The doctor nodded thoughtfully, "Yes. Yes, I see. Any other phenomena like that? Does she see things? Smell things?"
"Smell," Chris remembered. "She keeps smelling something bad in her bedroom."
"Something burning?"
"Hey, that's right!" Chris exclaimed. "How'd you know that?"
"It's sometimes the symptom of a type of disturbance in the chemicoelectrical activity of the brain. In the case of your daughter, in the temporal lobe, you see." He put a hand to the front of his skull. "Up here, in the forward part of the brain. Now it's rare but it does cause bizarre hallucinations and usually just before a convulsion. I suppose that's why it's taken for schizophrenia so often; but it isn't schizophrenia. It's produced by a lesion in the temporal lobe.
Now the test for clonus isn't conclusive, Mrs. MacNeil, so I think I'd like to give her an EEG."
"What's that?"
"Electroencephalograph. It will show us the pattern of her brain waves. That's usually a pretty good indication of abnormal functioning."
"But you think that's it, huh? Temporal lobe?"'
"Well, she does have the syndrome, Mrs. MacNeil. For example, the untidiness; the pugnacity; behavior that's socially embarrassing; the automatism, as well. And of course, the seizures that made the bed shake. Usually, that's followed by either wetting the bed or vomiting, or both, and then sleeping very deeply." "You want to test her right now?" asked Chris.
"Yes, I think we should do it immediately, but she's going to need sedation. If she moves or jerks it will void the results, so may I give her, say, twenty-five milligrams of Librium?" "Jesus, do what you have to," she told him, shaken.
She accompanied him to the examining room, and when Regan saw him readying the hypodermic, she screamed and filled the air with a torrent of obscenities.
"Oh, honey, it's to help you!" Chris pleaded in distress. She held Regan still while Dr. Klein gave the injection.
"I'll be back," the doctor said, nodding, and while a nurse wheeled the EEG apparatus into the room, he left to attend another patient. When he returned a short time later, the Librium still had not taken effect.
Klein seemed surprised. "That was quite a strong dose," he remarked to Chris.
He injected another twenty-five milligrams; left; came back; found Regan tractable and docile.
"What are you doing?" Chris asked him as Klein applied the saline-tipped electrodes to Regan's scalp.
"We put four on each side," he explained. "That enables us to take a brain-wave reading from the left and right side of the brain and then compare them."
"Why compare them?"
"Well, deviations could be significant. For example, I had a patient who used to hallucinate,"
said Klein. "He'd see things, he'd hear things, things that weren't actually there, of course. Well, I found a discrepancy in comparing the left and right readings of his brain waves and discovered that actually the man was hallucinating on just one side of his head."
"That's wild."
"The left eye and ear functioned normally; only the right side had visions and heard things.
"Well, all right, now, let's see." He had turned the machine on. He pointed to the waves on the fluorescent screen. "Now that's both sides together," he explained."What I'm looking for now are spiky waves"--- he patterned in the air with his index finger--- "especially waves of very high amplitude coming at four to eight per second. That's temporal lobe," he told her.
He studied the pattern of the brain wave carefully, but discovered no dysrhythmia. No spikes.
No flattened domes. And when he switched to comparison readings, the results were also negative.
Klein frowned. He couldn't understand it. He repeated the procedure. And found no change.
He brought in a nurse to attend to Regan and returned to his office with her mother.
"So what's the story?" Chris inquired.
The doctor sat pensively on the edge of his desk. "Well, the EEG would have proved that she had it, but the lack of dysrhythmia doesn't prove to me conclusively that she doesn't. It might be hysteria, but the pattern before and after her convulsion was much too striking."
Chris furrowed her brow. "You know, you keep on saying that, doc--- 'convulsion.' What exactly is the name of this disease?"
"Well, it isn't a disease," he said quietly.
"Well, what do you call it? I mean, specifically."
"You know it as epilepsy, Mrs. MacNeil."
"Oh, my God!"
Chris sank to a chair.
"Now, let's hold it," soothed Klein. "I can see that like most of the general public your impression of epilepsy is exaggerated and probably largely mythical." "Isn't it hereditary?" Chris said, wincing.
"That's one of the myths," Klein told her calmly "At least, most doctors seem to think so. Look, practically anyone can be made to convulse. You see, most of us are born with a pretty high threshold of resistance to convulsions; some with a low one; so the difference between you and an epileptic is a matter of degree. That's all. Just degree. It is not a disease."
"Then what is it--- a freaking hallucination?"
"A disorder: a controllable disorder. And there are many, many types of it, Mrs. MacNeil. For example, you're sitting here now and for a second you seem to go blank, let's say, and you miss a little bit of what I'm saying. Well, now that's a kind of epilepsy, Mrs. MacNeil. That's right.
