After the Stroke (6 page)

This afternoon I felt almost ready to go to a major hospital—everyone outside thinks I'm crazy as a loon not to.

Wednesday, June 11

Edythe brought delicious veal stew for supper and lemon pie. I could only eat a few mouthfuls but it was a feast day for Tamas and Pierrot, and since Edythe loves the animals she didn't mind.

Yesterday was a fine day but today rain
again
! It is hard because Karen Olch has had to take several days off and now again a whole day is lost. But she has already done wonders in the garden. The strange bronze tree peony has one flower out and the other peonies are on the brink now.

Two remarkable letters, one from Montana, the other from Oklahoma yesterday. From Montana, an artist, who inherited from her father a rough piece of land in an old mining town which had been used as the town dump. How thrilling to read:

We pitched a tipi amid the rubbish—the cans & broken glass—an old shoe, a purse, a broken toy, the dead car bodies & a horse whose rotting fragrance filled the air on the hot days of that first summer. These bits & pieces, discarded from other's lives became, quite literally the ground, the foundation of our new one.

She goes on to tell what has happened since in twelve years:

In these twelve years, many people have come & gone and helped to build “the place” as it is now—a large fenced garden, 2 small cabins & a big house of logs & timbers, the goat shed (now used for storage) and most recent & most exciting—the studio of my dreams. It's large (20 by 40 ft.) and snugly built with high ceilings & a clear-story [sic] for north light.

And it's here I sit to write you, this morning full of bird song & sunlight. (Nan Parsons, Basin, Montana)

She wrote me because of
At Seventy.

Thursday, June 12

The rain let up briefly yesterday afternoon but now it has become a steady downpour. My next to last day on two Amiodoroni a day—the end is in sight.

Never have I been more aware than in these last months how life-preserving my routine is. The day becomes a series of stepping stones—from breakfast to household chores, to coming up here to my study for an hour or so, then the change of pace and relief of driving the car down to the town to get the mail and do errands. I get back very tired, and there is Tamas eagerly awaiting his one dog meal of the day. I'm afraid he has quite a few people meals as he licks my plate at lunch and dinner and these days I can eat almost nothing. Next stepping stone, I lie down on my
chaise longue
and read the mail, which often takes an hour and sometimes—so many people depressed or ill or in need!—is too much for me. But after lunch—often chocolate milk and a peanut butter sandwich on thin bread because I am lazy—I fall on my bed and go to sleep at once. After taking a Coumadin and waking an hour later, I lie there for a while considering what to do—and read the paper with a glass of orange juice and Metamucil—then climb the stairs to this study once more, sort out the mail, see what Nancy can answer for me tomorrow, and maybe write one letter.

At half past five, next stepping stone, put on the local television news and get my supper together. The last stepping stone is doing the dishes and by eight I am in bed—these days reading with the utmost interest the meaty and fascinating long biography of Helen Waddell. I haven't read as absorbing and nourishing a book for ages.

Between twenty and thirty Helen Waddell had to give up everything she wanted—including a fellowship to Oxford, seeing her friends, going to dances, leading a normal young woman's life—to take care of her extremely selfish and ungiving stepmother who took every sacrifice for granted. Ten years of this imprisoning of a free spirit, and a gifted one! Even reading about it is hard to bear. But she managed to graduate from the University of Belfast with high honors, nonetheless. Yet what comes through, too, is her own belief that nothing worth winning is going to be easy. She and her eight brothers and one sister were brought up as children in Tokyo …

So the routine makes a frame and I feel that there is a next stepping stone to force me to do something, helps me get through the hours when I feel simply ill, passively and hopelessly ill.

The animals are also a help—even looking for ticks on Tamas becomes a kind of game. And Pierrot's wild antics tell me “to hell with your routine—I want to fly downstairs and play!” Fly he does, his feet not touching the steps, or so it looks.

Pat called from Los Angeles to tell me the dress rehearsal, given for theater and Hollywood people, was a triumph. They stood and cheered at the end of each part—the whole thing takes eight hours! This news cheered me immensely.

