Excerpts of "Sick Girl," by Amy Silverstein
INTRODUCTION
As I stand here counting out three pairs of underwear and four pairs of
socks, I think of the little boy who will reach into his suitcase and find them
waiting there for him—as if by magic—along with everything else he might need
this weekend. I thank the slow passage of time for keeping this son of mine young
enough still to see the world as a seamless sleight of hand: a quarter behind the
ear, the tooth fairy’s dollar, a perfectly packed bag that appears out of nowhere.
He doesn’t yet need to know the trickery behind the wonders that come his way.
He doesn’t need to know how hard it is for his mother to stand here packing this
bag: how tired she feels. How sick.
Today I create an illusion with a suitcase. On another day, perhaps, I
might draw upon my famous French toast. I am the mother behind the curtain,
after all. My son is my constant audience.
And thank goodness my hand is still quicker than his eye. I’ll be sure to
pack a book and a deck of cards, grape-scented kids’ shampoo and a rain
poncho—just in case. I will think of everything so this ten-year-old boy will be
free to think of nothing: not my life expectancy, which ran out eight years ago,
nor the handful of biggun medicines I took this morning that forced me to the
floor, a mommy-ball of nausea curled up on a damp bathroom rug. No, there will
not be any trace of my heart transplant in the suitcase I pack for my son today.
I’m one hell of a great magician.
Hey, I think I’ll toss in this mini-checkers set for the long plane ride. . . .
Almost ready to zip the bag closed now, I fold his favorite football jersey with
care, running my hands over the mesh material he calls “my holy shirt,” and place
it neatly on top of the pile. My son is leaving for the Super Bowl with his dad
tomorrow morning. Lucky kid.
I imagine them at the game sitting side by side, one pair of high knees next
to one pair of low. Father and son in caps with matching football team logos,
gazing ahead, rapt. The boy looks up at the man and smiles, sunlight glinting
across soft bangs. The father smiles back. A memory is created.
And while this is happening there will be a woman hundreds of miles
away who can’t catch her breath; she will not have taken her medicine while they
were away and now her body has turned against itself, just as she knew it would.
Her limbs feel impossibly heavy and there is no use trying to hold them up any
longer; she must give in. This mother, this wife—this reluctant survivor—has
made sure to leave herself no other choice this time; there will be no saving her.
She can lie down on her bedroom floor in contented resignation.
Now I don’t have to try anymore, she will whisper into the carpeting beneath her cheek. I don’t have to be a goddamn miracle.
She will close her eyes for the last time—in peace.
There will be no loving greeting for the returning football fans. There will
be a death.
Can I really do this?
Maybe.
I put my son’s toothbrush in a plastic bag and place it in the small suitcase
with the rest of his things. My feet carry me through the house now, but I feel I
am floating, lost in thought. I pass by the family room, turn back, and peek inside
the door; Scott still has not gotten up from the couch. He dropped himself there
about an hour ago after driving home from our appointment at the hospital. The
TV is off. There is no newspaper on his lap. He hasn’t even called the office to
find out if anything important went on in his absence this afternoon. Seeing him
like this, I feel my stomach tighten with guilt and remorse: The man I love most
in the world has chosen to sit alone in tormented silence, and here I stand ten feet
away from him with no idea how to break it.
I am the cause of it.
Lingering at the doorway, I watch him for a moment and then continue
down the hall, furious with my heart-transplant body for coming between us
again. Seventeen years of circles around my health problems have not given us
any sense of resolution. The illnesses continue to come in waves, and we find
ourselves caught up in an undertow that pulls us both into a fight for my life that
feels more and more compulsory as time goes by. And while Scott continues to
fight on, unhesitant, for me there is no longer anything natural or automatic about
it. Staying alive in this body has become an obligation for me that continually
raises the question of why. Why continue in a perpetual lifesaving marathon when
there is no possibility of a happy, healthy end?
The answer to this question appears to me only in blurry glimpses from
time to time—mostly in the calm short breaks between illnesses. Standing in my
kitchen today, with my fingers curled around the handle of my son’s Super Bowl
suitcase, I am keenly aware that some people might say I hold the clear answer
right here, right now, in the grip of my hand: the why for my continued fight for
life could be—should be—my son.
Or my husband—the man who is, I’m certain, the real cause behind the
apparent miracle of my continued survival. The constancy of his love and the
effects it has had on my longevity should be enough to keep me fighting forever.
That’s what people expect from me, I know. Which is why what happened at the
doctor’s today is such a sorry surprise: that I would hesitate before reaching out
for another buoyant, gleaming white lifesaver tossed into the perilous riptide of
my heart-transplant life.
That I might not reach for it at all.
Oh, I’d have to be a crazy person to do that. Or awfully selfish. I’d be
called an ungrateful organ recipient. A bad patient. A bad mother.
A hurtful, unloving wife.
