Sleeping Beauty (2 page)

“Hi, I’m Dr. Charmant,” he says, sticking out his hand. “And you must be Claire?”

“Ms. Beau.”

“Pardon?”

“Egalitarian medical relationships work best for me,” I say. “I don’t mind calling you ‘Doctor,’ but in that case you shouldn’t presume to call me ‘Claire.’ It puts us on unequal footing, which I don’t believe is conducive to a positive doctor-patient relationship.”

Charmant stands very still, his head tilted slightly. I keep my gaze fixed on him, refusing to look away. I’ve had my share of arrogant doctors over the last year; I’ve had it with their holier-than-thou attitude.

“Are your parents with you today?” he says finally.

I half exhale, half growl. “You didn’t even read it, did you?”

“Read…what?”

“Let me guess: You’re a fellow, right?”

Ah, The Fellow: A post-medical school, post-residency doctor with the overconfidence of a seasoned physician, but the actual skills of a parking valet. No disrespect to valets, of course.

“I’m not sure what that has to do–”

“Because if you had,” I say, cutting him off, “you would know that I am twenty-nine years old. You would know that I am only here because one of my doctor wants me evaluated for a class of sleeping disorders that usually only affects teenagers, and that the experts studying and treating this class of disorders usually work in pediatric hospitals.”

A look of profound confusion has overspread his face, and he starts wildly flipping through the pages on the chart.

“Look,” I say. “I’m aware that this is a teaching hospital, and I’m all for supporting the training of medical professionals, but at the very least I expect my time to be wasted productively.” I turn to the magazine rack on the wall and pluck a
Highlights for Children
from it. “So if you’re done playing doctor in here, then I’d be really thankful if you’d send the real doctor in.”

Mr. Doctor decides that escape is the only viable option, and I hear the door whoosh open and closed as he scuttles out.

I’m actually absorbed in finding the dog bone in the Hidden Pictures section when the door opens again. An extremely tall woman with a friendly, heart-shaped face and the torso of a linebacker enters. She is wearing sensible shoes and sports a no-nonsense bowl cut. She looks like she’s trying hard not to laugh.

“I heard you sent Dr. Charmant packing,” she says, her mouth breaking into a grin as we shake hands. When I start to apologize, she waves my words away. “The fact that this is a pediatric hospital notwithstanding, he should not have assumed that you were a child. Although,” she says, looking over her reading glasses at me, “you are very petite for a twenty-nine year old. Besides the sleeping disorder, you’re otherwise healthy? No smoking habit as a toddler that stunted your growth?”

I laugh. “No, I’m just small. My grandmother was tiny too.”

She nods. “I’m Wendy Pickering. You can just call me Wendy. Unlike Dr. Charmant, apparently, I spent the weekend looking over your records and I’ve come to the conclusion that you’ve got to be sick and tired of looking at us.”

I don’t know what to say to this. “Who?”

“Us,” she says as she clicks her pen and begins writing in my chart. “Doctors.”

I imagine what she’s writing.
Patient is sick...of looking at us. No evidence of any other illness found
. “Well, it’s not that,” I say.

She smiles. “Sure it is. You’ve been to four doctors in the last year and every one of them has punted to the next one without actually admitting to you that they’re not sure what the problem is. You’re frustrated. I can understand why.” She closes my chart and throws it onto the nearby countertop. “I want to start from scratch.”

“You do?”

She tilts her head and looks underneath me, amused that I’m sitting on an exam table that looks like a Dagwood sandwich. “Let’s move to my office. I think you outgrew this room twenty years ago. I blocked my schedule for the next hour. That should be enough time to get an accurate history.”

I immediately slip off the table onto the floor.

“You’re at the onset of an episode?” she says.

“It’s like labor. The fainting spells–”

“Your cataplexy?”

I nod. “The cataplexy attacks get closer and closer together until I can’t wake up. I had one on the way to the hospital today, the second in two days. By the end of the week they’ll be a few hours apart, and then I just won’t wake up for the next few weeks.”

“I want you in the sleep lab for observation the day after tomorrow so we can catch a few of the cataplexy attacks. Once they’re a few hours apart I want you to call me and I’ll clear the lab for an emergency overnight observation.”

