ON SCRATCHING

The Thing

The elegant Lady G visits me most mornings with a cappuccino and cheerful gossip. She is an acquaintance of Isabella and a distinguished research doctor at this clinic, where she works in a lab. She is another new friend who is generous and kind, and someone I would never have met otherwise.

She tells me a lovely story about a woman who became paralysed and could only communicate by winking. The woman was becoming very agitated and Lady G was worrying about her: was she having a heart attack? Was there something terribly wrong with her that she couldn’t communicate? With the use of an alphabet board the woman was able to explain at last that she had an itch on her nose that she needed scratching. It was making her mad.