This morning, here in Chelsea, in our own bed, I cracked my eyes. Eyes that were not Ambien-coated. Eyes that had been shut for five straight hours. But what had opened them? It was 5:40.
What was that noise? That high pitched repetitive noise? Like a trill, like a...
Birdsong. I reached over and grabbed N's leg, almost too hard. Birdsong. Good god it's good to be home.
But I should back up, because, as with all things so far, it wasn't that easy.
The full marrow results are not back, and won't be for a little while. But there's nothing else for the hospital to do for me in the meantime. And my numbers are either high enough or trending in the right direction, so why not wait for the results at home?
Yes. Indeed; why not?
They turfed us around noon Wednesday. The tiny room that had been our home unfolded a clown-car's worth of crap, and we needed the extra-wide wheelchair they use for fat people to get all of our bags and belongings down to the taxi driveway of the hospital. Hugs, tears, assurances, and this strange mix of freedom and knowing I'll be back soon enough pushed us out the door.
And into a cab. Which made me sick.
Not hurl sick, just car sick. Makes sense, and didn't surprise me: I often tend towards motion sickness when not controlling the vehicle. So it's really control issues more than nausea.
When we get to the apartment, it is about 90 degrees. N insists I can only carry the one parcel that weighs under four pounds--I think there was a bag of pretzels in it.
I am allowed to hold the door as she trundles our proud gypsy pile of gear into the hallway.
Then I have to relinquish everything and climb the stairs.
One stair at a time, one hand on the wall and the other on the railing, and weeping like the highest grade of sissy little dweeb, I get all the way to our door nonstop.
N has been carrying my precarious health and emotional fractures like some leaden turtle-shell on her back for a month, and my reward for her getting me safely back to our home is to stand on our "Go Away" doormat and blubber. Nice work, tough guy.
Yes, there is deeply ingrained pred flushing out of my system, but it is also extremely emotional in two ways: the glory of coming home, and a growing terror that I am not, in fact, in a hospital.
Convicts get out of prison, and they don't know what to do. Robert Downey Jr recently described prison as the safest place you could possibly be.
Meet me in the cancer ward, Bob.
But this feeling doesn't settle in at once. There is mainly happiness and fatigue, and the emasculation of slumping on the couch--the couch! the couch!--while N walks endless laps from one end of the apartment to the other unpacking, cleaning, prepping, arranging, feeding, fretting, and starting our life again. I think I may have picked up an envelope at one point. Maybe.
Then we ordered food. Just ordered it; didn't have to fit it between other meals, didn't have to send her out for it, didn't have to arrange for a visitor to bring it. Just called the local deli we have patronized for a decade but NEVER gotten delivery from, and a little while later a fine young man brought us:
Bag o' chips
Grilled Cheese
Creama' Tomato soup.
And seven or eight seconds later I was done.
Bad. Idea.
At some point after the bustle had settled, after a friend had come over to keep an eye on me while N shopped for the prescriptions and supplies we need now that we are here, I started to slowly grow into a nice little freak-out. And in perfect harmony I started to feel bad.
In the excitement of leaving it had not occurred to me that:
A: I had gotten chemo the day before.
B: I had not eaten greasy NY food in such abundance in quite a while.
And I was getting more and more worried about not being surrounded by doctors and nurses and monitors and bells and whistles and pharmacies and echo-cardiograms and whatever else had grown into my twisted sense of safety and sickness over the last 30 days.
30 days I was in there. 30 days N was in there with me. 30 nights of sleepy smiles across the little valley between the mechanical bull bed and the cot. 30 days to grow used to cancer.
And then all of a sudden I am on the couch, and my stomach is roiling and I am sweaty and feel loose-limbed and maybe faint. I rush to the bathroom. Yes it is nice to be sitting on my own toilet, but what happens there won't make a greatest hits list for anybody.
