The following might be a little garbled. This is sort of like drunk dialing, except the only thing I'm drunk on is exhaustion. I spent half the day at the Cleveland Clinic today– for once a good experience.
The geneticist does not think I have Ehlers Danlos, or any other bizarre and rare disorder. She went through my family history with a fine toothed comb and found nothing that suggests it (no sudden young deaths, for instance). She looked me over top to toe and decided that while I'm bendy, I'm within the normal range of bendiness. She even claimed my elbows "don't hyperextend"! I said, "You don't call this hyperextending??" demonstrating my broken arm impression. She recoiled and nearly yelled, "DON'T do that!! It can really damage your joints." But how else can I show her…? Anyway, appalling as that may be, it's not part of a larger whole. Indeed, my litany of weirdness does not cohere into anything more than a litany of weirdness. And as for Isaac, she's not worried about him either.
Major PHEW.
We agreed indeed not to even bother with the blood test, as my clinical findings to her were conclusive enough. She did decide I should do the echocardiogram of the heart, and if that showed anything, THEN we could test for something more. (She raise a concern about a cluster of cancers on my dad's side, and so that's a loose end for later.) To my delight, I had no needle stick to deal with today. I just had the ultrasound of the heart which was totally fine, quick, noninvasive. The tech probably wasn't supposed to tell me anything, but she said that everything looked good there too. I guess I'll get the official word later.
So– I drove home feeling much lighter, feeling that I think I can finally close this chapter. I can say, "Okay, I'm basically a normal person who was slammed with some horrendous virus and will gradually recover." That means, closing the acute phase and entering the recovery phase. And no more testing in the foreseeable future!
Tomorrow I'm leaving with the boys for a major midwestern multi-state odyssey. In a Honda Odyssey, fittingly enough, that has just had every possible thing fixed and has been cleaned to unrecognizable spotlessness. I haven't ever taken both boys on a tour like this by myself, so this will be an interesting experience. We're driving to someplace Indiana tomorrow, sleeping in a hotel. Then picking up my aunt Marilyn near Chicago, and her little dog Ping, and driving onward to my mom's farm in Iowa. There we will enjoy… 100 sheep… 13 horses… two mini donkeys… a tame crow… a pond full of frogs and toads and tadpoles of all sizes…a giant black and white spotted great Dane… a possible treehouse building project… possible sheep wool dog bed felting project… and perhaps most importantly the TrekFest in Riverside Iowa ("The future birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk"). The boys will get to actually BE in the parade! Throwing candy to everyone and probably ingesting a bit of it too. There's going to be an attempt to break the Guiness Book World Record for most people in one place in Trek costumes. We won't participate, but it should be quite a sight to see them try. After all that we're heading up to Minneapolis for the 4th, where Ben will join us, and then back home.
Which brings me to the exhaustion part. Can I pull this off? It's just mind over matter, baby, mind over matter.