The Nincompoop

My sister can really be a nincompoop. (She doesn’t read this blog and don’t tell her I said so! Hahahaha. She already knows what I think.)

My baby sister is an amazing human being and very active and busy parenting my darling niece and nephew, going to school, working, and dancing. I adore her. Even when she is a brat. She is also the sweetest person ever of course and lets me stay with her and picks me up at the airport etc. She is a fantastic sister.

And she is in a wonderfully happy phase. (May it last her whole life long.)

But I have seen her suffer, and I have taken her to the hospital, and I have been on the receiving end of her cranky periods. Hell hath no fury…like a grumpy Pearse.

And she is a sleepwalker and since childhood I have followed her to open doors in the middle of the night and kept her from trying to go out a second story window in an unfamiliar hotel room just a few years ago.

So in the last few weeks I emailed her and asked if she had ever been tested for porphyria. I assumed she had not but wanted to be diligent and ask, and also thought maybe it would ring a bell if any doctor along the way had ever even mentioned it in passing.

She never responded of course, which I know means~she is busy, no she has not been tested, never considered it, and she doesn’t want to talk about health things because she is sick and tired of being sick and tired and especially sick and tired of people in our family being sick and tired. And she is Moving Forward.

And its true, healthy people don’t go around talking about their health.
Unhealthy people go around talking about it.

But tonight we spoke on the phone and so I asked, “Sister, have you ever been tested for porphyria? “
And she literally yawned and said “No, and I looked at your email but it doesn’t sound like anything I ever had.”

“Well”, I said, nice and calm after my seven days of steroids, “two of the primary symptoms can be severe head pain and severe abdominal pain, and if I remember correctly you spent your entire twenties in extreme abdominal pain.”

She finished yawning and said “Yes, that is true, but that is most likely because I was taking ibuprofen about every eight hours since I was 14 years old.”

“And why were you taking the ibuprofen?”

“For my migraines,” she answered.