Looky, Daddy!: Scarier Than Twins

I need a handler. I need someone to punch me in the arm when I'm about to write posts like my last one. Luckily I have one.

"You wrote that the tension in this house was almost corporeal?" my wife exclaimed yesterday morning when she read my post. "It had nothing to do with Kathryn's epilepsy, you were watching Game Four of the friggin' World Series, for Chrissakes. Apologize to those people. And then put your stupid thesaurus back on the shelf. Corporeal, indeed. Dumbass."

My handler needs a handler.

She's right, of course. The post was supposed to be a lighthearted look on how there are some scary books out there and if you read some of them, you might never leave your house again. But somewhere along the way as I was writing it, I believe it was at the top of the seventh inning, I started buying into the fear myself. And then the whole tone of the post changed and it went where it shouldn't have. And I am sorry.

Epilepsy is certainly not the first thing I think of when I think of Kathryn. No, epilepsy is a far distant seventh, behind number six, wondering if she's colorblind, a fear that strikes me right after number five, amazement at the clothing combinations she can find within her closet, and number five and a half, fear that those combinations might very well induce seizures in everybody but her.

But still, these books, these scary books that I'm reading still fill me with fear and anger. Not because their worst-case scenarios are affecting me or my family personally, but that they affect anybody anywhere. I shake my fist at my imaginary maker not because of what is happening to my own child but because brain disorders happen at all. Any reasonable person would agree that disorders of the brain, like the McRib sandwich, should simply not be on the menu of choices to begin with.

Kathryn, of course, continues to be fine. The neurologist had a box full of answers and encouragement for me and a box full of really crappy stickers for Kathryn. But she did ask Kathryn to hop on one foot for thirty seconds, which almost instantly made her the COOLEST. DOCTOR. EVER. The only friction we encountered was over the medicine. The doctor was concerned over the level of drowsiness that Kathryn has been exhibiting, and of course, I tried to minimize that aspect because as I've written before, its awesome. But there Kathryn was, yawning big ol' yawns right in front of her new doctor and even once curling up on the examination table which could not have been any more startling to me than if she had sprouted a second head that spoke in a British accent and called everybody Chip, but there she was doing it and the doctor talked about changing her medication if her sleepiness continued. So for Kathryn's next visit we're stopping off at a Starbucks beforehand because no way will I have the silver lining stripped from my seven-year-old's dark cloud.

And so life continues here. Halloween is tomorrow and Halloween is, of course, Kathryn's favorite holiday. We haven't prepared like we normally do, most of our decorations have already been packed away for next month's move, but we are still very much caught up in the spirit of the holiday. Kathryn will be a witch, but that was not her original choice. A few months ago, back when only the most dedicated were even thinking about October, Kathryn asked me if we could find the same set of clothes that would fit both her and her twin sisters. I asked her why and she said it was for a Halloween costume.

"It's the only thing I can think of scarier than twins," she said. "Triplets."

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