Chapter 2 - The ScansThe doctor who finally saw me was young, maybe mid-thirties, with dark circles under her eyes that suggested she'd been on shift far longer than anyone should be. Her name tag said DR. ANOKA.
She asked me questions my father kept trying to answer for me.
"Any nausea?" A pause, and before I could speak, my father said, "No, she's fine, she's just tired."
"Any changes in vision?"
"She wears glasses. That's normal."
"Sir, I'd like to hear from her, if that's alright."
He crossed his arms and let me talk, though I could feel his impatience radiating off him like heat from a stove. I told Dr. Anoka about the headaches. The way the pain sat behind my eye. The way sometimes, for just a second, the edges of things went strange and swimming before snapping back into focus.
She ordered a CT scan. My father protested — the cost, the time, the unnecessary drama of it all — but she was already writing the order, and something in her tone made even him go quiet for a moment.
I was wheeled away, scanned, and wheeled back. We waited another forty minutes in the small curtained bay, my mother holding my hand, my father checking his phone.
When Dr. Anoka came back, she was carrying a folder and moving slower than before. She pulled the curtain fully closed behind her.
"I want to go over the imaging with you," she said, looking at me first, then at my parents.
My father stood up. "Look, we appreciate you checking, but if there's nothing broken and nothing bleeding, we're going to head home. She's got finals coming up and she needs her rest more than she needs to sit in this hospital all night."
Dr. Anoka didn't respond right away. She set the folder down on the rolling tray table and opened it, turning one of the images so it faced all of us. On the screen — a grainy black-and-white cross-section of my own skull — there was a pale, irregular shape near the base, roughly the size of a walnut.
"We're taking her home," my father said again, firmly, already reaching for my jacket at the foot of the bed. "Thank you for your time."
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Dr. Anoka looked down at the scan one more time. Then she reached for the wall phone beside the bed.
"Before you do that," she said quietly, "there's something on this image I need you to see first."
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