“But I already–”

“You already did it, I know. The testing was poorly done and the results in my opinion are inconclusive.”

I follow her down the hall past a row of exam rooms. I play “Guess the Décor” as we pass: outer space, sports, dogs, lollipops. I stop for half a second at the last to marvel at an umbrella stand just inside the door filled with gigantic Tootsie Pops. With Wendy ten steps ahead of me, I lean into the doorway, pick one up, and squeeze it. Another inflatable. Cool.

I see a flash of white out of the corner of my eye and look up. Hands in the pockets of his white coat, Dr. Dismayed stops short at the sight of me fondling an oversized sucker. I chuck it back into the stand just as Wendy turns around.

“Oh, there you are,” she says to Charmant. “Please schedule Claire for the sleep lab the morning after next for sleep latency testing. By Sunday night at the latest we’ll have her back in overnight.”

“Absolutely,” he says, probably glad for something to do. “Who should I request for the sleep tech?”

Wendy’s face lights up. “That’s the best part,” she says, turning away from him and continuing down the hallway. “Clear you calendar, Dr. Charmant. You have a date with the sleep lab in forty-eight hours.”

I watch his expression turn from haughty to disbelieving.
Well, I’m not exactly thrilled about spending the night with you either
, I think. I look over my shoulder to make sure Wendy’s out of earshot.

“Here,” I say, leaning into the room and plucking a real lollipop out of a glass jar. With a jerk of my wrist I toss it to him. For a second it looks like he’s going to try to catch it, then I hear it crack as it hits the tiles. “Isn’t this what you give to kids when it hurts?”

“Come and join us, Brendan,” Doctor Pickering calls to him from down the hall. “You might as well do
something
today.”

Chapter Two

Wendy ushers me into her office. Charmant slips in behind us and takes a chair closest to the door, like he’s going to bolt the first chance he gets.

“Any family history of sleep disorders?” she says, closing the door. “Narcolepsy, insomnia, sleep-walking?”

“No, none.”

“Neurological disorders? Manic depression, schizophrenia, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s?”

“Nope, nothing like that.”

“Ah. Well that complicates things.”

“Why?”

She tilts back in her leather chair. “Well, for starters I’m not convinced that you have narcolepsy.”

I sit up straighter. “Really? I mean, what else could it be?”

“Oh, there’s lots of stuff it
could
be. The question isn’t what it
is
, the question is what it’s
not
. And I don’t think that’s been answered definitively. Once we eliminate what it’s not, we can discuss a diagnosis and how we’ll move forward with treatment. It’s just sometimes easier to nail down if there’s a family history of a related disorder.”

She jots a few things down on a pad of legal paper while she’s speaking. I lean forward and see “Beau, Claire, 29” in nearly horizontal scrawl at the top of the page.

“Are you married, Claire?” she asks.

“No, I’m not.”

“Have a significant other?”

“Nope.”

She nods. “Do you work? Are you able to work?”

“When I’m not in the middle of an episode, I do work.”

“What do you do?”

“What else do people in Los Angeles do?” I say with a smile.

“You’re a waitress?”

I laugh. “Close. I’m an actor.”

“Really? We don’t meet a lot of actors in a pediatric hospital. That’s amazing. Do you stay busy? What kind of roles do you play? Do you do movies or TV?”

“I stay pretty busy. In the last couple of years I’ve had some regular parts in a few TV sit-coms and dramas, just small parts. I do a lot of steady work as a background actor.”

She tilts her head almost imperceptibly at the term “background actor.” Figuring that a pediatric neurologist probably doesn’t spend a lot of her time staying abreast of the latest and greatest Hollywood terminology, I explain: “An extra.” She lights up with comprehension at the outdated term. “Anyway, I had a decent part in Sophia Coppola’s next movie, but then I had an episode and they gave it to someone else.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. What were you going to play?”

I shift in my chair, knowing my answer is going to resurrect a lot of ill-will from Dr. Charmant’s side of the room. “Um, I have, uh, an appearance and abilities that cater to a very much in-demand market niche.”

