correctly to “1,” but maybe all those naysayers are right: there really is nothing wrong with her.
Dr. Luce comes back in right after the test finishes.
“Alright,” she smiles, “I bet you’re ready for lunch.” She nods, and Dr. Luce suggests a few places where she can go for a half-hour lunch. She had made a sandwich at home and takes it outside to eat. She needs fresh air, needs space to let her mind go blank.
When the half-hour is up, she returns. Dr. Luce greets her as she enters the waiting room, and she follows Dr. Luce to a room next door to her office. There, a large computer sits with two wide flat-panel monitors next to it. She sits in front of the monitors, and then Dr. Luce explains the test as she scrubs her earlobes clean with gritty paste. She spreads EEG paste on two electrodes for her earlobes and, after clipping them on, measures her head in both directions, spreads apart her hair in the precise middle, scrubs it clean, and presses down a single electrode with EEG paste. Somehow this single-electrode test will tell them in what ways Akaesman has changed her, but only generally. The test doesn’t take long.
When it’s done, Dr. Luce removes the electrodes and introduces her to a pleasant university-aged woman. Dr. Luce’s assistant starts a new program on the computer, one that shows a drawing of the top of a human head with symbols all over it, all in red. For the next twenty minutes, the assistant cleans her earlobes and her forehead, struggles to pull on a tight form-fitting cap full of grommetted holes, squeezes EEG gel into the holes, its coldness a welcome relief on her hot head, and works the gel into her scalp until each red symbol on the screen turns amber and then green. Once they are all green, she fetches Dr. Luce.
Dr. Luce approves of what she sees, closes the program, and starts another. She types in her name, birth date, gender, and other essentials and then begins collecting data.
She watches her brain wave patterns flow across the screen and is slow to switch focus when she’s asked to do some tasks rather than watch her brain work. Some of these tasks she does with her eyes open, some with eyes closed. Dr. Luce asks her not to fall asleep when her eyes are closed but simply to relax. She reminds her constantly to relax her jaw. She wonders briefly how she looks with that garish form-fitting cap and hanging jaw. Fatigue wipes her memory as she finishes each task; she becomes more and more in the moment — the past and the future evanished.
Back in the office with remnants of paste in her hair and cotton batting firmly and thickly surrounding her perceptual centres, she barely understands what Dr. Luce is saying about the assessments. She nods and takes the material Dr. Luce hands her. She gets up and walks out of the office, material in hand, down to the subway, back toward home, where she slumps in front of the blaring, incomprehensible television, unmoving until The National comes on. Peter Mansbridge’s “Hello” stimulates her into planting fists on couch cushion, pushing herself upright, teetering on her feet for a moment, and then moving toward the kitchen in search of food. Smokey is hungry too. Her cat had uncharacteristically left her alone until now. She picks up her continuously mewing cat, wanders over to the kitchen, but stops.
Was it real? Was today real? She remembers that first test, the one she was sure she did so well on. Apparently not. Apparently her focus was all over the place. And the other tests showed her brain had low power, was mostly asleep, and … and … she struggles to remember. She gives up. It doesn’t matter anyway, for she can ask again at her first treatment what this all means. All that matters is they will treat her. Treatment. She savours the thought. She blinks rapidly. She mustn’t forget; she must enter her appointment into her new iPod Touch. The Palm was becoming less and less useful as it was old technology. Getting into Spenta galvanized her to replace it, although she’s not sure if the primitive iPod Touch is any better, except for its screen.
She struggles to remember when she’s supposed to go. Oh yeah, the appointment time is on one of the materials Dr. Luce gave her. She finds her purse and fishes in it for that wad of paper. She unfolds it and finds the date. She rummages in her purse for her new iPod Touch and fingers in the date of her first treatment session. The date she will start to get well: the second Tuesday in September.
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