I place the suitcase by the kitchen door and take a seat on the wooden
bench beside it. With my hands cradling the top of my head, I pull my neck
forward and let my face come down until I am looking at the floor between my
feet. I notice Scott’s worn-out pair of running sneakers peeking out from under
the bench. Lined up just next to them is my own pair, even more battered. Seeing
the evidence of our morning jogs aligned so closely this way, it strikes me for the
first time how odd it is that Scott and I never go running together. From time to
time he has asked me to join him, but I always say no, thanks, “I like to do my
own thing,” which is only partly a lie. I certainly do my own thing, but there is
nothing about it that I like. Running miles with this transplanted heart is hell for
me.
So is packing this suitcase.
“I’m done with Casey’s bag,” I say. “He’s all set to go.” I’ve made my
way back down the hall to the family room again and find Scott still there, still
motionless on the couch. I’m hoping to rouse him with news of the motherly
chore I’ve just accomplished. But I know that in the eyes of my husband a wellpacked suitcase is not a remarkable achievement. Not even for his heart-transplant
wife— the one behind the curtain who makes everything she does look so damn
easy.
How can I expect him to applaud effort that he cannot imagine?
I lift Scott’s legs up a bit and move them to the inside of the couch so I can
sit down next to him. My eyes rest somewhere around his knees for now. I will
not look up at his face until I get the all clear: a touch on the shoulder or an
invitation like, “You know I love you, but—” I need some sign that Scott isn’t
irreparably angry at me in spite of how I failed him today.
He lifts his hand off the couch and brings it down with a thump. “You
were totally out of line with Dr. Davis. You yelled at him— at your transplant
doctor. The man who has kept you alive all these years. He doesn’t deserve your
anger . . . and he sure doesn’t deserve to hear your suicide threats.”
“They’re not threats,” I say, keeping my eyes down.
“If you remember correctly, I set up the appointment for today. I called
Dr. Davis. And he was nice enough to sit down with both of us—for over an
hour—to work this thing out. Find a way to make your life more livable. But you
attacked him like it was his fault. And then you tell him—and me—that you’re
going to stop taking your transplant medicines. How is he supposed to react? I
mean, come on. What do you want him to say?”
I’m not sure how to answer this. The truth is, I’d like to hear Dr. Davis say
that it’s really okay with him if I go now—that I’ve done an amazing job in this
body and that I’ve withstood more than any one person should. I’d like to hear
him agree with what I’ve said all along: my life was not really saved back when I
was just a twenty-four-year-old law student with a virus in her heart— no, my life
was taken away by this heart transplant and I can’t expect to ever have it back, not
even a small slice of it. I’d want him to say that he is proud of me for hanging on
for seventeen years: with two strong hands, with bite, and with effort, intelligence,
and an appearance of normalcy that have been astounding. I’d want Dr. Davis to
honor me and let me go.
But instead, I tell Scott, “I don’t know what I want him to say.”
“Well, then, what am I supposed to say? When I ask your doctor to meet
with us and then you dump all over him. When I hear you go off about how you
won’t take your medicine. How do you think I feel?”
“It must be awful.”
The words sound flimsy, even to me.
“Do you realize that since this whole post-transplant lymphoma thing
came up last week, you must’ve said to me ten times that you want to end your
life? And I listen to you. Then there are hugs and more listening. We spend a lot
of time talking about it. And you’re still saying that you want to give up and die. I
schedule an appointment with your doctor. I’m supportive. I’m there for you. But
the sadness, the anger, the suicide talk—they just keep coming. There’s no end. It
just goes on and on and on. . . .”
That’s why he feels frustrated and fed up, he says; it’s not so much the
nature of my complaint (Scott says he understands how a cancer threat, in
addition to my heart transplant, can force me to the very end of my rope), rather,
it’s the endlessness of it that wrecks him. He needs a break from my anguish—or
at least from the way I express it and how often.
I tell Scott, though I’m not sure he believes me, that I truly want to give
him the break he deserves. I want to make things easier for him.
The suitcase, for instance. I packed it so he wouldn’t have to. I don’t tell
him that my heartbeat felt terribly wrong the whole time I did it. I keep from him
the details of the crippling nausea I felt; the trembling hands that challenged me to
button and fold my son’s shirt without breaking into tears. But I know Scott is not
interested in suitcases. He wants an end.
So do I. We just see this end differently. Scott would like to see the end of
my despair; I want to end my suffering. They are not the same wish.
I lift my eyes now and look into Scott’s for the first time since I sat down
beside him on the couch. He looks back at me through a haze of weariness. Selfblame rises up in me: I haven’t spared him enough; I haven’t thought of him
enough; I haven’t kept enough of my heart-transplant self behind the curtain.
Or maybe I’ve kept too much of me there. Perhaps there is a price to be
paid for hiding the truth about how I live in this body, and I am paying it now:
being misunderstood.
