To Feel Stuff (2 page)

I followed the blue tape to the waiting room, a sunny rectangle with wooden chairs lining its perimeter. From the vantage point of the open doorway, I stood and surveyed the four patients who were sitting in the chairs. I knew which one E was right away, not because she looked any sicker than the other patients, but because she looked so at home.

Whereas the other three patients each held a single magazine, novel, or clipboard with an informational form on it, E occupied not only her chair, but the chair to the right of her, the chair to the left of her, and the floor space in front of them. She had books and papers strewn about the chairs and a laptop computer balanced on her thighs. She was using the waiting room as an office of sorts, and she was so busy with her work that she didn't feel my eyes upon her, and thus didn't look up. The other three patients all sensed my presence and stared at me, wondering why the man in the doorway was watching the young woman with the computer, since he wasn't making any movement toward her. This was when I decided, for propriety's sake, to enter the room and approach E.

E has black hair and white skin, the kind that is so translucent that I could see, even from a few feet away, a blue vein in her right temple. Because she was looking down at her laptop, the only features I could immediately make out were her eyebrows, eyelashes, and eyelids, all of which were heavy and dark. I remember thinking that E's eyebrows were much like those of Brooke Shields in the 1980s. She had blunt bangs that skimmed these eyebrows, and the chin-length hair framing her face was tucked behind her small ears.

I'd expected her to be in a nightgown or a hospital gown, but she wore dark blue jeans and a white thermal top. She was remarkably thin, but the thinness seemed natural on her. She was wearing socks but no shoes, which also told me how comfortable she'd made herself in the building.

I walked over to E and stood in front of her. “Excuse me,” I said, “but may I talk to you for a minute?”

She looked up at me and I saw the bow of her upper lip. “Are you a doctor?” she asked in a voice that, strangely, made me think of tinsel.

I was surprised at this question, since I was not wearing any credentials, nor was I wearing my coat. I admitted to E that I was a doctor.

I helped her collect her things from the floor and chairs, and we returned to the infirmary together. At that time E was recovering from a potent mix of pneumonia and strep throat, and she was also weakened by a marrow extraction she'd undergone after the hospital discovered her aplastic anemia. She walked slowly, but declined my arm when I offered it to her.

Once back in the infirmary, I asked if I could pull up the vinyl shades to let in some light, but E ignored my question. Instead she asked me, “What are you here for?”

Seeing that E was not what you'd call a natural-born “people pleaser” and that she didn't have a great deal of patience for me, I knew that I would have to present my offer to her with precision. “I am a doctor and professor in the medical program here,” I started, “and I've come with a proposal of benefit to both of us. I expect you know that the administration may force you to leave if you're still sick at the end of the semester?”

E looked at me like an expert poker player. “Yes, I'm aware of that,” she said.

“And you do realize that, based on your health record over the past two years, it is highly unlikely that you'll be fully recovered and bouncing around campus by January?”

“I've thought about that,” said E.

“If you agree to work with me,” I suggested, “I'll tell the university that you've become the subject of my newest study, and that I need easy and indefinite access to you in order to carry out the project. I'll tell them that you're a one-of-a-kind medical anomaly that they're very lucky to have—if they don't know that already—and that the study, if based at Brown, will bring the school widespread acclaim, media attention, and respect. Once convinced that if they let you go, they're letting a prodigious opportunity slip through their hands, the university will put you under my care.”

E nodded, taking in my proposal, and leaned forward. “What's in it for you?”

I was surprised again, since I thought that my role in all this was more than obvious. “I'm going to publish a study on you.”

“Oh. You're serious about doing that?” E said, laughing for the first time. It was neither a laugh of relief nor of pleasure, but somehow a laugh at my expense. I respected that she distrusted me.

“Well, yes,” I said. “This isn't a charade for the sake of the university. I'm really going to do this.”

“What's the time commitment I have to make to you?” E asked.

