This is a tale of sicknesses. Bug’s sicknesses. She’s my wife. In making it into a coherent narrative, it has been compressed. The ‘action’ spans more than ten years: Bug was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in the late nineties, with the other events occurring over the next decade. Given this focus, it shows only one side of our lives. As we discussed the drafts, Bug and his actually makes sense; it has been hard to reconcile ‘the calamities’—that’s what we call them, as in ‘Bob, remember how before my calamities I used to do funk aerobics?’—with the other parts of what are kinda cool lives.

So, yeah, this is just one of our stories. It goes like this.