My family will leave for the Super Bowl tomorrow morning. They will go
on my insistence; I would not allow an acute flare-up of my medical problems to
hold them back. Scott bought these game tickets months ago, after all. Casey has
been counting the days. And besides, I don’t feel especially sick or weak. I jogged
this morning: a nod to Scott that I’m bouncing back from the crisis that
culminated in the showdown with Dr. Davis, and that it is okay to leave me.
Bathed in the green light I have given him, Scott will wake to an early
alarm clock, walk down the hall to our son’s room, and find him there, already up.
Casey will spring from the bed, throwing the covers away from his body in one
swift move. Then he’ll soar down the stairs, taking three at a time—in his
pajamas.
Scott will have to call out and remind him to put some clothes on.
Right! Clothes!
Then there will be a few moments of commotion as father and son begin
rummaging through drawers. Scott will pull out a pair of pants that are too small.
Casey will grab a sweater that is way too warm for where they’re headed. Then,
in the same moment, they’ll turn their heads and notice the jeans, T-shirt,
underwear, socks, and lightweight zip-up sweatshirt folded neatly on the chair. A
grin will come up between them as they realize, in silence:
It was Amy.
It was Mom.
And I bet she packed my suitcase too.
Of course I did. But I’m not sure if I will be here to unpack it as well.
Over this Super Bowl weekend, I will spend a lot of time thinking about
endings. And beginnings and middles. Heart viruses, hospitals, and being saved.
Bravery and hope. Reluctance and resignation.
And responsibility: to a son, a well-meaning doctor, and a husband who
must be some kind of angel.
Love is exhausting.
CHAPTER ONE
My heart transplant was there in the lines of my father’s palm. Madame
Clara saw it right away. She was not just another fortune-teller with a shack along
the Atlantic City boardwalk; Madame Clara was a gifted seer (or so her sign said).
She knew that a man like my father, middle aged with a fine leather belt and
Gucci shoes, along with my stepmother, Beverly, a well-kept blonde with
country-club good looks, would be likely to doubt her psychic advice even as they
sought it. They were casual drop-ins: the kind of customers who wander in on a
lark, husband pushing wife or vice versa, with a playful nudge. “Aw, come on. . . .
It’ll be fun.” If people like this were ever going to take her seriously, Madame
Clara figured they would have to be eased into believing. She’d first have to
dazzle my father and Beverly with some facts, things only a true fortune-teller
could read in the crisscross lines and intricate folds on the underside of my
father’s right hand.
“You are in a family business. There is stock involved,” she said, offering
up the first evidence of her clairvoyance.
“Well, you got me there. Score one for the great Madame Clara!” My
father was in a playful mood as usual, ready to challenge the dark-haired woman
sitting opposite him with fast quips and charming good humor. “Seems you know
me like the back of your hand—or my hand, as the case may be.”
She continued intently, her black eyes unwavering. “You have an
important deal in the making; it will fall through. Do not feel distressed when this
happens. Something bigger awaits you.”
“Bigger than a bread box?”
Madame Clara laid her pointer finger on the center of my father’s palm
and traced a diagonal line slowly, stopping at points to whisper their significance.
“Respect. The rewards of hard work. Bounty.”
“Await me, right?”
She looked up from his hand. “Yes, but only after a disappointment. You
will not get what you have been seeking.”
These words had significance for my father. The year was 1984. He was in
the process of trying to sell the family business that his father and uncles had
started some forty-five years earlier, which had grown to become a publicly
traded company on the Stock Exchange. On the day my father offered his palm to
a fortune-teller for the first time in his life, he believed he held in his pocket a
firm offer from a large conglomerate to buy the business for a share price that was
more than respectable. It was an imminent coup; the company had fallen on hard
times and my father was one of the major forces to save it, with tough decisions
and careful maneuvers that included firing every last family member who had
long become a useless fixture. He was not a popular manager at first, but his efforts breathed not only life but unprecedented productivity into the company. To
pull off a sale at this point would yield a profit for shareholders, including the
cousins he’d sent out the door.
Did Madame Clara just tell him that the deal would fall through?
My father grimaced.
“Oh, Arthur, don’t be ridiculous,” Beverly said. The sudden furrow in my
father’s brow told his wife just what he was thinking. She grabbed his forearm
and gave it a little shake, followed by a couple of reassuring pats. “Well, for
Pete’s sake, there must be something else in that hand of his, Madame—ah . . .
Clara?” She forced herself into a grin but there was nothing cheerful about it;
Beverly’s expression was flat-out imploring.
It was time to change the subject, and Madame Clara was ready. She had
been holding back but would now reveal the prophecy she may have seen and had
been reluctant to mention: that one of my father’s two daughters would become
very sick.
My father had not told her he had any children at all, let alone two
daughters; the fortune-teller had hit upon another truth. There was Jodie, who’d
just graduated from college, and her younger sister, Amy, who still had two years
to go. Both were healthy young women.
