Page 16 of Artfully Wild
“Oh my God!” she exclaims, burying her face into her hands. “I thought I heard someone’s voice and Hudson thought I was crazy.”
“Yeah, well, luckily I hung up before the big climax.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
JACOB
“What I can tell you is that while the migraines seem to be getting worse, there isn’t any obvious sign as to why.”
A new doctor, Dr. Adams, recently started at the hospital a few months ago and Skylar wasted no time trying to get me to come see her, because apparently Dr. Adams is a neurologist who has some kind of subspecialty in headache medicine. Sky said she’s one of the best in the country, and for whatever reason she is at the one hospital a few miles outside of our small mountain town.
Dr. Adams words repeat in my head, a needle scratching against a broken record. It’s the story of my life. I’ve gotten second opinions from other doctors in the past, but I was never able to get any concrete answers. One doctor chalked it up to chronic migraines and left it at that. Another one thought I had an extremely rare condition where the migraines are caused by blood vessels in the brain being constricted, but I think that doctor was just trying to diagnose me with anything so they could have some rare kind of disease diagnosis for a researchpaper. I don’t even remember the name of it, just that the diagnosis didn’t fit me.
I’m exhausted…tired of once again getting no answers. It feels like the more I go to any doctor, the more questions I have—which is why I stopped going to the doctor a few years ago. They couldn’t help me and it seemed like my migraines had subsided enough that I could live my life normally for the most part. But over the last year or so, they’ve just gotten progressively worse and I’m to the point that I can’t risk being stubborn anymore. Of course I’m afraid to get a diagnosis, but I think I’d rather have answers over not knowing and it getting worse over time.
“I figured you’d say that,” I say, disheartened. Dr. Adams gives me a sympathetic smile, one I’m sure she gives to all her patients right before delivering bad news.
“Well, I’d still like to run more tests if you’d be okay with that.” She flips through the pages of her clipboard, pausing in the middle. “So the last time you addressed this was a few years ago?”
Surprised she’s digging even a page beneath the surface instead of sending me off with another prescription for the migraine medicine I already take, I nod my head.
I don’t really want to do further tests, but I did come here for a solution and if that’s the way I’m going to get it, then so be it.
“I’m all in here, doc. I just need to figure out how to prevent them. Or at least lessen the intensity.”
“I understand, Mr. Sinclair, I do. I used to suffer from them myself and still do sometimes, to be frank.”
I don’t think I’ve ever had a doctor admit to suffering from anything serious. When you go to the doctor, you don’t ever really think of them being sick. They’re the ones who are supposed to fix you, not the other way around.
“I think the best course of action right now is to increase thedosage of your current medication to see if that will help prevent the migraines from pushing through. I’ll also prescribe you an as-needed medication to take for the ones that do make it through. For those, you can take them every two hours. And be sure to drink plenty of water throughout the day. You might feel a bit more tired than usual and you should refrain from drinking as it can make the effects of alcohol stronger, but one drink is okay. I’ll follow up with you in a few weeks to see how it’s going and we can make a plan from there, okay?”
She says all of this in a way that isn’t condescending or like she is talking down to me as if I wouldn’t understand it. But, she’s actually taking me seriously. My voice is being heard and she isn’t acting as if the pain I’ve been in for years is a lie.
She’slisteningtome.
A warm feeling grows within my chest and spreads throughout my body. One I didn’t think I’d ever feel when it came to the medical side of my life. All I’ve ever felt was despair and darkness. But now, for the first time in a long time, I feel light in my chest.
I feel hope.
CHAPTER NINE
JACOB
“Do we go with cornflower blue or azure?” Skylar turns toward me, holding up two shades of blue.
Trying to hold in my laughter at the face I know she is about to give me, I grab the lighter sample card from her hand. “I canazureyou, I have never heard of cornflower blue before.”
Sure enough, she levels me with theSky-is-the-most-annoyed face. The only one that rivals theSky-is-completely-over-your-bullshitface. I might be, too, if I was boring and hated paint related puns.
“C’mon,” I joke, giving her shoulder a playful nudge. “My puns are hilarious and you know it.”
She puts the cornflower blue sample back on the shelf and picks up a darker shade labeled everton blue. “Jacob, they stopped being funny about twenty minutes ago.”
“Don’t act like you aren’t anticipating the next one,” I tease. Picking up another sample, I turn to her, “So, why exactly are we at a hardware store for paint and not at a craft store or something?”
“Because,” she takes the sample from my hand and places itback on the shelf. “I have plenty of acrylic and oil paints to use, but if we want to do blue for the backdrops on all of the portraits, then we need a lot of it.”
One thing we discussed before was what color the backdrop should be for the dogs and she settled on different shades of blue depending on the breed, hence the blue shade debacle in the aisle.
