When you read older fiction and someone refers to dragging a steel bath into the kitchen and filling it with kettles of boiling water, do you wonder... what would that be like?
I don't think I could stand it.
•••
I didn't quite have a Christmas to speak of this year – it was interrupted for a minor illness....
I wake on the Saturday before Christmas with a painful infection in an awkward place.
(Hmm... 'An Awkward Place'... that should have been the title of Bernstein's last, horridly tacky opera, instead of A Quiet Place. It does better sum up things.)
Holiday plans start to disintegrate and get canceled; the full moon and solstice are moving majestically past, the university is closed. People are busy – I finally go to the emergency room on Sunday, wait three hours, am given an antibiotic.
A young doctor, earnest and focused, refers to the senior consultant – he is unfortunately less interested, and seems to brush off the case quickly. At one point I have to make sure: despite my accent, I am not visiting, I am a citizen, I do have full rights to... he pauses, slightly embarrassed. I wonder how often I need to confirm this.
The young doctor comes back when he's gone – she is doing a bit more than he said to do: I get the feeling she's slightly annoyed with him, and I'm glad she's thinking ahead.
If it doesn't get better, come back in two days....
•••
Such drama! In a part of the body I hold in high esteem – though now I also feel extremely defensive about its welfare....
•••
Two days later is, of course, Christmas Day, I dither in messages to people expecting to see me, and finally cancel everything. Can't quite get myself out of the house... or, for the most part, bed....
Painful. Body signals say: you need to do something.
•••
Boxing Day: back to the emergency room; it is quieter, and another young doctor, one who looks like one of my students except more harried, tells me: you need one of the specialists at the other hospital, the Freeman, one of them is in the small emergency ward there today.
He says, we can arrange transport but it will take some –
No, I'll get an Über. Instant taxi without complications.
•••
Over these and following days, Über carts me around the city in an efficient manner – don't complain to me about the plight of taxi drivers. The easiest part: no waiting or calling or figuring out addresses... and, as I am exasperated and distracted and discomfortable, I don't want additional demands placed on me.
Of course I would, at this point fairly continuously, rather be home in bed.
•••
At the Freeman, an intense young South Asian doctor, and a curly-headed, bearded nurse who doesn't appear to take anything very seriously.
The doctor is clear and ruthless about what to do – he's going to cut into a place where I don't want anyone cutting, ever, but well there ya go.
(Did I mention the high personal esteem thing? But sometimes one must set one's feelings aside...)
Lidocaine. Through a long, sharp needle, in a place where there are too damn many nerve endings. I swear I heard the nurse say something about, shouldn't you use a smaller needle? But this apparently gets brushed aside....
I find this unamusing.
•••
I thought afterwards: I'm glad he didn't tell me how long this would take – it was probably ten minutes or so; I got through it largely by thinking: it must be only a few more seconds....
And, yes, holding onto the sides of the bed, and snarling, and cursing a great deal I'm afraid.
At which point, despite the ebbing sharp pains from all that cutting, I did indeed start to feel better.
•••
The dressings will need to be changed every two days, at my GP's – except they are of course closed for the holiday – or the district nurse's stations – or back to one emergency room or the other.
The dressings are a bit unusual, you need a prescription to get them and bring them to the appointments.
Oh, and, you can't shower, or take a bath, for the next two weeks.
•••
No shower! No bath!
Worse than some damned hipbath!... a washcloth? A wet rag... my hair...
I mean, they are kidding, right?
No, they aren't.
•••
The doctor and I have a long conversation, as we wait for the nurse and a test and paperwork in the mostly empty, dimly lit emergency ward – only a few other people: mostly homeless or drunk, which suggests something about my place in the world as an ageing solitary in need of medical attention during a holiday.
The doctor and I talk about illness and fragility, about the kinds and range of things he needs to know as a doctor, and how complex, how multiple they all are; the nature of concrete knowledge and interconnections, at that level....
I finally begin to wilt and get a bit disconnected myself, at which point he goes to do other things.
