Today, we seem to be engaged in the latest episode of 'Sinus Wars', and I'm on the losing side. Plus, I'm playing host to a bi of that oh-so-amusing bronchial congestion we all enjoy so much. My voice currently sounds like two dry large rocks being rubbed together...
But then, it's not congestive heart failure, either, to be sure. (And here, I'm afraid, I begin to swerve into dangerous territory) (Or... not) Which reminds me (and I know you knew it would) of a human interest story I read, a few years ago, about a woman who had been diagnosed with a severe, but treatable form of cancer. According to the story, while she went through the rigors of treatment, she was also given a particular instruction, from her physician -- "Medical regimen aside, if you want to do something, do it. And if you don't, don't." The article went on to explore how this simple prescription, along with the rigors of chemotherapy, altered her life.
The thing that I found interesting was my reaction -- not to the challenges of the disease, but rather, to this doctor's advice. I found myself feeling a little jealous. Why couldn't I 'get away' with something so simple, as doing what I wanted, and not doing what I didn't? Why would I need the permission of someone else -- though, in my world, the word of a doctor does carry a certain appreciable weight -- to live, essentially, my own life? And can this kind of leeway only be granted in the case of serious illness?
Even if I thought that being ill or disabled might be to my advantage, I've never been particularly 'good', at sickness. Some people make wonderful patients -- cooperative, agreeable, obedient, not prone to running about with IV drips behind them. In my own case, as an adult, I'm pretty sure I'm less than ideal, under doctor's care. I get cranky, and just want to be left alone. Luckily, I've enjoyed good physical health for most of my life, so this less-attractive side of my personality has remained largely unrevealed. Even my very earliest illnesses, however serious, didn't present much of a challenge, to remain civil while being ill.
When I was just six, and we had just completed our fifth move as a family -- this time, from East St. Louis, to an outlying suburb -- I came down with pneumonia. Because I was only a little boy, I had no idea how ill I was. What I recall mostly was sleeping out on the living room sofa, and my mother's tender solicitude, the doctor's visits (in that antediluvian era when physicians actually left their offices from time to time) and the pills he prescribed for me to -- big pills, yellow ones and white ones, that had a bad smell, and were hard to swallow. I stayed home from school for weeks. When I was well enough to sit up, but not yet well enough to go to school, I ate my breakfast of oatmeal and milk in front of the television, watching Hopalong Cassidy, and the Cisco Kid. When there weren't cowboy shows for my amusement, I would look through my first grade reader -- I must have brought it home with me before I got sick, and I was excited to be able to read.
As I later learned, that winter I almost died. (Is that why my mother was so caring, because of the drama?) Of course, I had no idea how sick I was -- and what would a child do with such knowledge anyway? I did know that, because I had missed so much school, I might have to repeat the first grade. My teacher's greatest concern, she said, was that I wouldn't be able to keep up with the next year's reading. My parents arranged a special visit with her, and as my father stood by, the teacher and I sat at a little table and I read that first-grade reader I'd had at home. All the way through. All by myself. Every word, correct. I could go to second grade after all. I can still recall that little-boy pride, but I'm also afraid that, at some level, I still expect my mother to show up now, when I'm ill now -- an expectation that fills me with dismay.
Later...
I've turned nine years old, my bout of pneumonia is just a vague memory, and I'm living in the great dark house on the hill. It's my week for kitchen duty, and this morning, I'm pouring the milk. With a big, cold aluminum pitcher, filled to the brim, I go from table to table, filling the other children's glasses, or maybe pouring a little milk into a housemother's coffee cup. At the table nearest the kitchen door, the handyman, Mr Phyffe, holds out his bowl of the strange, coarse brown cereal he brings to the table every morning, in a white envelope in his jacket pocket. There are many rumors about what properties this cereal must have. I add milk until he lets me know it's enough, and then I turn to fill the glass held out by one of the older boys. He snatches it back, before I can get the pitcher into position.
'Get away from me,' he yells. 'I ain't drinkin' that milk! You got the mumps!' I start to cry, and run into the kitchen, the remaining milk sloshing in the pitcher.
I'd been afraid of this. There had been a minor outbreak of mumps at The Home. Lots of the kids had gotten them, and rumors about what mumps meant, and what they could do, were in heavy circulation. We heard who had them on one side of their neck, or the other. Who'd had them on both, and was that better or worse? And then that morning, when I'd been brushing my teeth, I thought my neck looked a little taut and swollen. Felt a little warm. But I had hoped it wasn't so -- I hoped no one would notice. It would probably be my fault, and I would get in trouble. And now here I was, standing in the warm kitchen, with Mrs. Boyce, the cook, gently holding my head, and asking me to turn from side to side.
'You'd better go on down to the infirmary,' she said, and she pointed me toward the back door.
Sick kids at The Home didn't stay in the main building. They were housed in a separate facility, an old, two-story white clapboard house, down a steep, narrow side service driveway, and across the road. To me, it felt strange and dangerous, walking down there that morning, all by myself, with no one watching me. There were cornfields nearby, with dried stalks still standing, tall enough maybe to hide someone. There was a thin bit of treeless woods beyond, a dip in the landscape, and then another, larger, denser forest. I thought about many things, as I crossed the two-lane road.
Where would I go? Without my jacket. With the mumps? My face felt hot. My throat hurt. I knocked on the Infirmary door, and the nurse led me in.
