They don’t know exactly what is wrong with you…
And this not knowing takes forever and never ends.
For one thing, you have a purple rash from neck to wrist to ankle that will not budge from beneath the military-grade ointments you are required to slather over it. For another, some of your organs are failing tests, failing you, failing in general. You spend half of your one wild and precious life in your online patient portal looking at inscrutable graphs of the wrong concentrations of hematological components you’ve never heard of. The absolute lymphs are too low! The absolute monos are too high! The immature granulocytes are juuuuust right. Since when did your blood become Goldilocks and the Three Bears?
“Stay with your group,” you can hear your fourth-grade teacher say on the museum field trip — and you would like to, you really would, but you seem to have wandered off and now you are lost and gazing alone at the ruins of Pompeii while everyone else sits in the cafeteria with their bologna sandwiches.
There, on your way to the bathroom, you run into your favorite doctor — the one you are there to see — and she hugs you and says, “I was so happy when I saw your name on my schedule!” Later, when you’re sitting in your papery gown on her papery table, she will say, totally convincingly, “We are on it,” even though they don’t totally understand what it is.
The phlebotomist in the black Pumas asks about your flying-chipmunk tattoo, and her eyes fill with tears when you explain that your daughter has the same one. She and her mom have matching tattoos, too, and she rolls up her sleeve so you can see the red of the heart on her biceps. “We’ve talked about this before, haven’t we,” she says, and you laugh, and she says, “Did I cry that time, too?” She did.
In the CT scan waiting room, a lively and ancient man wearing more than one wool sweater clinks his bottle of clear contrast solution against yours and says, “Cheers, baby! To our health.”
Afterward, your husband gets your ticket validated and holds you in the elevator of the parking garage while you cry a little. Then he takes you to lunch at your favorite café in this hospital town — the place with the platters of Middle Eastern dips: garlicky tzatziki and earthy baba ganouj and tangy, vibrant muhammara to scoop up with warm, spice-freckled pita. Sometimes, while you’re sitting there sipping your mint iced tea, the results start dinging into the portal, and he makes a yikes face to make you laugh.
Driving home you respond to the many texts from individual friends and friend groups, everyone checking on you, sending you nonstop heart-based emojis, offering to bring you soup, caring if you live or die. If you didn’t keep these appointments a secret from them, your parents would call, too, and you would reassure them that you do, in fact, plan to outlive them, although the possibility that you won’t hangs above your head like a bad lightbulb. You are approaching 60, and still it’s possible that nobody will ever love you as much as these two. You cry into the cats’ fur about it, and the cats lick your salty face even though your tears are a little deficient in magnesium.
Ten days from now, your daughter and her bestie — both of them living in your home like balls of actual sunlight — will take it upon themselves to remove the biopsy stitches from the back of your shoulder after they catch you trying to do it yourself in the medicine-cabinet mirror. They are science majors, they work lab jobs, they are fearless and knowledgeable, and they only start laughing when it becomes clear that the kitten has chewed through all of the sanitized packaging of the suture-removal kit. “It’s fine,” you say, “just wash it with soap and water.” They use alcohol swabs instead. When you see their two perfect rosy faces bent so carefully toward your wound, you believe in something like the power of mystical healing.
Some days, yeah, you still feel like you’re wandering around alone, studying the ruins while everyone else eats lunch and peers at irrigation dioramas. But you’re not alone, and no one will let you forget it. So lean in. Reach out. Let the ashes rain down around you while you count your blessings.
Catherine Newman is the author of the novels We All Want Impossible Things, the New York Times-bestselling Sandwich, and the brand new Wreck — out today! — which, she says, “is kind of like if this piece were turned into a novel, but funnier, ideally.”
Thank you, Catherine. Congratulations on your new novel. xoxo
P.S. Catherine Newman’s joyful house tour and her love of cold plunging (“a sea of thigh and boob”).
(Photo by Nick Karvounis/Unsplash.)
