Dust is nothing rare in this island. If you live on an extinct volcano, expect dust. And if your volcano is just a little west of the Sahara, expect occasionally to be enveloped in talcum powder puffed skywards by the desert winds, which turns everything pink.
Sahara dust is an old adversary, though. This new invasion is completely alien. It seems to settle mainly on the floor, much less on the furniture. It takes him a few days to register it fully as something unfamiliar and weird, and when he does, he still can't make out what it is.
Meanwhile his wife is not doing so well. From being perky, optimistic and clearly on the mend she has reverted to lying prone on the sofa for hours, listless and dispirited. When they try to go for a stroll she can hardly make ten paces without pausing to gasp for air. This is not good. And she complains of being cold. 'I'm cold as a corpse,' she tells him, horrifyingly. Yet her skin is burning, hot as a steam iron set for coarse cotton, and the room is like a sauna with the little fan heater whirring all day.
One morning after performing the nine o'clock subcutaneous - that's the injection into her tummy, he's an old hand at it by now - he pauses to examine her skin more closely. She's developing fish scales. Around her midriff but even more obviously on her forearms and her ankles, where her skin is clearly flaking away.
Which explains, neatly and shockingly, the white dust. His wife is losing her outer membrane, in tiny pieces that he sweeps up twice a day. Now, this really is very troubling. Your skin is the biggest organ of the body! Without your skin you dehydrate and die. And if something is killing off her skin, what other damage is it doing, less visibly? No wonder she's feeling poorly.
It has to be a side effect of a medicament. But which one? That same morning he reads carefully once again through all the leaflets he extracted from the packs. They're terrible things to read, flimsy paper with multiple folds and tiny text, and every one of them warns of side effects from mild headaches to fatal convulsions. Most of them include something about skin - eruptions and rashes, dryness and flaking. Really, it could be almost any.
They've already stopped the little joy capsules that gave her a ravening appetite and sleepless nights. Of the remaining stuff, on balance, he suspects the injections. Fierce stuff, it has to be. This is pure gut feeling and entirely baseless, probably provoked by the neatly menacing little syringes like something a Russian assassin might hide in his socks.
While they're pondering this problem and what to do about it, fate takes a hand in the shape of the hospital neurologist. This is their first consultation with a neurologist and the first time he's ever knowingly met one. He was expecting to see, seated behind the desk, a grey-haired academic with square spectacles and a very large forehead, but instead they are greeted by an attractive young woman wearing tailored trousers and smart platform-soled shoes. The crisp white coat is on target though.
She is charming, friendly, down to earth and quietly competent. She takes a look at the MRI brain scan, available at the click of a button on her computer screen, and asks what happened. His wife explains that she had some kind of attack. She's not good at describing this, she wasn't watching it from the outside, so he augments her account with a live-action replay using arms and legs.
The neurologist keys the details into her report. She examines the latest prescription for medicaments, queries the one that comes in little syringes: 'How long have you been on this?' Weeks, we admit.
'She's not feeling too good,' I offer. The neurologist nods sympathetically. 'I'm not surprised.'
Time to come off the emergency firewater, then, and on to a gentle long-term anticoagulant you can simply swallow as a little pill. The neurologist writes a note to take to our family doctor, arranges a date for the next neurological consultation and ushers us charmingly back into a world that now looks a little brighter.
Within a couple of days he's got his perky wife back again. Still a long hill to climb but she's heading upwards again rather than down. He continues sweeping skin from the floor for several more weeks but gradually it thins and disappears like the last snows of winter.
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