The Anesthesia Game by Rea Nolan Martin

She’s only fifteen. She shouldn’t have to play anesthesia games at all, never mind this often, but whatever. She tries not to waste time feeling sorry for herself. She already knows life isn’t fair. Get over it. If you’re going to survive, you have to turn it into a game you have a chance of winning, a game that makes up for lost time. A game that teaches you how to be awake even when you’re not.

THE ANESTHESIA GAME

40-something Hannah, 50-something Mitsy, and 60-something Pandora indulge in a creative assortment of addictions that obscure the mysterious connection to a common past that haunts them all.

Estate reserve pinot noir, QVC, and a deck of maxed-out credit cards drive Hannah and her Virginia horse farm into a financial corner. Religion, spiritualism, and an addiction to the telephone mystic, Pandora, create the agoraphobic cave into which Mitsy retreats from everyone, including her critically ill 15-year-old daughter, Sydney. Pandora trades her green tea and tofu for the cigarettes, coffee, snickers, fine wine, and hashish that muddy her mystical vision just when she needs it most.

The link to their recovery is Sydney, the child among them, and the stake they all share in her perilous condition and unlikely cure. As Syd submits to weekly treatments for an illness she refuses to grace with a name, she plays The Anesthesia Game, a game that ultimately leads her to the origin of her disease and a possible way out of the struggle that binds them all.