“There will be a surgery—a serious one. And a miraculous recovery. The
daughter will be okay.”
“Splendid,” my father said. “Next time, let’s stick to the collapse of my
business deals. It’s more fun.”
Madame Clara shrugged. “I see what I see—dark and light.”
“Maybe I should have washed my hands first,” he said. My father reached
into his pocket for a twenty dollar bill and handed it to Madame Clara with a
wink. “Thanks for the memories!”
Or at least that’s how I pictured it. My father had recounted his fortuneteller story so many times it ran like a movie in my head. The first time I heard it,
Madame Clara’s prophecy about the sale of the family business had already come
true: the original deal had fallen through just as she said it would, only to be
replaced several months later with a different buyout arrangement for nearly
double the price. Dark and light—that’s what she’d told him. Oh, she was right.
Madame Clara was the real McCoy. What a story!
And what a nightmare: there had also been a prediction about an illness.
My father had to keep this part quiet and hope with every bit of the skeptic still
left in him that it would not come true. But the amazing Madame Clara had turned
him into something of a believer. The best my father could do was push the sick
daughter prediction to the back of his mind, stay silent about it, and wait for the
passage of time to prove that the fortune-teller’s insights had been imperfect.
Three years later, illness hit me hard and fast; I would undergo the serious
surgery that Madame Clara had foreseen. My sister, Jodie, would remain healthy.
In time, I would move on to a recovery that was every bit the miracle that had
shown up in my father’s palm. But the fortune-teller had also said that I, the sick
daughter, would be okay; this part of her prediction was flawed. While I would, in
fact, survive for a surprisingly long time after surgery, nothing about living with a
fragile heart would ever be okay with me. This is not to say that Madame Clara
was wrong. She was, after all, reading my father’s palm, not mine, so whatever
she drew from it would naturally reflect his perceptions and experiences to come.
My father, like nearly everyone else in my life, would always see me as okay in
my post-surgery body. Perhaps Madame Clara had not misread his future at all.
But she’d misread mine. Months before I would sense the first inkling of a
heart problem, I took a short trip to Atlantic City with my boyfriend, Scott. On my
suggestion, we sought out Madame Clara’s shack on the boardwalk and there it
was, right where my father said it would be. Scott was reluctant to go in. The
whole fortune-telling thing gave him the creeps, he said, even while parting the
glass beads that served as the door to the reading room. As Scott took his first
tentative step inside, I reached down and pinched his butt cheek, hard and quick.
Into the air he flew, with a gasp.
“And I didn’t even have to yell boo!” I teased.
“I’ll show you boo!” He spun around and grabbed the sides of my waist,
squeezing in spurts that brought me to breathless laughter within seconds.
Madame Clara emerged from behind a makeshift curtain and sat, annoyed,
behind her crystal ball. I squirmed out from Scott’s clutches and brought the fun
to an end, knowing I was in the presence of the great seer who’d predicted, with
amazing precision, the fate of my family’s business. It excited me to think of what
she might say about my own destiny; I’d just finished my first year of law school
at NYU, and I was in love—real love—for the first time.
I offered up my palm. This had to be good.
Madame Clara fell silent. Her eyes went soft and out of focus, almost as if
she were refusing to look closely into my hand.
I felt the urge to help her along. “Um . . . will I have children?”
“I see four,” she said.
“What about health?”
She turned my hand over and patted the top of it. “Health looks good. You
will live a long life.”
This was the end of my reading with Madame Clara. She charged me only
five dollars; it lasted less than three minutes. Scott kept his palm to himself.
A good fortune-teller is focused on the hand in front of her. Hands contain
lines; they are simple to read. But faces—especially young attractive ones—are
more complex. And when they’re attached to lean, youthful, unblemished bodies,
faces can be misleading. Even obscuring.
The diagnosis of my illness might have come about differently had my
family doctor studied a little palmistry. Or maybe if he’d closed his eyes and just
listened to what I was telling him instead of being blindsided by the pretty firstyear law student sitting on the exam table wearing nothing but a light blue
hospital gown. It does not take tremendous beauty to throw an Ivy League–
educated physician off the scent of a menacing illness. It’s the coming together of
circumstances that will do it—with or without a mane of long wavy hair and a
perky bosom. Take an admittedly studious, overachieving twenty-three-year-old
woman at a highly competitive law school; give her tightness in the chest and a
couple of episodes of passing out; send her to the doctor’s office, cheerful and
brighteyed, with a bounce in her step; and have her giggling at his jokes and at the
first touch of the cold stethoscope on her back. Together, these can be enough to
make any doctor assume, at first blush, that there is nothing terribly wrong with
this young woman.
