Nobody warns you that the cure for a debilitating, often fatal brain disease is a length of silicone tubing with the personality of a retired DMV clerk. But there it is, threaded from my ventricles to my belly, quietly draining the excess cerebrospinal fluid that idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus (iNPH) kept pooling in my skull. I named it Norma, short for “normal pressure,” which felt optimistic at the time. Norma has never once lived up to it.