A ten-year-old Amanda wandering around the sights and sounds of a carnival. Trying to take it all in as such an event was much larger than the backroads of isolated territory from whence she grew up. She could not imagine this many people assembled in one place. It was made more disturbing by the fact none of them seemed familiar. Short for her age, she wandered unnoticed among the crowds and began to feel the first stirrings of fear. The loud talk, the screaming children, the long lines of procession, along with the myriads of odors created a miasma that she wanted to flee. The laughter and the faux expressions of joy on the faces of people, took on the maroon tones of a nightmare. She could imagine underneath the laughter, were horrid screams about to erupt.

and I told myself -- as I've told myself before -- that the body shuts down then the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn't slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.

The canter is a cure for every evil.

Each of us carries a sleeping tiger inside, and we can__ predict when that cat will wake, stretch, and sharpen its claws.

... but as with so may diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you.

Before I knew it, I was once again being whisked down the hallways at the new hospital into an even bigger room, one that, unbeknownst to me, would be my home for what would feel like a long, long time.