Dr. Clark gave me the obligatory exam. He looked into my eyes with a
light and my ears with a scope. He asked me to touch my nose and walk in a
straight line. Then, after listening to my heart for a few seconds, he mentioned
casually that he’d heard a slight clicking that I “might want to get checked out
sometime.” He was thinking mitral valve prolapse, a generally benign condition
that could possibly explain the sound he’d heard. Then he took my blood
pressure; his eyebrows shot up almost to his hairline. “Wow, that’s low!” he said.
“Too low?”
“Aw . . . what’s too low?”
I didn’t know what was too low. That’s why I was asking.
“Could it be why I’ve been passing out?”
“Sure! You should salt your food. Lots of salt. Salt it all, if you like.” He
told me I should consider myself lucky to be one of the people who didn’t have to
feel guilty when they reached for the salt shaker. Dr. Clark was an old pro at
seeing the bright side.
Later, in his office, with me now dressed in my street clothes and sitting
opposite him across a paper-ridden desk, my doctor pronounced me well, saying
he couldn’t find anything wrong except the low blood pressure. The stresses of
law school were getting to me, he said. That’s all it was. He gave me an
empathetic “It’s tough the first year, isn’t it?” followed by “But not too tough for
a girl like you, I bet!” Then, just before I slipped out the door, Dr. Clark held his
arms out to me, just as he did for all his patients, and I knew I was in for one of
his signature bear hugs, with that barrel chest of his so solid against me it hardly
seemed to yield at all to the pressure of body against body. His hugs had been
taking my family’s breath away for years; and today especially I was glad to have
the familiar comforts of Dr. Clark so close by—at New York Hospital, just a
fifteen-minute cab ride from my law dorm at NYU.
On my way back downtown I bought a large blue container of Morton’s
salt and poured a good-sized mound of iodized blood pressure lifter into my palm.
I licked it off in one swipe; I really didn’t want to pass out again. But I did pass
out again. And again— in the shower, waiting for an elevator, brushing my hair
by the mirror. I didn’t call Dr. Clark to tell him his salt cure was not working for
me, and I never went to have that little click checked out either —not even after I
started vomiting blood. I felt at fault for these body symptoms and was
embarrassed that I couldn’t bring my stress level down to the point where they
would just disappear. Dr. Clark had told me I was healthy, right? I could only
blame myself for not feeling well. Nervous law student. Must calm down. Eat
salt.
I would look back on the early stages of my illness and wonder how many
other young women had ever stared into a toilet bowl full of their own bloodstreaked vomit, flushed it down, and dashed off to a two-hour seminar in
Constitutional Law. Probably none. My brushing aside of symptoms was uniquely
stupid. There must have been something—what was it, what was it?—that led me
to ignore the obvious. Only in retrospect would I recognize that it was youth,
coupled with the absence of serious childhood illness, that could dull down the
medical-danger radar in a girl to the point where peril hardly registered at all. Add
to this an obliging physician with the same defective detection system, plus a
penchant for the jolly, and what you’ve got is a recipe for massive denial that
cooks up into a ticking time bomb.
Back in Dr. Clark’s office one year later, I would find my blind optimism
blown to bits. This time my symptoms were different and more serious: I couldn’t
breathe. But strangely enough this was not the main focus of my complaint. It was
more my chest that was the problem, or so I believed. It felt heavy and
uncomfortably full, as if I’d eaten three years worth of Thanksgiving dinners in
one sitting. I told Dr. Clark that there seemed to be something wrong with my
stomach; food didn’t want to go down. It felt worse at night when I lay in bed. I’d
even heard a gurgling deep down in the center of my chest—like there was water
in there or something. “My digestion isn’t right. I feel it here,” I said, placing my
hand over my left breast without the faintest appearance of worry. There was
nothing about my twenty-four-year-old life that would prompt me to make a
connection between the location of my hand and the heart that lay beneath it.
The heaviness in my chest turned out to be due not to poor digestion, as
I’d thought, but rather to a grossly enlarged heart that was literally bursting out of
me. And the gurgling sound I’d heard? That was water in my lungs. I’d been
listening to it night after night as I lay in bed, a crackling that came with each
exhalation; it didn’t scare me at all. I figured it must be part of that food “caught
in my pipe.” Such simple words and innocent explanations came naturally from a
young woman who hadn’t been sick since her childhood ear infections. I was
understandably naïve. My medical vocabulary was nonexistent and my selfdiagnostic skills immature. Pipes and stomach trouble—that was the best I could
come up with. My imagination could only go so far as a bellyache.
But Dr. Clark was probably able to conjure up a range of possibilities—
and perhaps one horrifying probability—from the obvious severity of my
symptoms. A quick step up on his scale showed I had gained eight pounds since
weighing myself at home two days earlier (a sure sign that my body did not have
the strength to expel water as it should). A blood-pressure check proved that a
whole year of salting my food hadn’t helped my numbers to rise one bit. An
external palpation of my abdomen was normal except for one troubling discovery
that had nothing at all to do with my digestive system: I wasn’t able to catch my
breath while lying down on the exam table. Even before he put his stethoscope to
my chest, Dr. Clark had an idea of what he was dealing with, although he could
hardly believe it. From what he’d seen so far, the young woman on his exam table
seemed to have congestive heart failure, a disease found mostly in the elderly or
in middle-aged people who’d suffered several heart attacks. A diagnosis of this
disease usually meant that at least some portion of vital heart muscle had been
damaged beyond repair.