Friday, June 13

Still pouring! “Wildness and wet”—Pierrot is in a frenzy of frustration—and so am I. Due at the dentist in Portsmouth for the cleaning of my two remaining teeth—and also to do errands. It's a rare thing for me to drive so far and stay away so long—and unfortunately I have to stop on the way at the hospital for a blood test (“pro-time” they call it).

Yesterday—rain
all
day. Karen Olch came and spent the day cleaning out the plant window, washing and pruning plants, feeding them, clearing out some of the detritus that accumulates—and even washing the windows! It makes an enormous difference in the whole feel of the room, neglected as it has been for months.

Karen is a treasure—a very careful and thorough workman who shames my casual ways.

Sunday, June 15

The effect of the last days on two-a-day of the drug has been devastating, and after a hell of a day yesterday I woke even worse off this morning. I'm glad I managed to go out for dinner with Nancy and to the movie
A Room With A View
as planned. I felt awfully sick all through it but it's visually a marvelous work of art and made me very nostalgic for Italy, for Florence where I spent May of my nineteenth year.

Afternoon

Unfortunately I felt Bonham-Carter was miscast as Lucia—L.
must
have character and that pudgy little face lacks just that.

For only the second time this spring I sat out on the terrace at four and drank my orange juice and Metamucil—lots of sails on a hazy blue ocean, and as always at that time lots of birds all flying south, some only to my feeders just south of the terrace. I chased a huge gray squirrel off one of them before I came out. Poor Karen said something is eating the tops of her seeds as they push up, cosmos among them. Snails? I wonder.

On Friday—and it did finally clear up after all the rain—Karen Saum came at four-thirty bearing our supper: sword-fish, lettuce and aspargus from the garden where she is house-sitting, a melon and Camembert! What a feast. It was feast enough to see her and we had a good long talk.

But I could hardly eat one mouthful when she served our supper, so it turned out to be a feast for Tamas and Pierrot—and I burst into tears of shame, so awful it felt after all the loving trouble Karen had taken.

Things are not easy at H.O.M.E. but she never wavers in her dedication, and she looked radiant. One of her sons is teaching Spanish there this summer and her mother will come in July. So many of my friends do have family, it feels strange sometimes to have none, as though I am at the center of an immense emptiness—alone.

Will the time come when I can listen to Mozart again? What keeps me from playing records, like a finger across my mouth? The fear of a complete howling crack-up? Or that poetry would then seize me and shake me to pieces like a wild animal with prey? Who knows?

Friday, June 20

I'm entering a new phase. Monday and Tuesday were very hard days. On Monday I simply stayed in bed, feeling too sick to make the effort even of getting up. Nancy, the wise one, persuaded me to call Dr. Petrovich's office and tell one of the nurses, who said at once, “We'll find time tomorrow for you to see the doctor,” and it was set for four-thirty. When he saw how upset I was, and close to despair because of
never
feeling well, he suddenly asked, “How would you like to have the cardioversion tomorrow?” It felt like a reprieve and of course I hummed with hope and said, “Yes, by all means.”

[Cardioversion is an electric shock which often gets the heart back in sync when it has been fibrillating. Of course I was a little nervous lying on a narrow bed in Intensive Care for a half-hour or so before Dr. Petrovich arrived and the machinery could be set up. Then I was alone again and by now quite tense.

I decided to invent a game of visualizing, a flower perhaps, but finally I decided on Pierrot's face and slowly brought it into focus in my mind, thinking, “It looks like a crumpled pansy,” and I smiled because it really does. I felt pleased to have invented a device against nervous tension.

When the cardioversion finally took place I was anaesthetized for a few seconds and it was over.] Dr. Petrovich said, “It's fine. It's done the trick!” Euphoria! I was a prisoner set free. And for an hour I lay there in bliss waiting for a sandwich and a glass of milk—it was near two.