So I go home, and blessedly do nothing.
•••
Thursday. Back to the Freeman emergency room; a ruthlessly efficient senior nurse redoes the dressing. She informs me what I must do, who to call, the various locations where I need to get dressings redone every two days.
Unfortunately, as with several other bursts of advice over this time, it is all telegraphic, and assumes I know the difference between different sub-departments – even when someone writes things down for me, they are so terse as to be hard to follow.
•••
Of course, the NHS is having more and more funding stripped out of it at the moment, which is why different district nurse stations, my GP, and the two emergency rooms are having trouble getting supplies, getting them to the right places, especially over a holiday...
Individuals are professional, focused, skilled: but the frame that holds them in place is clearly having chunks yanked out of it.
•••
Saturday, the district nurses. They have no information on me but patch me back together anyway, and give me two phone numbers and some instructions that I partly understand – this is tricky because of the special dressing required, because of the interfaces between systems that produce the various things needed. I suspect that, a couple of years ago, everything would have been kept in one place, but that was before aggressive neoliberalism started thinking about how damned much all these poor people seem to cost.
I'm sorry to say I cursed a lot more this time. Nobody had pointed out that I should take pain medications half an hour before, there was no Lidocaine – and the pleasant, but new, nurse had never done this before, so...
When I recovered and got up, I apologised very formally. The two nurses just laughed and said, oh we would do the same if anyone were doing that to us....
•••
(This shower/bath thing – it isn't payback because I took a bath in drought-ridden Cape Town last summer, is it? Hmmm... that would explain every....)
•••
Monday, I call the phone numbers – there is confusion. People are working hard, trying hard, but unfortunately the weekday receptionist at the district nurse station seems to have no idea what to do with me. She takes several hours to reach the wrong answers; I finally try another number, and a sharper woman puts together the jigsaw puzzle and has me sent back to....
My GP's office, ten minutes before closing, on New Year's Eve.
••••
How did such an infection come to be? Apparently it happens all the time: minor infections turn septic.
This is how Berg died, you know, I tell the nurse at my GP's office. Of course that statement requires some explanation – I mention the unfinished opera, and imagining Helene saying, Oh Alban, don't be such a baby, you'll be fine in the morning....
I don't tell her the plot of Lulu; that would merely confuse matters.
•••
In the mid-90s I had an infection on one of my thighs – staph, perhaps? – it looked minor enough but hurt like hell; enough to land me in the hospital for a couple of days. The hospital that is the University of California at San Francisco is high on Parnassus Avenue; though it is only a few blocks from the lowlands of the Castro, because the hill goes straight up it is perpetually lost in the fogs that make up the upper level of the city....
I was on a high floor, looking across fields of mist, wondering: am I having these kinds of illnesses because of HIV?
It was all very Magic Mountain of course.... I suppose I could have another go at reading that book – I've never liked it... why do the patients at the sanatorium snipe at each other so much?
Maybe they have minor infections in awkward places.
•••
Because time continues to move forward, Monday is of course New Year's Eve. As I've told Michael, and Norma, that they must come pick up their panettone for Christmas, both of them drop by, one before and one after the GP visit; I get chocolate, and bath stuff, and a trendy logo or two.
Michael says, why don't you come out with us for New Year's – no that won't happen. I'll stay home and text you.
•••
Improved well-being, in steps – suddenly better after the procedure, then better Monday, then better today.
•••
This past year, the coming year: other people are caught up with comparing the two, but as I tell Norma, I feel strangely – continuous – it isn't particularly annoying that I bypassed Christmas, my birthday, that some things are done, that others are not done.
It all seems part of a much longer flow, like something vaguely Taoist: even needing to return to the thesis, even the upcoming sabbatical.
Even illness, even health.
Even waiting to be allowed to take a shower... or a bath....
•••
On this night, as everyone else moves from one year to the next, there are fireworks outside:
they are obviously celebrating the fact that my Amfortas wound doesn't hurt much, today.
Comments