I told her, “Until you get better or until you graduate. Whichever comes first.”

“How many hours a week?” she asked.

“I'd like two hours every week regardless, and then additionally scheduled meetings when necessary.” Realizing that I should cover all my bases, I added, “Should you contract something especially violent or bizarre, I think we'd need to adjust our time accordingly.”

After this, E stared at me for a while, and I couldn't begin to tell what she was thinking. I realized this study would be so much more than an exercise in observation, documentation, and analysis. This girl was what my father likes to call a “tough cookie,” and if I was going to make any notable progress, I was going to have to establish a high level of intimacy with her. Although I could monitor E as closely as humanely (and technologically) possible, the success of the study and the eventual book I planned to write about my experience would depend on complete access to her mindset and worldview.

That day, though, I felt so unnerved by our first encounter that I could only deal in surface details.

“I'll agree to it,” said E.

I drew the contract out of my briefcase and put a handheld tape recorder on the bed. That recorder has since been present at all meetings between E and myself. All conversations that follow are reported verbatim.

E signed the contract, age nineteen at the time, and afterward I did a cursory physical. I checked her vitals and took a family history, although I now know that I was asking the wrong questions about her family. We were wasting time, and neither of us knew it, but then again, E and I would waste a lot of time over the next year or so.

We monitored her serial illnesses closely. These included her first bout of tuberculosis; a brief return of her freshman-year encephalitis; the resulting seizure disorder from the encephalitis; the mumps; aspergillosis; symptoms that highly resembled those of a malarial patient, except E never developed a full-blown case of malaria; a second bout of chicken pox even though she'd had them as a child; flus, and uncommon colds. Even with the most serious illnesses, E would suffer only during the incubation period, then begin to recover slowly but completely. Her afflictions never left her with permanent damage—there were no memory problems, no organ impairment, no paralysis. I found this remarkable. The parade of illnesses was incessant, yet E bore them as if they were minor allergies. The only exception was the fibromyalgia, which produced a widespread muscular pain that plagued her constantly.

During our initial acquaintance, E was a fascinating patient to watch, but a difficult patient to read. For all our hours together, all I had to show for my effort was, essentially, a list of illnesses. E remained silent during most of our meetings, answering questions when I asked them but rarely offering more. I felt that I needed to get inside of E, but she saw me as her academic meal ticket, so to speak, and we had trouble moving beyond that perception.

Many nights I went home frustrated and nervous because I knew I had to deliver a progress report to the deans in December of 2003. E's spring-semester registration was contingent on what I had to say, and my reputation was in danger. I knew that I couldn't go into that meeting with a report that any nurse could offer. Not only were the deans expecting better of me, I had also counted upon being able to publish something about E for the wider medical community, and I didn't yet have a single hypothesis as to why this young woman was so dramatically and repeatedly sick.

I was about to give up when I received a call from E one afternoon in November of 2003. I'd given her all my numbers at the beginning of our relationship, but she'd never used them. If she needed to cancel one of our meetings, she had one of the nurse practitioners let me know.

At home my caller ID showed a number at Rhode Island Hospital, and I picked up, thinking it would be Wainscott. Instead, it was E, who had spent the afternoon in the emergency room.

E wanted to know if I could meet her at the hospital. She said she had something important to tell me, that she had experienced a troubling symptom and it had alarmed her so greatly that she wanted my help. She placed this phone call the day she met a new patient in the Brown infirmary. I'll refer to this patient as C.

Paxil CR: Get back to being you

 

I never let you know that before I loved you, I hated your voice. Sorry about that.

I had already met some of the kids who'd been attacked. If you remember the junior who got shot in the neck while chewing a Pizza Bite outside Josiah's, I met him first. He stayed here a few nights because the stitches got infected and then he got a fever. When his voice returned, he told me—he gasped—that when he was in the hospital, they gave him a wipey board to communicate. He wrote, “The irony of this situation is that hours before the shooting, I had been performing a drive-by myself.”

