They don’t know exactly what’s wrong with you…
And this not knowing will last forever and will never end.
First, he has a purple rash that stretches from his neck to his wrists and ankles, and he won’t budge from under the military ointment he needs to smear over it. The other thing is that some of your organs are failing the test, you are failing yourself, and you are failing overall. You spend half of your once wild and precious life looking at mysterious graphs showing incorrect concentrations of blood components you’ve never heard of on an online patient portal. Absolute lymph value is too low! Things are definitely too expensive! Immature granulocytes are correct. Since when is your blood Goldilocks and the three bears?
“Stay with your group,” a fourth-grade teacher is heard saying on a museum field trip. You want to, and you really want to, but you seem to have wandered off, and now you’re lost and alone admiring the ruins of Pompeii while everyone else is eating bologna sandwiches in the cafeteria.
There, on your way to the bathroom, you run into your favorite doctor, the one you were there to see. And she hugs you and says: “I was so happy when I saw your name on the schedule!” Later, when you’re sitting at her papery table in a papery gown, she’ll say, “We’re working on it,” perfectly convincingly, even if you don’t fully understand what they’re saying. that teeth.
When a phlebotomist wearing a black puma asks about your flying chipmunk tattoo and explains that your daughter has one, her eyes fill with tears. She and her mother also have matching tattoos, and their sleeves are rolled up so you can see the red heart on their biceps. “We’ve talked about this before,” she says, and you laugh, and she says, “Did I cry then too?” She did.
In the CT scan waiting room, a cheerful old man wearing more than one wool sweater holds a bottle of clear contrast agent against yours and says, “Cheers, baby! To our health.”
Your husband then validates your ticket and locks you in the parking lot elevator while you cry a little. Then he takes you to lunch at his favorite cafe in this hospital district. There you’ll find platters of Middle Eastern dips, including garlicky tzatziki, earthy baba ghanouj and tangy, vibrant muhammara, served with warm spiced freckled pita. Sometimes you’re sitting there sipping your mint iced tea and the results start hitting the portal and he makes a nasty face to make you laugh.
As you drive home, you respond to a ton of text messages from individual friends and groups of friends, all of whom check in on you, send you heart-based emojis nonstop, offer to bring you soup, and care whether you live or die. If you didn’t keep these promises a secret from your parents, your parents will also call and reassure them that you are, in fact, planning to outlive them. However, there’s no chance you’ll be hanging over your head like a bad light bulb. You are approaching 60 years old and still there may be no one who loves you as much as these two people do. You cry into your cat’s fur about it, and even though your tears are a little lacking in magnesium, the cat licks your salty face.
Ten days from now, your daughter and her best friend, both of whom live in your house like real balls of sunshine, will find you in the medicine cabinet mirror trying to remove the biopsy stitches from the back of your shoulder. They major in science, work in a lab, are fearless and knowledgeable, and only start laughing when it’s revealed that the kitten has chewed through all the sterilized packaging of the suture removal kit. “It’s okay. Just wash it with soap and water and it’ll be fine,” you say. Use alcohol swabs instead. When you see their perfect rosy faces carefully bent towards the wound, you believe in something like mystical healing powers.
Some days, I feel like I’m alone wandering around and studying the ruins while everyone else is eating lunch or admiring the irrigation dioramas. But you are not alone and no one will let you forget. Lean forward and reach out. Let the ashes fall around you as you count your blessings.
Katherine Newman is the author of the novel we all want the impossiblea New York Times bestseller sandwichand brand new shipwreck — I’m going out today! It’s “like this personal essay turned into a novel, but ideally more interesting,” she says.
Thank you, Catherine, for this personal essay. congratulations new novel. Shit
PS Katherine Newman’s fun house tour and her love of cold plunging (“a sea of thighs and boobs”).
(Photo by Nick Karvounis/Unsplash)
Source: Cup of Jo – cupofjo.com