The cause of this damage varied case to case in congestive heart-failure
patients. Dr. Clark could not imagine what might have been the cause of mine, but
at the moment it didn’t matter: left untreated, congestive heart failure could be
fatal.
It must not have been easy for him to put his dark suspicions to the final
test. “Let’s take a listen,” he said.
I opened the front of my hospital gown and lifted my chin into the air. Dr.
Clark leaned his head toward me as he concentrated on the sound of my heartbeat.
It didn’t take long for him to realize that the little click he’d heard only one year
earlier had turned into an ominous thud. Instead of the bright sounds doctors
typically hear when listening to a healthy heartbeat, there were gallops— spurts of
effort followed by a run of chaotic aftershocks—and then a short period of
tortured lumbering. Dr. Clark knew he had just listened in on a sick heartbeat that
was out of his league as a general internist. “Why don’t you get dressed and meet
me in my office. We’ll talk, okay?” he said, without a hint of anxiety. It was
important not to get me upset or excited—not with the way my heart was beating
today.
When I walked into Dr. Clark’s office he was already on the phone. He
smiled and gestured for me to take a seat. After finishing one phone call he
immediately went on to the next and then the next. Each time he brought the
receiver to his ear, he’d hold up a finger to let me know that he would be just one
more minute; just one more phone call and then I’d get that talk I’d been promised. I looked on as Dr. Clark reached up again and again to rub the back of his
neck, beginning each new phone call with an audible exhalation and a plea: “Can
you do me a favor here?” He was trying to arrange for me to have tests done
immediately, even though it was past five on a Friday night.
“There, now we’ve got it,” he said, handing me a sheet of paper with
locations and times written on it. “I need you to go do these tests for me, if you
would.”
“Tonight? Now?”
“If you would, please. I just want to check a few things out, okay? Go
now, dear. Come back and see me when you’re done. I’ll wait here in the office
for you.”
“But won’t it be late? It’s Friday night.”
“Doesn’t bother me a bit; I have a lot of paperwork to tackle. Don’t worry
yourself about me.”
“All right, as long as you don’t mind,” I said, gathering my things together
and heading for the door. I thought it was awfully nice of Dr. Clark to hang
around just for my stomach problem.
“Some of these testing places are a couple of blocks away from here.
You’ll have to do a fair amount of buzzing around. So please, dear . . . walk
slowly.”
I lingered beneath the door frame for a moment. “Sure, okay,” I said.
I did not notice until after I’d spun through the revolving doors of the
hospital and out onto the street that I had left Dr. Clark’s office without a big bear
hug. He’d remained seated for the first time ever, elbows on the desk, fingers
massaging both his temples. I thought I saw him reach for the phone again as I
walked out.
My visit with Madame Clara predated the fateful appointment with Dr.
Clark by just three months. I’d chosen to ask the fortune-teller about my health—
a question that might have seemed odd coming from a young woman. But even
back then, during my short week end trip to Atlantic City with my boyfriend, I
had a sense that I was not well. I’d been sitting with Scott at dinner in some
casino restaurant in Caesar’s Palace, maroon velvet walls all around us and huge
silver goblets on the table as symbols of a tacky Ancient Rome. A photographer
dressed in a bedsheet toga wandered over and asked if he could take our picture. I
wished that he’d skipped our table; nausea and light-headedness occupied my
attention, and the last thing I wanted to do was strike a pretty pose. Scott did not
know this, of course, and asked for one photo—of me, alone on my side of the
booth—so he could have a memory shot for his wallet. We’d only been dating
two months, but Scott already knew I was more than a little bit camera shy and
would have to be coaxed into a smile. As the photographer stepped backward
from the table and toyed with his lens, Scott leaned across and whispered to me in
an accent he couldn’t have intended to come off so comically French, “You are
my leetle Rom-an godd-ess! Your beauty could fill ze Coliseum!” I laughed, my
chin resting on my palm, elbow on the table, and—click—the photographer
caught me in a full smile. It was a pose Scott would carry in his wallet for the next
seventeen years: his lighthearted Roman goddess always there at his fingertips,
twinkle-eyed and lovely. He saw only happiness in the photo, but for me the
image contained a painful memory; I had been concealing something from Scott
that night. Even as I laughed at his comparing my beauty to a Roman sculpture,
my mind was troubled: I really don’t feel well. This is something bad and I know
it.
