My name is Judith Santana. I am thirty-two years old, and I work as a billing coordinator for a chain of veterinary clinics in Covington, Kentucky, which means I spend my days ensuring that dog owners pay for their golden retrievers’ dental cleanings, a procedure that costs, on average, forty dollars more than my own last dental visit. This is its own category of depressing, but it is not the depressing I want to talk about today.

It was a Saturday in June, Leo’s birthday, and Freya had converted our modest three-bedroom ranch on Dorsy Avenue into something that could only be described as a Pinterest board for a man who once told me his ideal birthday consisted of a good steak and nobody talking to him. There were streamers. There was a banner. There was a cake shaped like a football, which made no sense because Leo’s sport was bowling, but Freya had a vision, and questioning Freya’s vision was something you simply did not do if you wanted the rest of your afternoon to pass in any version of peace.

I had been feeling wrong for five months before that afternoon.It started as a tingle in my feet, the pins-and-needles sensation you get from sitting too long in the same position, except that I was not sitting too long. I was standing, walking, living my ordinary life, and the sensation was there regardless. Then came the fatigue, the crushing kind that made eight-hour shifts feel like marathons I had not-

trained for, that sent me to bed an hour after dinner and still left me dragging through the next morning. Blurred vision that came and went without warning, once in the middle of processing a claim, the screen going soft and strange for about forty seconds before resolving. My legs giving out completely in the shower one night, no warning, no stumble, just a sudden absence of structure beneath me, my hand catching the grab bar we had installed for Freya’s visits and my heart hammering against my ribs in the dark.READ MORE STORIES BELOW…