There was simply no accounting for it.
It all began months ago. The irony of it was that she knew the exact moment it had started. It was in late November, she remembers the incident clearly. It was on one of her Thursday evenings. One of those times she would regularly set aside for what she liked to call her random reading. This being the one activity in her highly ordered life of working in the strict and methodical environment as a means test assessor in the city’s tax office, that wasn’t organised. She privately enjoyed the whimsical nature of it.
On this particular occasion she had approached her multi-shelved bookcase with her eyes closed. She had pulled out a book at random and settled down in her comfy reading chair, as was her custom. She opened the book, it happened to be the King James Bible, giving no thought as to where it would open, and began to read.
At Genesis 19 she read with great interest how two angels had visited Lot in the city of Sodom. How they had told him to take his wife and daughters out of the city before it was destroyed, and how they were told not to look back, and how his wife looked back and was turned into a pillar of salt. Following her reading session she sat down to supper, only to find that her life was about to change radically. She became really sick.
Over the following months she had grown weaker, with her immune system gradually shutting down day by day. During this period she had several doctor’s appointments, a number of expensive visits to Psychiatrists and two CT scans. Despite all this medical analysis, it remained a complete mystery how this collision of synapses within the brain had brought about the life-threatening condition. A strange and unknown malady that was rapidly taking her to an early grave. The entire affair was a complete mystery, both to her and to the dozen or so medical professionals.
How could a simple passage from the Bible bring about such an unexpected and life-threatening allergy to pepper?
