Last fall my husband Gary and I moved to be closer to my sister. New town, new house, new everything, and that meant finding Maddie a new pediatrician. That’s how we landed with Dr. Okafor.

Sharp woman. Kind, but the kind of sharp where you can tell she actually reads what’s in front of her instead of just skimming. She sat there going through Maddie’s whole file, all forty-seven pages, slow and careful while we waited.

Then she stopped on one page and looked up at me over her glasses. “Who ordered the original EEG?” she asked.
“Dr. Linden,” I said. “Back at Children’s Medical Center.”
She flipped a few pages back, then forward again. Frowned a little. “There’s no EEG in this file.”
“Well, he said she had one,” I told her.

She didn’t answer right away. She went back through every page, real slow, and then she set the folder down. She told me there was no record of any brain test at all. No EEG. No MRI. Nothing. The whole diagnosis, she said, was built on a single office visit. One visit. I sat there with this cold feeling crawling up my back, telling myself there had to be some mistake, some page that got lost in the move.

Dr. Okafor ordered both tests that very week, the EEG and the MRI. I kept telling myself she was just being thorough, just covering all her bases. Maddie was scared of those big machines, so I held her little hand the whole time and kept whispering, “It’s okay baby, they’re just taking pictures of your head.” Go figure. I was the one who needed the comforting more than she did. Those few days waiting felt like a year.

When the results came in, Dr. Okafor called me into her office and sat me down, which I’ve lived long enough to know is never a good sign. The EEG came back normal. No seizure activity. None at all. The MRI was clean too. She folded her hands on the desk, looked right at me, and said it as plain as she could. “Your daughter has never had epilepsy.”