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A journey to the medical netherworld (2016)
If your child gets sick, hope for something mechanical. Failing that, wish for something commonplace. This is a mother's quest to find her daughter a diagnosis.
It helped that we were both science journalists, who routinely spent our workdays searching PubMed, reading scientific papers, interviewing scientists and doctors and weighing the merits of research findings. I found a US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) website that described how some children, following a strep infection, show a sudden, dramatic onset of obsessions, compulsions, tics, irritability and separation anxiety. But there was one big problem: the procedure involved not only inserting an IV into her arm for two days, but also multiple draws of blood and cerebrospinal fluid— aka a “spinal tap.” Our daughter was needle-averse at the best of times; in her current state, I worried that she might attack anyone who came near her with one.
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