In Extremis

Normally I like having E show up in a dream, and while it was nice to see her last night, the circumstances were really quite disturbing.

We were somewhere together, and it was in some sort of classroom setting. I vaguely remember something about a parking lot and crossing the lot, though I’m not sure what the connection was. Maybe it was our arrival where ever, I’m not sure though.

Anyway, we were in this class type setting, with three or four other older women who were doing some sort of exercises. We were being led by a lady neurologist. E and I weren’t really doing the exercises but more just hanging out. E was having trouble though. She wasn’t feeling well, but putting her usual brave face on it, and trying to push it into the background. Then she turned to me, and I could see that she was in distress. She was showing a physical symptom that you just couldn’t miss. She didn’t want me to do or say anything, but I called over the teacher, who stopped the class and came to see her. The neurologist/teacher said “no, that’s serious, get her to the hospital right now.” The funny thing was that the symptom she was showing had no relation to the problem that she was experiencing, which is the problem that she is waiting to be diagnosed with.

I took her to the hospital, and the next scene was us in an examining room, with her being checked by a doctor. For some reason I was also being checked, and that lead into a separate segment of me performing the “tests” associated with E’s problem. Mostly it involved me drawing a star on a big paper with a big black marker. I had to draw a pentagram without lifting the pen and at first they were measuring where the points were that I stopped. Then they stopped doing that because I was having trouble with it, and I just had to draw the image. But I was having trouble doing that too. I couldn’t make the lines go where I needed them to. At one point I even couldn’t control my hand and made marks on the page where they weren’t supposed to be. And then they made my try to draw it with my left hand. All of this was going on with me alone somewhere, and out beyond me was a big open green field with a big circular cement slab of some sort in it. The result of the “test” was that I failed it.

Things cut back to the examining room again, and there was a crowd of people in there and there was a doctor guy who was taking everyone’s blood pressure. I was feeling lousy, and my left arm was numb or tingling or something, and when he took my pressure in that arm he told me it was “in extremis”, which was some sort of medical term (which was bad). He tried my right arm and it was okay, but close. I even saw the in extremis part of the gage. E’s doctor came, and everyone else cleared out. I knew that my result meant that Dr G would be ordering an MRI for me. I knew that E was also in extremis, which was why we were here in the first place.

E gave me a smile and said “woo hoo, your blood sugar is under 30 too!”

Then she said something about “well I’d better be staying in her only over the weekend” and she seemed quite set on that. I asked her if she wanted me to go to her house and pick up some things for her and bring them back. She gave me a bit of a confused look and said “gee, I don’t know”.

The dream faded out quite rapidly then and I woke up.