“No,” I said. We’d had this conversation before and I was over it. I needed answers and I needed them now. “Listen, I have life stuff happening, and I just can’t live like this anymore. I have to get to the bottom of why I’m still struggling to recover fully. It’s been nine months.” Nine months since the second-worst day of my entire life.

Dr. Henry nodded. He leaned back in his chair and said, “Have you considered the possibility that your symptoms are a sort of self-protection?”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Nick, you suffered a major trauma,” Dr. Henry said. “It could be that your—”

“Are you about to tell me that the numbness in my leg, my heart racing, and my forgetfulness are all in my head?” I asked. I wanted to yell. I was not mental. This was not imaginary. And I resented that first Jackson and now Dr. Henry both seemed to think I had a sort of post-stroke PTSD happening.

“I want to refer you to a colleague of mine, a specialist,” Dr. Henry said.

My eyebrows raised. “Why haven’t you mentioned him before?”

“You weren’t ready,” he said. He opened the top drawer of his desk and took out a business card. He reached across the desk and handed it to me. “Give Dr. Franks a call and tell him I sent you.”

I looked down at the card, expecting to see an alphabet soup of letters after the doctor’s name. There wasn’t. There was just a word in italics off to the side but it still hit me like a slap across the face. I glanced up at Dr. Henry. “A psychiatrist?”

“It’s the only remaining avenue of help I can offer you,” he said.

When we got home, I couldn’t stomach the thought of food. I excused myself and disappeared into my room. I sulked in there for a couple of hours, contemplating what I should do. I was not going to a head doctor. No way. No how. Forget about it. There was nothing wrong with my mind. It was my body that was damaged. Dr. Henry had just run out of ideas. Clearly, I needed to get a second opinion and possibly a third. There had to be someone out there who understood why I had become a prisoner in my own body.

Alone, I pushed myself up to my feet. My leg felt fine at the moment, which was a relief but it was always shadowed by the anxiety of wondering when it would go out again, which caused me to spiral into a swamp of fear that I had to claw my way out of. It was exhausting.