Stories of diagnoses are not clean and tidy, even if the diagnosis itself is profoundly meaningful. Diagnosis is an answer, but it’s not always a comforting one. And the meaning it has for different people, even different members of the same family, can be mixed. “When Emily got sick, I was a mess,” said Jim Brackett. His daughter Emily suddenly began throwing up after car rides or spinning in the yard when she turned five years old. At first he and Emily’s mother, Beth, thought it was intense motion sickness. But soon Emily was having regular stomach pain and headaches. Her face began to look as if one side were tilting, and she was struggling to balance. One day she was shrieking from the pain in her head, and her parents took her to the hospital. But doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her—it wasn’t an infection or a diagnosis like cancer. Emily saw multiple doctors and received few answers. “I was a worrier.…