Kelly Davio’s previous Waiting Room columns for The Butter can be found here.

Next month Fox brings back its wildly popular show, Empire, featuring Lucious Lyon, the fictional music mogul, record executive, and bad guy of Shakespearean proportions.

Lucious spent the first season of the drama believing he was dying of ALS. But in the final hours of Season One, a smiling neurologist told Lucious he actually has myasthenia gravis, and that it’s “highly treatable.” Shortly after, a home nurse gave Lucious an unidentified shot and told him that, within a short period of receiving these injections, he would be be symptom-free.

Hours after the Empire finale, bloggers were writing their hot takes on Lucious and his revised diagnosis. Slate summed up Lucious’s new reality by saying he has “something non-life threatening called myasthenia gravis.”

To me, a myasthenia gravis patient, the idea that I have “something non-life threatening”—and that there’s a magically curative shot nobody bothered to tell me or the medical establishment about—comes as news.

Someone else who might be surprised to hear from Empire that myasthenia gravis isn’t life-threatening is actual artist, songwriter, and producer Stephen Ellis Garrett, who was diagnosed with MG seven years ago.

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Kelly Davio’s previous Waiting Room columns for The Butter can be found here.

Some weeks ago, I was late for a meeting and waiting at a crosswalk, impatient with the incredibly long red light. Just as the signal finally turned my way and I began my slow progresses from curb to street, a Typical Seattle Biker—white man, brown beard, tight shorts, pointy helmet—came rolling up the curb cut in front of me. He then did what Typical Seattle Bikers do: that unnamable thing of jerking the bike’s handlebars back and forth and bouncing the wheel about. (I’ve asked around, and apparently the goal of the exercise is to “work on balancing” by heaving around in this way.)

I tried to skirt around him, but I’m not all that great with my own balance. The fact that one of my feet doesn’t entirely lift up makes me veer off to the right at times, and in trying to out-maneuver a guy bouncing about on a moving heap of metal, I ended up somewhere between the light post and the local weekly paper’s news stand. By now, the red hand was flashing. There was no way I was making the light, and I was unamused.

“Look,” I told the guy, “I’m just trying to cross the street!”

He gave me an outraged look in return. “And I’m just trying to ride my bike on the sidewalk!”

Kelly Davio’s previous Waiting Room columns for The Butter can be found here.

In my mid-twenties, I sat for my first and only tattoo. It’s a sizable piece on my left shoulder: a wax-sealed envelope nestled in a bed of primroses. In my mind, it was a reminder that, regardless of the bad news of life—the rejection, the failure, the royal screw-ups—good news would come for me, too. There would be acceptances, success, and plans that came off well. It was a simple little affirmation, and it was a beautiful design.

Having wanted the tattoo for some time and having researched what seemed like every artist in the greater Seattle area, I felt proud of my new ink the way I suppose a project manager feels proud of coordinating a team’s efforts. All I’d done was pick the right person and sit without squirming for the three hours it took him to get the ink into my skin; the artist did all the hard work — from the drawing and stenciling to the placement and execution — but I still loved showing off his efforts. Strangers would stop to comment on the beautiful way he’d used color, or ask who’d done the tattoo. I was always happy to direct people to his shop and evangelize his talents.

Kelly Davio’s previous Waiting Room columns can be found here.

I do not have much in common with my neurologist of many years, aside from our mutual interest in keeping me alive. He’s the sort of guy who takes vacations to go shoot at wildlife on the tundra. I, on the other hand, still get creeped out by eating egg yolks. I have a sneaking suspicion he’s of a libertarian bent, while I look at Hillary Clinton and think, “gee, I don’t know. She may be too conservative for my taste.” He wears a fishing vest much of the time for reasons I couldn’t begin to guess at. He finds the fact that I still sometimes insist on tottering around in high-heeled shoes equally perplexing.

But there is one thing we hold dearly in common, and that’s our joint enthusiasm for all things related to the zombie apocalypse. It’s not unusual for us to go over a previous week’s episode of The Walking Dead while he prods at me with spiky instruments, and I typically arrive early at my appointments so we can chat over which new apocalyptic paperbacks he’s reading. If he weren’t so busy with the likes of his patients, the man could, I believe, edit Best Zombie Fiction, 2015.

He recently told me about a new title featuring a character with, of all things, myasthenia gravis—the same rare neuromuscular disease I see him for.