Dry Ice Read Free Page B

in a protracted discussion with a business associate of Raoul's who was inexplicably fascinated with the delivery of the Internet over the electrical grid. Lauren put her lips close to my ear and asked if I would mind leaving the festivities early.
        "What's up?" I said. Still whispering, she admitted she was beginning to feel foggy and that her thinking was sluggish—a condition she'd long ago labeled "brain mud." We had come to consider the onset of brain mud a warning sign of an imminent multiple sclerosis event, either a fresh exacerbation of her disease, or, if we were lucky, merely an irritation of an existing lesion. A fresh exacerbation meant a new symptom, which could be a crisis. An irritation would usually mean a temporary rerun of an old, unpleasant episode.
        I excused myself at the precise moment my companion was getting into the meat of his argument about the money that could be made by people with vision. I didn't exit the conversation reluctantly—those days I counted myself among the blind masses.
        On the way home I checked with Lauren about a chronic problem that had only recently waned—deep pain that crept up her legs from the soles of her feet, sometimes reaching all the way to her hips. The pain had been worsening gradually over a period of years. During the previous eighteen months it had become insistent enough that it was one of her major daily challenges.
        The agony had caused her to go on and off narcotic painkillers, but Vicodin and Percocet had proven less than effective palliatives. Even when they helped she despised the sedation that came along for the ride. Any discussions we'd been having about having a second child became a casualty of her chronic pain and her reliance on narcotics. We hadn't talked about conception in months.
        Cannabis provided her with some relief, but she had reached a decision that she didn't want our daughter to associate her mother with the telltale aroma of weed, and she had given up using it. I remained ambivalent about her decision.
        When coupled together, U.S. law and Colorado law regarding cannabis form legal quicksand. For registered users with a prescription, marijuana is legal in the state of Colorado. Federal statutes allow no such exception; marijuana is an illegal drug under U.S. law. Lauren had chosen not to sign up for a state authorization card as a registered marijuana user—she feared the professional consequences if the system's anonymity failed and the news leaked out.
        Although I respected Lauren's concerns about Grace, I was also aware that by choosing to forgo cannabis Lauren was shun ning something efficacious. And where MS symptom-abatement was concerned not too many things were efficacious.
        More selfishly I found that the time we spent together on the high deck of our house in the evenings after Grace was in bed—Lauren toking on her bong, the gurgling water floating with fresh-cut lemon flutes—were nice moments. As the cannabis did its thing and her symptoms abated we often had our softest interlude of the day.

    On the way home from the party Lauren assured me that the pain wasn't worse. We stayed vigilant over the next few days, steeling ourselves for the inevitable caustic punch line to the brain mud—for her vision to deteriorate, for her equilibrium to evaporate, for some muscle to lose its tone or its strength or to begin to spasm, or for her bladder to stop emptying on command, or . . .
        The list of possible consequences was endless. With MS, wherever there was a CNS pathway there was a potential symptom. But nothing emerged. No new symptoms. No reruns of old symptoms.
        Or so I thought. I'd never considered that the new symptom would be the infiltration of some nefarious music-killing poison into her ears.

    "Music hurts," she repeated. "It irritates. It's like . . . rubbing a burn. Or touching a blister. Or having an eyelash in my eye. It's just so . .