The doctor standing at his head had asked, “What do you mean? Is this a confession?”

The guy, Ben, had dashed off, “It's slang, doctor. When you repeatedly drive past the apartment of a girl you're interested in to see if she's home, you're said to be doing a ‘drive-by.' Jessica Norman. I thought I loved her, and I was on her street five times that night.” Ben remembered going back and putting the quotation marks in last, “like the pen had just become too heavy to hold.” He said his strokes were slow and tragic, and so I told him that I thought he liked the experience of getting shot. He stroked his sideburns, which looked like rats stapled to his cheeks, and then he agreed.

I also met the freshman held at gunpoint while he withdrew his last three hundred dollars from the Bank of Boston ATM on Angell. He wasn't hurt, but he didn't want to sleep alone for a few nights, so he slept here. I met the senior pelted with rocks as she exited Dunkin' Donuts. She came here because of some lingering headaches. Also, I spent some time with that graduate student who was almost kidnapped, except she screamed at her three attackers, “My mom just died last week. Please stop. I'm human,” and surprisingly, they did. She didn't want to sleep alone for a while either.

I heard, through the nurse practitioners, about a RISD woman who was bludgeoned over the head with a brick as she walked through their sculpture garden and about some other people I never met.

I was jealous of them because their injuries seemed manageable and finite. They got stitches. They got some medication. They left. I met them and never saw them again.

And then I met you. But, first, I heard you.

I was standing at the infirmary window, and I heard all of you singing. Each of your voices tunneled separately through the holes of the screen, and I swear, you were the loudest. You were singing, “Oh-ay-oh-ay-oh,” and I recognized the song from a mouthwash commercial that I saw in the mid-'nineties. It had computer-animated bottles swinging through the jungle on vines, and, listening to you, I thought, “This guy is throwing his voice through the air in the same way, just flinging it out.”

I imagined what you looked like because I wanted an image to direct my pissed-offness toward. I pictured your mouth opened unnaturally wide, so that when you made the “ay” sounds, it pulled back into a desperate boomerang shape. I pictured your eyes so wide that the cold slapped at them.

You went into your second round of jungle calls, and I pictured you tearing up, your sight going blurry. I began to call you “A Cappella Guy” in my head. You sang so hard that it was like your jungle song was a prayer that had to get out to the world. (I still know the words:
“I'm far away from nowhere/On my own like Tartan Boy.”
) You were singing so loud that it seemed like the campus wasn't enough acreage for you. Like you had to sing beyond Brown, beyond Providence, beyond Rhode Island, because there were clinically depressed people in Boise and starving children in actual jungles that could be moved by your voice.

I can tell you now that I remember thinking, “Oh you motherfucker, I'll get you.” Although you weren't in any danger from me because it would have been too much trouble to get outside anyway.

Before you guys broke into song, I'd been having a good time at the window. Freezing air had been coming in through the screen, turning itself into thousands of invisible needles and poking me in each pore. This felt great. When extreme temperatures pricked me from the outside, the inside of me hurt less.

I remember there were snowflakes coating the trees, which looked like icy fishing nets. I smelled fire. It was burning all over Providence in people's fireplaces and sometimes beyond their fireplaces, all throughout their houses. Vivian told me about a family she'd seen on the news whose house had just burned down a few days before I met you. She had liked and deliberately remembered what the mom had said to the newscaster: “I know what they mean now, when they say that the pits of hell are full of fire and pitch black at the exact same time.” The family's house had burned down because of a short from a bad heater. Vivian said it was the dogs and toddlers who never got out in time (or who were never gotten out in time).

I never found out what kind of fire I smelled that night—that of human/animal misfortune or that of chestnuts roasting. I breathed in the smell, though, and felt like the fuzz in my nose was being singed. I also felt like the tuberculosis was being crowded out, which is why I was doing all this deep breathing.