Breath-holding; another vertebrate

Karen took Jake to the neurologist's neurologist yesterday afternoon. On call, hammered by an emergency, and close to two hours late, but he managed to make time for my son and do a complete neuro exam. My hero! It never fails to impress me when I find a good doctor; I'm so used to the opposite. He thinks Jake may have chronic viral meningitis (which is what my internist -- another good doctor -- thought, too). He wanted to do a lumbar puncture, but he was running too late. He had Karen call me to ask whether I would trust any of the Crescent City doctors to do an LP on my son. (No.) Currently, the plan is for Karen to take Jake back to Medford on Monday, to some hotshot pediatrician who does lumbar punctures on kids all the time. You might ask what good this will do. Well, there is something to be said about knowing. Beyond that, there's no treatment for chronic viral meningitis. Just have to wait it out. On the up side, his headache has been better for over 24 hours now. This is significant. In the last 10 weeks, he's had only one or two other breaks from the headache, and those lasted only a few hours. With any luck, this whole thing might pass, and Jake won't even need an LP. *** We home-school Jacob, which is a damned good thing, since with this illness he hasn't accomplished more than two full days' worth of work in the last 50 school days. A few weeks ago, to con him into doing a bit more work, we promised him another kitty. That will make three cats -- four, if you count Tolerance, who ran off some time ago. Tolerance was Jake's favorite, so this new kitty is sort of a replacement cat. We bought a calico from the Humane Society. I'll post a photo ASAP. Jake named her Emerald, which is a fine name, except it reminds me of Emeril, and no one liked the idea of naming her Emerald LeCatsy. *** Decent writing day: just under 1300 words. It's another battle sequence, which never fails to amaze me because I don't know squat about the military. At my father's suggestion, I read Audie Murphy's book -- well, I read about half of it. Got bored. My next big idea was to buy the PC game Call of Duty. I might not be a veteran (thinks I) but if I finish Call of Duty, I'll have some sense of what war is like, right? But I only finished a third of it. Got bored. I can only pray that my readers will be forgiving. I'm no Joe Haldeman, that's for sure. I'm looking forward to getting John Scalzi's book from Amazon (Old Man's War)to see how he handles his battle sequences. Only one battle sequence left in the novel, and this last one will be a corker. It's unconventional enough that I should be able to get by on imagination alone. D.