What a reprieve. What a miracle. Because most of the other kids had already been sick, and had recovered, I was in a room all by myself, in a big cool clean bed, with smooth sheets, a soft pillow, and an extra blanket. The nurse brought me my meals. I drank big glasses of orange juice. During the day, when I wasn't eating in bed or resting in that bright room, there were books to read, and I had a box of crayons, and some blank paper. It makes me laugh to remember what I drew -- ball gowns. Empty, uninhabited, self-supporting ball gowns. Each of them had the same heart-shaped neckline, and a full, billowing skirt. I put my very best efforts into these fashion fantasies, making up stories for each color combination. It was deeply gratifying. And at night, when the shades had been pulled down, the sheer white curtains drawn, and lights put out, it was quiet. Here, in this house at least, no one had a razor strap. No one got beaten. In this instance, my illness brought me to shelter and safety, when it was sorely needed.
And much more recently, I had a health challenge that probably disturbed John more than it did me. We were living in Jersey City at the time, and I'd been hired, for one semester, to teach glass-blowing classes at an arts university in Philadelphia. I had visited the place, and knew that these classes would keep me on my feet, for six hours at a stretch, in, essentially, a factory setting -- which prominently featured a concrete floor. Two of these classes were for beginners, so I knew I'd be moving almost constantly about on that concrete floor, as I tried to help each student understand, and succeed at, the mystery of glassblowing.
For a year before, though, I'd been having minor trouble with my left leg, and with some veins that had begun to throb and protrude. A surgeon recommended stripping out this pre-varicose venation, and it made sense to do this as a preventive measure, rather than possibly incurring a semester's worth of damage. The doctor said this would be, at most, a half-day procedure, and that I just had to make sure someone could drive me home afterwards. No problem. For better or for worse, right?
The surgery was a snap, as these things go. I had a spinal block, instead of general anaesthesia (we'll talk about that another time, perhaps), so I was awake, more or less, during the procedure. Capable of, say, shifting myself on the table, if the doctor wanted my leg in a different position. They'd draped a blue curtain across my chest -- I was hoping there would be a puppet show-- so mostly I looked at the ceiling, and I remember thinking they really should attend to the acoustic tiles up there -- some of them were broken, or discolored, or water-damaged, and I could see up the suspension system up above them. Only later did it occur to me that this should have given me pause. But as I was also being given a valium drip, I suspect that, had a small, manageable-looking one-alarm fire had broken out in the room, I wouldn't have been too upset.
Later, I woke up (when did I go to sleep, I wondered?) in different ward, in another bed, hooked up to an IV drip, with one of those wheeled poles we see so often on TV. John was due, in a few minutes, to pick me up, but I still had to regain sensation in my legs, and prove to the nurse that my excretory system was fully under my control, before I could be released. My legs proved to be remarkably uncooperative -- perhaps they liked being asleep? Maybe they needed the rest? I kept pounding on them, to see if anyone was home, but the response was negligible. And of course, until the legs decided to reanimate themselves, that other little quiz was out of the question. Pound, wriggle, jiggle, pound. Wiggle wiggle wiggle. I think one of my toes was first to acknowledge its allegiance to, and connection with, a larger entity.
This is how John found me, dressed in that flimsy paper hospital drape (don't tell me it's a gown. I drew real gowns when I had the mumps. I know gowns), still hooked up to tubes and hanging plastic sacks, with that goofy metal holder lurking by the bed. I was thinking that, at that moment, I looked more than ever like the strange glass/mixed media sculpture I'd been doing (it always did have a medical/industrial flavor), but from the stunned look on John's face, I was reminded that this isn't who he recognizes as me. I'm the one, after all, who likes to joke around, picking him up at the waist and bouncing him there. Now, I couldn't even stand up. My legs were only beginning to respond to nerve impulses, and I still had a bathroom exam to pass.
It took just over an hour to get things back to something approaching normal, so we could go home. I think that, by then, John had gotten over most of his initial shock, but his completely understandable reaction still resonated. He was patient, about having to do all the driving for a while. A month later, after some surprisingly painful therapy (mainly involving, simply going for a twenty-minute walk twice a day), I was more or less recovered, and didn't anticipate any trouble with the upcoming teaching challenge. At least, not with my legs.
But, to get back to some of my original thoughts, and my general trepidation about being ill -- I depend, to a greater extent than I'm comfortable admitting, on my general health and heartiness, and even on a certain degree of physical strength, for a very significant part of my self-worth. I'm literally afraid of not being able to 'pull my own weight'. Perhaps, having been found to be literally disposable, I tend to work that much harder to maintain both a store of physical hardiness, as well as something like an observable value to society in general. The woman I read about, who had her battle with cancer, was given a kind of reprieve from this particular challenge, I suppose -- though admittedly the cost to her was terrible, and I'm certain she would just as soon have been healthy, and loaded with obligations, instead of ill and permitted to do as she pleased.
For me, though -- as I suspect may be true for others as well -- incapacity is truly terrifying. No matter how many blue disability tags I might have hanging from my rear-view mirror, I have the sense that, if I exhibit any observable loss of capacity, I become like prey. No one wants to know about my inner dialogue, when I recently twisted my knee, and was hobbling around in public. Is it any surprise, then, that as I plummet into my seniority (I'm afraid my 'golden years' will prove to contain more brass than not), I have major trepidations. Falling in the tub? Slipping on the stairs? I'm beginning to wonder if I shouldn't just create a huge rubbery beach-ball suit for myself, and try to start at trend.
For today, though, it's just the annoyance of a head cold, some stuffy sinus drama, and an attendant bit of chest congestion. On the semi-brighter side -- if there is such a thing -- I'm singing in church next Sunday, and as I have the bass part, I should sound particularly resonant. There will, however, be no cart-wheels, hand-stands, or low front rolls as an encore.
© 2011 Walter Zimmerman
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