Anonymous Doctor

A patient rose from the dead yesterday.

Okay, not quite. But almost. She had been basically catatonic-- unresponsive, a tremor in her leg but otherwise practically paralyzed, unable to speak, completely out of it-- for days, we thought maybe from her psych medications but even after we stopped the meds nothing changed. We ran tests, couldn't figure out what was going on.

Then yesterday her son runs into the hall-- "she woke up," he starts screaming. I go into her room, and sure enough, she's sitting up, talking, acting as if nothing had happened. "It feels like I had a stroke," she said. I asked what she meant, but she couldn't really verbalize. We've done an MRI-- there's no evidence she had a stroke. But everyone was talking miracle yesterday, we were telling her that she was in such bad shape, but what a miracle that she's better, we don't know what happened, we'll keep trying to figure it out....

I get in this morning... and she's back to how she was before. Unresponsive, like she's in a trance.

It's like she's possessed. For Halloween, perhaps. And we don't know what to do. And her son is even more distraught than before, since he had that glimmer of hope-- more than a glimmer, really-- for half a day she was back to some degree of normal.

People getting better, only to get worse. Very frustrating part of the job.