And then all of a sudden I am on the couch, and my heart rate is speeding up, and there's nobody except N, and my fears and systemic quivering are too much for me. My trust falters, I lose the thread, I abandon N and her careful carrying of my health. I am foolish enough to stop believing in Sequoias. I feel like they were wrong, we shouldn't have left, I am back in A-fib, I am turning to liquid from the inside out. I shouldn't be here. I should be back take me back take me back oh jesus am I in A-fib just stare at your chest just stare at your chest it's a 4-count not a broken 3 its a 4-count calm down calm down CALM DOWN...please.
N saw the little boy in my eyes and, and fixed it. She called her father, who came in with a stethoscope and listened to me and said 'no, you're not in A-fib' and he's a Dr so I listened. He taught us to take blood pressure, where to listen to the heart. When he and N listened to both their hearts and mine I saw the truth in their eyes when they said, a little sadly, that mine actually sounded stronger than theirs. Just pounding away, scared 4-count, lub-dub, lub-dub, you're here.
So with some help from her and him, it passed.
And it was time for bed.
I figured I might as well just pile every demon together and get it over with, so I didn't take the Ambien. Fuck'em, you gotta fight it out eventually, and this is my goddamn bed.
There was a sound that became symbolic of the hospital to me. A sound that attacked me, small but dedicated in its violence like and Arctic Tern defending her nest on the beach. Every day. Dozens of times, punching holes in every thought or space or sleep I had.
I asked N about it, and she never heard it. Amazing what we choose to hate, what we choose to ennoble with the strength of obsession.
It was a ringtone. I think it was for a staff phone in the hall, but it could have been our roommate's cell. It was a set of bending opening tones and then a chitter of follow-up notes. Very digital, vaguely musical. It was one of the ringtones from the earliest era of ringtones, a facsimile of something else.
But it had bored into me like the marrow needle and taken up residence. And most nights in the hospital it took up residence in my head and just rolled over and over and over. Tinnitus with a melody.
As I tried to sleep, it was more constant than it had ever been, somewhere between memory and reproduction. I felt like I could actually hear it, yet I knew it was memory and psychology. But i did not stop.
Each time I slipped away--for ten minutes at the start of the night, maybe an hour at a time by the middle of the night--it was there, shushing in my ears, pretending to be next to the bed, maybe outside the window, melding in with the air conditioner hum.
I had sweats again in the night. Partially because we shaved off the mohawk--it was just about to slough off on its own--and partially because of the fear, and partially because of the heart-rate and partially because of...well, just get used to it. That's how it'll be on your own in the night, no Ambien, no nurses. Just us: and that's more than enough, dammit.
It was the terror-test. It was me, the internal sadist me, rounding the bases over and over to see if any other part of me could stop the sprinting. It was a mind-game at the most basic level--with only one gamer and high stakes.
And then...
Birdsong.
And an Iggy Pop track.
Highway Song, off of American Ceasar. Great album, but a song I haven't listened to in years. I looked up the lyrics online:
"Highway Song"
I been walkin' down the road
what it means i dunno
i been walkin' down the highway
with the bad food flyin by me
i' m an ordinary man
with a time bomb in my hand
it keeps tickin' and i keep runnin
tryin to find out where i come from
and there ain't nothin' gonna take this road away
nothin' gonna take this road away
nothin' gonna take this road outta my heart
nothin' gonna take this pain outta my heart
i wake up sweatin in the night
every town is only lights
i 'm addicted to the highway
'cuz i just can't do things their way
and there ain't nothin gonna take this road away
nothin gonna take that road away
nothin gonna take that road outta my heart
highway i' m doin fine
you help me draw the line
no use in bein alive
if i'm just renting
i undersand the circus well
i've played the clown when down he fell
but bein' down ain't bein' loser
so just look out here comes a bruiser
and there ain t nothin gonna take my road away
nothin' gonna take my road away
nothin' gonna take my road outta my heart
I just dug these up, just now. And I have chills. But I'm smiling.