But then when a nurse brought me
the
pill, Amiodoroni, the one that makes me ill, I realized I was being asked to go back to hell. It was a traumatic reversal and a storm of tears popped out of me. Late that night, around nine-thirty, after I had gone to sleep, now in a private room with the same lovely view I had had before of a line of trees against the sky, Dr. Petrovich came in. Yes, I have to take the pill or have another stroke. The hardest thing psychologically to take is that he does
not
believe this drug makes me sick. He insisted it was the fibrillation that did. So I am on the drug, one a day for a week, then one every other day.

Dr. Gilroy also came in to see me and said if I am still as miserable in two or three weeks to go and see him. This was comforting.

I woke to nausea and begged for something to help, and they did give me something which unfortunately made me very groggy all day.

Edythe fetched me at the hospital and it was a help to have her here last night. We had fun making a homey supper together of corned beef hash with a poached egg and a little salad, half a grapefruit for dessert. We watched Pierrot play.

But that night in the hospital when I lay and tried to face what must be accepted, I realized that a kind of aloneness is with me now. I have to curl up deep down inside myself. For the moment I have no energy even for the telephone. This is a new phase as I wrote at the start today—a phase in which I am more alone than ever before.

A steady downpour outside this morning matches my mood and I rather like this wild, wet world.

Monday, June 23

Again Saturday and Sunday I gave up and stayed in bed. I see clearly that the psychological problem is that I see
no change
—with an operation one gets better, some hard days, but the movement is there towards healing. If I had terminal cancer I would be on my way elsewhere, movement of another kind. But for five months I have been on a plateau of misery.

So something has to change and I have made an appointment with Dr. Gilroy for tomorrow.

York Hospital, Tuesday, June 24

As agreed I stopped in at Dr. Petrovich's office yesterday morning for Lucy to give me more pills—Amiodoroni—and to listen to my heart. She was upset to find it was back fibrillating and called Dr. Petrovich at once—he has put me back in the hospital, has put me on three-a-day of the pill and will do another cardioversion of the heart on Saturday. I was happy to be back in shelter again, not responsible for
anything
—for Sunday evening I had got stupidly exhausted catching Pierrot—it's his evening game to run in and out of the bushes playing hide-and-seek. Before that I had chased a huge gray squirrel off the big feeders eight times, running out with Tamas behind me, barking—and back again out of breath. I shall be missing the peonies at their height, but the truth is I have been too sick to enjoy the garden or to pick flowers. I can hardly believe it.

What I have enjoyed is the wonderful silence at night—the steady throb of tree frogs and crickets and far away the long crescendos of gentle surf as the tide rises and ebbs. So it is not silence but a soothing, comfortably peaceful sound.

But here in the hospital I look out again on the line of trees which were leafless in April and are now rich and dense in their leaves, great green humps against the sky.

I have been pretty depressed because it looked as though there were no avenue open from this plateau of illness I have lived on for months. But when Dr. Petrovich came in yesterday after lunch, he told me that there is still a last resort for which I would have to go to Massachusetts General for an operation that would readjust the heartbeat and make possible a pacemaker. So I have a new hope. Another few weeks, and maybe.…

Yesterday I finished Frances Partridge's last journal,
Nothing Left To Lose.
I hated so much to finish it and may read it again. A journal like this becomes a whole life one lives with, and in it I saw very well that what makes a good journal so moving is not the big events but tea in the garden or its equivalent.

York Hospital, Wednesday, June 25

I feel drugged and exhausted today, but if it is the effect of the tranquilizer I am now taking three times a day with Amiodoroni, it is at least better than the previous nausea and pain.

Outside I look out happily on the green mounds of the trees moving slowly in the wind—and a sky full of lovely wind clouds. The hospital is heaven, I am so tired. But I have nothing as good as Partridge to read. Helen Waddell is too long, and a newly translated South American novel Joan Palevsky sent a bit too much for me in my present mood.

Thursday, June 26

Difficulty in breathing, so I have oxygen now but the heartbeat is still 110–120—and am very glad to be in the safe cocoon of the hospital
again.