Sabine by A.P. Page B

anaemia.
    Stuff Sharnack, Horwath and Thibault, says Sabine with all the force she can muster – not a great deal nowadays – and bids me go on reading.
    Definition: The term chlorosis (from the Greek χλωρóζ, meaning green) indicates a particular dystropho-regulatory syndrome, composed of disorders in the psychic, neurovegetative and endocrinological systems, combined with haematic and vascular alterations, exclusively affecting young women at or around the age of puberty.
    Snort.
    The anaemia which the syndrome typically presents is hypochromic, normochilic, non-haemolitic and hyporegenerative, and is characterised by a pallid greenish skin colouring, particularly evident in the face. It is this last to which the syndrome owes its name.
(For further description, see
Van Boorden, Markovich, Robeck, etc.)
    She looks in the little mirror she keeps by her bedside and drops it limply on the floor: the green is there OK. Stuff Van Boorden, Markovich and Robeck too.
    Symptoms: Besides the anaemia and the greenish pallor, which are the prime symptoms of the disease, the most commonly observed flanking symptoms are: asthenia, anorexia, irregularity in the menstrual cycle, irascibility of temper, virilism …
    Virilism?
Virilism?
(This really rouses her.) Stuff the lot of them, Dr la Forge first on the list. They can take their virilism and their latinism and their total, total, absolute, irredeemable cretinism and shove them up their rectums. Recti. Recta. Rectis, rectorum, or wherever. They haven’t found the cause of the blood loss, they haven’t fucking found where I’m fucking bleeding
from.
And until they find out that and put a stop to it, all these iron pills and tonics and things are worse than useless. It’s written there, I think, a little further on. Under ‘Therapy’. Look, try page 1151. The one with the sexy photographs.
    Like her hand, the joke is limp, but at least shecan still make one. I locate the spot she is seeking and read on:
    As is the case with all anaemias of this type, the first therapeutic steps must be directed at: 1) locating and arresting the haemorrhage; 2) repairing blood volume; 3) treating the patient for shock and/or collapse; 4) restoring globular volume by means of …
    Yeah, yeah, I thought so. It’s one, see. It’s step fucking one. Not two or three or fifty
foutu
five, but one, and they still haven’t got round to taking it.
    This is the fighting stage, Sabine is in the fighting stage. She is fighting the disease and the diagnosis and the doctors all on the same front, her medical books piled round the bed like a barricade. Dr la Forge has advised Ghislaine to remove them, stealthily, overnight, a volume at a time – there is no patient more tricky, he says, than a first-year medical student – but so far she hasn’t had the heart. The books, weighty as they are, seem to be the only thing that is keeping Sabine anchored to the earth. Much of the time she is floating around Lord knows where, light-headed, slow-pulsed, swoony, with her eyes rolling back in her head like marbles; it is agonising to watch her, agonising. But the books with the long complicated words inside them that I barely understand and Ghislaine not at all still have the power to bring her back to us now and again, reeling her in from the clouds like a wayward kite.
    She has summoned up enough energy now to takethe volume from me, and is scrabbling through the section labelled ‘Etiology’. I’m not quite sure what this is, but I reckon it must be causes. Ectopic pregnancy, she announces with another snort. Well, it can’t be that.
    I don’t know what ectopic means either and have to ask.
    Means extra-uterine. Means outside the uterus. Means outside the womb,
bête.
Means the fertilised ovum is in your tubes, up your nostrils, wherever you like but not in the womb. Anyway, it can’t be that. Leukaemia neither, or