Dead silence all around, and I realize I’ve just made everything worse. They probably think my “niche market” is, like, fetish pornography. I sigh. “Studios try to avoid hiring minors if they can help it. If you’re under eighteen, the studios can only work you a certain number of hours, and there are all sorts of rules they have to follow that make it really expensive for the production, so if they can find someone over eighteen to play a teenager they’ll do it.”

I shrug. “It’s a pretty common thing. I’m short and I look young, so I end up getting cast in a lot of roles as an older teenager…sort of like Ellen Paige in
Juno
.”

I refuse to look in Charmant’s direction. He probably feels vindicated.

“Well, overall things look good for you,” says Wendy. “That must be really exciting!” She leans back in her office chair, a look of almost parental pride on her face.

It’s nice for someone to look proud. My parents never did recover from the horror of a daughter graduating from college with a perfectly serviceable English literature degree only to “run off with the circus” (as my dad called it). Fortunately for me, I was spared any long-term disapproval when my brother one-upped me shortly thereafter, informing my parents that not only was he gay, but he was going to forego college altogether to join an alternative rock band. My dad’s response was true to form. After a stunned silence he looked at the ground, did a couple of knee bobs,
harrumphed!
a few times and said, “A
rock band
?”

I’m wondering if we’re going to spend the entire time talking about my dubious employment when Wendy changes tack.

“Okay, let’s get down to business. When did your symptoms begin? When did you first notice that something was wrong?”

I settle in. This could take awhile. “About two years ago I started to notice that it took a long time to wake up.”

She nods while she writes. “Tell me about that.”

I clear my throat, trying to think how to explain. “Well, I would be awake in my mind, but I wasn’t always sure I really was awake.”

“Why not?”

“Because I couldn’t move. Well, sometimes I could open my eyes, but not much else.”

“Okay, you couldn’t move. Anything else?”

“And there were these...visions.” I hate even saying this word aloud, so my voice sort of drifts off into an unintelligible murmur at the end.

“What kind of visions?”

Oh lord, this is embarrassing. Why she had to ask Charmant to sit in on this after our disastrous first encounter (well, disastrous
second
encounter, I suppose) I have no idea. “I would see things...people and colors and things in the room with me, around my bed.”

She looks over at Charmant. “Brendan?”

He looks irritated, like the kid who always gets called on in class because he’s the only one who ever knows the answer. “When a person enters deep dreaming REM sleep, the brain paralyzes the body so the dreamer doesn’t act out the dream and hurt themselves while they’re unconscious.”

I’m annoyed that he hasn’t looked at me once. It’s like I’m not even sitting here.

He continues, still speaking only to Wendy. “Hypnopompic Paralysis like Ms. Beau is describing”– the use of my last name doesn’t go unnoticed by me–“happens when you wake up while you’re still in REM sleep. The person will be largely unable to move, and may even continue to dream while awake.”

Finally he makes eye contact with me. “This can obviously be terrifying.”

I’m about to volley back something sarcastic like, “No shit, Sherlock,” but instead I push my tongue to the roof of my mouth to discourage my tear glands, which are trying like hell to go into hyper-production. I put on a sudden and brilliant performance of a sneezing attack, which prompts Wendy to hand me a tissue, which allows me to cover my weepy little face and blow my nose.

“Did you tell your doctor about this at the time?” she asks.

“Not at first. But eventually I did.”

“And what did your doctor say?”

“She didn’t know what to make of it so she referred me to a psychiatrist. Not because she thought I was crazy or anything,” I hurry to add. “The psychiatrist barely listened to what I told him. He said I was likely so depressed that I couldn’t get out of bed.”

“What did he say about the visions?”

I shrug. “I hinted around about the things I was seeing. He said he’d probably want me evaluated for schizophrenia.” I pause, reaching for a new tissue. “It was a long time before I mentioned it to anyone again.”

“What did the anti-depressants do for you, if anything?”

I laugh. “They made me tired for one thing, which wasn’t good because by this time I was scared to death to go to sleep.

Wendy flips through my chart. She stops and runs her finger down the page, reading. “So one of your doctors finally suspected narcolepsy. What did you say when he told you that?”

“I told him that couldn’t be right.”