A haunting memory of the photograph came to mind as a car whisked me
up First Avenue to my first-ever appointment with a cardiologist. I began
searching my mind for signs that I’d missed or had ignored over the last year,
ones that might have been responsible for landing me in the backseat of this car. I
felt proud at first, for having been so courageous through months of symptoms
that might have sent a weaker woman running back to the doctor who’d waved
her good-bye with a hug and a saltshaker prescription. But then I thought myself a
fool who just might have kidded her way straight into a medical emergency. As
the city blocks rushed by and blurred, negativity and doubt began to set in. I
shivered with regret and shame, recalling how I’d put my faith in a container of
Morton’s salt. Deep down, I hadn’t fully believed Dr. Clark at the time he’d said
it would cure my low-blood-pressure problem, but I’d found his jaunty
prescription hard to resist and his bear hug reassuring.
The Friday-night circuit of diagnostic tests he ordered had revealed an
unspecified something wrong with my heart; by Monday I had an appointment
with a cardiac specialist, Dr. Daniel Bradley. My father and Beverly, as my
parents, were the natural choice for driving and accompanying me. I would have
liked for Scott to be with me as well today, but he was hours away at Penn Law
School, caught up in hours of classes and a part-time job, so I’d told him to stay
put; I was fine and would speak with him afterward. I’d also considered asking
my sister to come but then thought better of it; Jodie was severely doctor- and
hospital-phobic, averse to the point of true hysteria when faced with white coats
and syringes (even when aimed at someone else). Her presence would only have
added to the fear and anger that had been mounting inside me.
By the time my parents’ car stopped in front of the medical building, I had
worked up a huff of angry disappointment that radiated far beyond the confines of
Dr. Clark’s office and my own foolish denial. I was already irritated at my future
cardiologist, Dr. Bradley, and I hadn’t even met him yet. I was also plenty leery.
Thirty blocks northbound in my father’s car had given me enough time to arrive at
a troubling conclusion: doctors cannot be trusted; they make awful, awful
mistakes.
My father and Beverly, though, would keep the faith and hold fast to the
idea of super-doctors, with Dr. Clark being the most illustrious among them. By
extension, Dr. Bradley was raised high in their esteem for having been his top
cardiologist pick. Were it not for Marvin (Dr. Clark’s first name rolled off my
father’s tongue as if he were referring to a golfing buddy), it would have taken
weeks to land an appointment with a cardiologist of such renown. My father
insisted I was fortunate: Marvin was there when we needed him, with his sharp
diagnostic skills and unparalleled web of best-doctor connections.
Lucky me. Lucky us.
“But he got it wrong,” I said, surprising my father. I hadn’t yet detailed for
him the progression of my office visits with Dr. Clark, because up until this point
it hadn’t seemed important. But now that my father was expecting me to worship
this new cardiologist as a blessed offshoot of our family internist, I felt compelled
to speak up and put both merely mortal physicians in proper perspective: neither
one of them deserved our blind devotion.
My father appeared not to have heard what I just said—or else he was
pretending real hard.
“I went to see Dr. Clark last year because I was passing out a lot. He said
it was just low blood pressure. Obviously he was wrong.”
“Come on, honey, did you tell him you were passing out? Did you?
Really, did you actually tell him?” This was Beverly talking. She turned her head
to glance back at me from the passenger’s seat and threw off that high-eyebrow
mother glare of hers, accusatory and questioning at the same time. It was a look
she’d been flashing my way since I was eight years old, perhaps because Beverly
understood that young girls needed to be on the receiving end of this kind of
lingering stare from time to time. It was a sign of love. Beverly knew I had never
gotten much in the way of affectionate maternal scorn at home. My parents’
divorce had left me at age five with a mother who wouldn’t bother expending the
effort it would take to raise an eyebrow for my benefit; she was too busy fawning
over a glass of scotch—and then another and another. I had begun mixing my
mother’s drinks on request in the second grade; a hairraising howl would float up
to my room, and quickly as I could drop a Magic Marker in my lap, I would be
down in the drinking den with the red-haired terror I was forced to call Mom. I’d
count out three ice cubes into her favorite glass and then douse them with Johnnie
Walker, poured to the level that matched the length of my ink-stained thumb.
This would all continue until it was time for me to go to college, at which
point I left my bartending duties behind forever, along with the face, voice, and
liquor-soaked rages of the exacting patron in the hell-pit cocktail bar that was my
childhood home. I didn’t look back. Didn’t call. Didn’t write. Didn’t share my
college academic awards, my law-school admission, or even my heart illness. It
seemed to me I hadn’t lost much by running off this way; all I had really given up
was a mother in the most attenuated sense. It was Beverly who had truly raised
me and Jodie since little girlhood, taking root as a nurturing presence in our
lives—if only on weekends and school holidays, according to my father’s rights
under the divorce agreement. In between visits, there were frequent conversations
on the phone. Beverly showered us with attention, doling out love, guidance, and
advice wherever Jodie or I ran short.
