The interesting thing is the test for CJD is "do we detect prions in one of these three places", one of which is cerebrospinal fluid, which so far as I can tell needs to be done at the CDC because that test took three weeks.

The lame thing is the interfamilial recriminations created around "if the doctors haven't figured it out it's obvious you're failing" aimed at my aunt. I don't know that we'll ever recover. My wife and I did a fair amount of looking over doctor's notes and lab requisitions just so we could say "yeah, looks like they're doing all the things and the studies they're referencing aren't ones you find casually, these guys are really digging" and it STILL wasn't enough. I actually suggested Jedi-mind-tricking my other aunt into inviting my sister out with her just so she had someone to ricochet off of without tearing the fucking family apart (it appears to have worked). So it wasn't so much just the ridiculously bad illness? It was the nature of everyone in the family to go HELP HARDER and figure out a way to blame the people on the ground.

"Oops, I guess it wasn't mad cow" is so far out of the probability fan that it sounds like a Mr. Bean episode. There were so.many.people behaving badly and no provisional diagnosis would shut them the fuck up.