“Coming, coming, coming.”
The nape of my neck heated. Nope. No thoughts were going there. I watched as her character vaulted over a ledge and rushed around a corner before the duo bared down on her. I watched as her little hands clicked around on the controller, her little tongue caught in between her lips as she concentrated on avenging my little animated character.
Who was apparently dressed as a red pickle.
“Yes!” she hissed as she lifted her controller into the air in triumph. “They’re dead. Where are you?”
I used my controller to shuffle out of the corner and she came over to revive me.
“That was some serious shooting,” I said as I looked over at her.
She peeked back over at me with a light in her eyes that I hadn’t yet seen. “Thanks for bringing this up, Doc.”
I just shook my head. “No thanks needed, Miss Elizabeth. Mindsets are incredibly important when healing. Our brains hold more control over our bodies than we’d like to think.”
“Oh?” she asked as she turned to me a bit. “How so?”
“Well,” I said as the game shot us back to the lobby, “there are a multitude of studies that we’ve done on the brain, most in the last decade, that have proven that mind over matter really is a thing.”
She tilted her head. “I’m not following.”
“Take, for example,” I said as I set my controller down in my lap, “cancer patients. If you’ve ever watched a documentary on our medical field, or even just a medical show, you’ll see at least once where a doctor is doing their damnedest to lift their patients spirits during hard procedures. Sometimes you’ll even encounter moments where an adult has a moment of dread before a surgery, and so the surgical staff will change the date of the surgery just because of the mindset. And that’s because we’ve been able to prove that in a stressful-enough situation, the brain will actively attempt to cut itself off from the body in order to save itself.”
Her jaw dropped open. “You’re fucking kidding.”
I shook my head. “I’m really not. We’ve been able to prove that, given a scenario where the brain feels like the body is going to be too much of a burden, we’ve been able to record moments through brain scans and wave charts that, yes. There are moments where the brain actively works against the body if it feels the body has become a burden. It’s the dual dichotomy of the body having its own immune system and the brain having its own immune system.”
Her eyes bulged. “The brain has a what now?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said as my hands came into view, moving the way they always did whenever I sank myself into a rant. “The blood-brain barrier is nothing more than the brain’s immune system. That’s why, when doctors talk about medications, it’s important for those meds to get past that barrier. Otherwise our body’s immune system will simply filter out the medication before it can do anything good for us.”
She blinked at me. “That’s the wildest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“The body is, in my opinion, the last true wild west we’ve got.”
“I thought that was Alaska.”
We stared at one another for a moment before laughter bubbled up the back of my throat. It burst from her lips just as it did mine, and the sound of our intertwined giggling cemented itself into my memory. I wasn’t sure why my brain actively tried to hold onto every single memory with her that I could. But it was good hearing her laugh instead of hearing her scoff.
I’d have to do some research on that, though.
My brain was way too focused on her whenever I was around her.
“Oh, Doooooc!”
Anna’s sing-song voice was the only thing we heard before Miss Elizabeth’s bedroom door slammed open.
I grinned. “Anna. You know you need to knock before you whip doors open.”
She leaned against the doorframe and waved her hand dismissively through the air. “Brutus needs you, Dee.”
I nodded as I slid out of the bed. “Let him know I’m coming.”
“Sure thing!” Anna chirped as she backtracked down the hallway.
“And knock on doors before you open them!”
“Okay, Dad!”