And today, in the midst of a tense car-ride discussion, I would accept
Beverly’s insistent prodding begrudgingly, even as part of me was glad to be
needled with so much interest and caring.
“Of course I told him.” It was a perfect place to throw in an eyeball roll,
and so I did, with drama; it was the kind of roll a mother might expect from a
daughter like me.
“Maybe you should have been more insistent,” she said.
“I told him what I was feeling. That’s all I had to do. Dr. Clark was
supposed to figure it out from there.”
“And he did . . . eventually. We’re lucky he caught it, I tell you. So
lucky.”
I slid across the backseat and out into the hard cold rain. My father and
Beverly managed to make their way from car to doorway before I did because
they ran like mad. At first I set out to jog the thirty feet along with them, but my
strength gave out and I couldn’t catch my breath. Then I remembered what Dr.
Clark had told me Friday about walking slowly, and it all began to sink in: the
pelting rain, the cardiologist appointment, the horror and strange humiliation of
watching my father and Beverly, both nearly sixty years old, make it inside a full
twenty seconds before I could. They watched with patient smiles as I slowstepped toward them through sheets of rain, wincing. It was in this moment that I
experienced for the first time in my life what it was like to be disempowered by
illness; I was not able to move as fast as I wanted or needed—my twenty-fouryear-old body wouldn’t let me—and if I pushed through limitations with my usual
stubborn strength, I feared it might cause my heart to give out. How terrifying
even to think it: that I could die while trying to save myself from getting sopped
by this rain! Thirty feet of distance from car to doorway appeared before me like a
life-and-death choice. It was the first choice of this kind that I’d been forced to
make in my life; it would not be the last.
It seemed I was caught in a rainstorm full of lessons: a momentous mindaltering downpour that would teach me with a slow, soggy trek up the steps of a
medical building that youth is no protection from illness. It would also remind
me—forever—that extreme weather can be an omen (for me, at least). Whenever
I woke again to the sound of rain splattering sideways against my bedroom
window, I would sense a portent of bad news to come. It was all I needed to set
off on a slide—down, down—to a place of worry and fear about my body. I’d
drop like a shot, ending at a black bottom no healthy person would ever
understand, trembling beneath my quilt in secret panic.
I’m dying again. I’m dying again.
“Who wants to hear a joke?” My father was ready, as always, to distract
with humor, pulling my attention away from this waiting room of cardiology
patients three times my age.
“Sure, Dad, lay it on me,” I said, leaning closer to him.
“A doctor finishes examining this guy and says, ‘Look, I’ve got bad news
and good news. Which one do you want first?’ The guy tells him he wants the
bad. ‘Okay, you’ve got two weeks to live. I’m so sorry.’ Then the guy asks what
the good news could possibly be, and the doctor answers, ‘See that blonde nurse
down the hall there, the one with the big boobs? I’m fucking her.’”
Good one, Dad.
My father always managed to get a laugh out of me, even with the crudest
and most offensive jokes. He had a gift for lighthearted delivery and a comic
sense that never failed—not even in a cardiologist’s waiting room.
Looking at my father’s face as the smile faded from his lips, I saw nothing
in his expression but easy confidence, as if he were sitting with Beverly and me in
a nice restaurant waiting for our menus to arrive. Maybe it was just optimism, or
maybe a worried father’s denial all dressed up to achieve that casual appearance.
But it was his ability to hold on to this nonchalance after our appointment that
seemed to me most ludicrous. My father would tell me the details of a phone call
he received later on from a friend, who’d reacted to my bad news by saying,
“Gee, Arthur, that must’ve been a terrible day for you.” My father had told him,
yes indeed it was a horrible day—for his stock portfolio.
It so happened that my appointment with Dr. Bradley fell on October 17,
1987—also known as Black Monday—the day when the stock market went
wildly bad and took a giant nosedive. It was a downfall reminiscent of the crash
that set off the Great Depression. As stockbrokers and securities analysts
considered whether to jump from their windows just after the four o’clock closing
bell, I rode the elevator up to the cardiology suite with my father and Beverly. By
the time we rode down again one hour later, a few Wall Street lives had been lost
and the value of innumerable stock portfolios stunningly obliterated.
There had also been a prophecy fulfilled: You have two daughters. One of
them will get very sick.
Dr. Bradley’s findings on Black Monday marked the definitive beginning
of my life as a sick person on the edge of dying. I would never again know any
other kind of life again. The stock market, though, recovered and in time reached
unprecedented levels of robust trading and widespread prosperity. Some of these
profits would come to benefit me directly, helping to pay the massive medical
bills that lay ahead.
Madame Clara had been right; she’d seen it all in my father’s palm years
before: dark and light.
Sick Girl © 2007 by Amy Silverstein, and reprinted with the
permission of the publisher, Grove Press.