Anosognosia is the inability to grasps the concept of one’s own sickness. A sufferer has another mental disorder, let’s use delusional disorder, but is unaware that they suffer from delusional disorder. Even if others tell them, they reject it as false. It can vary over the course of a person’s life, they can be more accepting of their reality at times, but when anosognosia sets it, the person has no idea that their own mind is distorting the nature of their reality. This isn’t a hard thing to wrap your brain around, is it? It makes sense that a person would be unaware that their actions while victim of their mental disorder were having a negative impact on someone else; that explains why their compassion for their loved ones can’t overrule whatever erratic behaviors they succumb to that leads to real pain for loved ones. But imagine living with any of the many mental afflictions that exist; imagine schizophrenia that causes a person to get lost in delusion, imagine that as the default setting for existence. It is not an ideal way to live, but there is something cruel about having that affliction and not knowing that you are suffering. At least tell me why things are so scary or different for me so that I can do whatever I can to overcome it, if that is even a possibility.
Someone told me that we can get used to anything. Many people struggle to accept that the present won’t always look the way it does right now, that people we love will be inaccessible or that bad things will happen, but most of us adapt because we don’t have any say in the matter. If we want to continue existing in the world, then we have to accept it for what it is and obey its laws. Humans survive on their adaptability. I wish that I could have everything that I wanted, the way that I wanted it all the time, and maybe I’ll get that in my life time if I strike gold or something, but until I do, I accept life’s challenges everyday that I wake up and I make due because I want to be alive. That is how you treat anosognosia.
Donna Moss loves a good textbook. It can be any subject, as long as it is more than 400 pages, has a multipage index, chapters with subheadings. It can be hard to trace an afinity back to it’s source, but for Moss, it is most likely the fact that her parents are professors and she used textbooks as toys in her youth. Of course the attraction becomes more intimate with age; as she grew older, Moss found that she preferred reading to most other activities because it expanded her understanding of her own existence. She liked to know things that others did not and she liked to share information with people. She wanted to become a doctor when she understood that they put knowledge of the human body to such practical use that they were known to resurrect the dead. She didn’t have a god complex, but if a person cared to be philanthropic, what more profound way exists to show love of human life? She didn’t mind the decades of schooling that it took to become a doctor, and in reality she struggled to wean herself off of the student lifestyle when she started her internship. She just loved finding a cozy place to sit and getting lost in something that she did not know very well.
Her work with Dr. Eakran has not changed her as much as her partner in the basement, Dr. Frederick Cousins, believes. The work they do in the basement is perfectly suited for her curiosity and she has flourished under his tutelage. She proposed the therapies for Giovanni that had improved his ability to socialize with Aspergers, the poop transplant that changed the makeup of his gut bacteria. The procedure had very limited impact on other patients, but after Eakran entrusted her with his most intimate and shocking secret, she wondered what impact his alien gut bacteria would have on a patient. Eakran had performed this experiment years before he started at the IBF because he was interested in the effect of Earthling microbes on his own Druont physiology, and he knew the drastic effect that it would have (he had marveled at the complex intricacies of Earthling biochemistry), but after working with Moss so closely, he came to admire her thirst for discovery and enjoyed watching her pour over data and draw conclusions.
Moss did not take the news that Eakran is an alien with any real shock or surprise. When she thought about it, many things about him made sense when she found out. His accent never really sounded like one that had originated on the African continent, and it wasn’t quite Canadian either. And his hands seemed strange to her, like they were too perfect or manufactured. When she found out, she was curious and she felt like the luckiest person in the world that she had the chance to ask questions of a being from another planet. Eakran never told her why he trusted her with his secret, but she was honored by it. And from that day, she devoted herself to his causes because she knew that he could give her knowledge that no one else on Earth could. They both agreed not to tell Cousins because he would struggle to keep the secret, not because he was bad at keeping secrets, but because he would feel an obligation to share the advanced technologies and knowledge that Eakran was privy to.
Moss learned why she was creeped out by Eakran’s perfect hands when he removed them and showed her his true hands. Each with two long fingers and the thumb with the talon like nail. Moss was mesmerized by the anatomy of the hand and the engineering of the prosthesis that had covered it. And as they stood in his office and he engaged the locks on his door from his desk, sealing it completely, she watched him press the wall behind his desk, and then a panel emerged revealing three holes that he placed his fingers into. He removed the panel to reveal gadgets from his home planet that he explained to Moss. She was in heaven.
Now, it seems like a nightmare. She felt her body moving and enacting all of the moves that Eakran had made that day when he told her his secret that she swore to protect. She was moving and she didn’t really know why. And when things feel like normal again, when she is piloting her own ship, she is standing before Eakran’s hidden panel. Only, Eakran is not there, but Cousins is there with the new patient, Maria, both of whom are stunned to silence looking at the high tech machinery in the hidden panel.
“What have you done?” She asks, looking at Maria intensely.
“Don’t ask her, ask me. What the hell is that stuff?” Cousins asks pointing at the hidden compartment.
“It’s none of our business. We have to get out of this office right now.” Moss closes the panel in a hurry and scrambles for the button to disengage the lockdown. Cousins beats her to it and grabs her shoulders firmly.
“Tell me what is going on. What are you hiding from me?”
Moss struggles and then she gives up. “It’s not for me to say Rick. When Dr. Eakran is back, I will talk to him and I will tell him that you should know everything. But it’s not for me to say.”
Cousins releases her shoulders and slams a fist hard on the desk. “Tell me this. No, promise me this Donna, promise me that we are here to help these patients. Promise me that we’re not organ harvesting or doing Nazi type experiments on people. Can you do that?”
Moss nods as she pushes the button to open up the office.
“I promise Rick. You know me. I wouldn’t be here if it was something horrific. I care about my patients.”
“Then why don’t you believe Maria?” Cousins asks. “She’s our patient and you believe that mind control exists, but the thought that she was abducted is ludicrous to you?”
“It’s best you talk with Eakran, Rick. Trust me. He will make it all make sense.”
“Unless he doesn’t trust me.” Cousins says. “Then what?”
“Then you got me.” Maria says.
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