[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by Rev. Bob

BG:

It's obvious that Symbogen knows more than they're telling her and her family, both from the narrative and the excerpts. I mean, I was in the hospital a month ago and they ran several tests on me, but I never saw the raw data; all I got were the results they summarized for me. For all I know, the CAT scan could've shown all kinds of strange stuff that they decided not to disclose.

As a concrete example, my barium swallow test results got sent to two doctors. One called me to let me know it showed gallstones. The other never mentioned that.

One hopes that the second doctor knew that the first doctor was responsible for telling you about the gallstones. If they knew that each other was getting the results, they may have discussed the results before talking to you.

Parasite discussion with spoilers:

Spoiler:

I'm sure that in the subsequent books it will come out that SymboGen knew all along and was hiding the information because it would have been shut down the moment the public and/or government found out about what was happening. Maybe I should have realized sooner that since this was an first person narrative, and she clearly didn't understand what was going on and had pretty much had to relearn everything from babyhood, that it was an unreliable narrator. For example, I knew that the narrator in Julian Comstock was an unreliable narrator and I found that novel to be a lot more fun.

I'll have to think about it a bit more, especially about all the tapeworm people showing up and spying at Symbogen. Maybe I'll bump it up in my voting, or not.