Silver mesh covered Donna’s head like a beekeeper’s hat. She wore as much copper jewelry on her ears, neck, nose, wrists, fingers, toes and ankles as she could carry. Some of the newer pieces left ugly green rings on her skin, but she hoped it meant that copper was leaching into her body. She had tried to have copper rods implanted under her skin by a tattoo artist, but the first attempt developed a bad infection leaving her with a hoop-shaped scar on her forehead. Donna also stored silver coins in the folds and furrows of her body. She found that she had to shift them around during the day or ulcers would form, but she liked the ritual of moving them from fold to fold.
It turned out that not being able to have metal implanted was a good thing because it would have interfered with her MRI scans. She went to three difference imaging companies, but told them all she had never before had a scan; she wanted to be sure nothing was missed.
Getting the endoscopy and colonoscopy was more complicated, but a little Internet research and she was able to fake the correct symptoms. The hardest part was eating raw hamburger for two weeks so her stool would turn black. She then went to a second gastroenterologist and demanded a virtual colonoscopy to make sure her small intestines were clean as well.
The most difficult test was the electroencephalograph, which no neurologist would perform without some hard symptoms. Her first idea was to buy some insulin online, inject herself with it to induce hypoglycemia, which would eventually cause a seizure. She planned to inject herself under her tongue, so there’d be no evidence to find, but as she brought the needle to her mouth she changed her mind. She decided instead to fake a migraine, howling in pain until the neurologist called to the Emergency Department hooked electrodes to her scalp.
Everything came back completely clean. Not a polyp, cyst, wave variance, diverticula, ulcer, sclerosis or plaque was found. No hidden hollows, no foreign objects, no hidden creatures or miniature people appeared.
Donna realized things were worse than she feared. The fairies living behind her eyes were invisible to all man-made scans, and impervious to copper and silver. Through it all they had kept on talking to her, kept on conjuring hallucinations, and kept demanding that she jump the fence at the White House and bum rush the president.