In Sickness and In Health

I was hit by a truck this week.  I could barely make out the license plate as it sped away: H1N1.

I had spent the last six weeks dodging germ traffic in my clinic, having diagnosed several dozen patients with the much hyped Swine Flu.  But my luck could only hold out so long.

My symptoms were mild at first, causing me to believe I may have contracted some lesser virus.  But, being a much better doctor than patient, I pushed it too hard through the weekend, and then crashed on Sunday night.  Still in denial on Monday morning, I loaded myself up with ibuprofen and tried to make it into work, only to have my nurse make an executive decision and send me right back home. 

And then I truly crashed.  Through the floor.  Plummetting towards the dark ugly bowels of the earth.

Being several days into the illness at that point--too late for tamiflu--I decided that as long as I was home, I wasn't going to mask my symptoms with ibuprofen.  If this illness was telling me to lay prostrate in bed, then that's what I was going to do.

My lungs were on fire.  My sputum was the color of pond scum.  My sinuses were turgid with pressure; I thought if I could stick a needle in them, they would pop.  My head throbbed.  My skin bristled at the slightest pressure of even my clothes.  I had no appetite. But mostly, my entire body was overpowered by a profound malaise, the likes of which I have never before known.   I lacked the strength to read, to even hold up my head.  I lay in bed and moaned for hours and hours, like a cow crazy with disease who stumbles in a winter pasture, thrashes, and then lies still, the only sound the mournful, wheezing bellows of its lungs as snow begins to slowly cover it like a white sheet in the morgue, like the blizzard that dropped two feet of snow in Denver that night.

I thought, so this must be what it is like to die.  This is what happens when an insult utterly saps my body of vitality, and I succumb finally to the malignant entropy of the universe, wave upon wave of disease and pain crashing over me as I flounder, thrash, and then relent.

Forty eight hours passed in unmitigated misery.  My lovely wife was an angel, Florence Nightingale bringing me soup, covering me up with blankets, and holding down the rest of the fort.

Just past the point where I thought my body had lost the fight, I began to heal.  My sinuses cleared.  My cough lessened.  My brain fog lifted.  But mostly, I felt energy returning to my bones.  I felt a rush of exhilaration.  "I have taken your worst shot, you dreadful Pig Flu, but I'm still standing."

Today, I went and played basketball, wary of whether or not my convalescing body could handle vigorous exercise yet--if ever.  As I drained three pointer after glorious three pointer, I knew that I was back.  Me.  My body.  My soul.  My deadly long range jump shot.

I deal with suffering people everyday of my life.  I sympathize with them as I try and coax them back to health.  Lucky for me, I don't often personally experience pain or physical suffering.

But I have renewed empathy now.  An illness such as this is a reminder of how miserable it is to lose our precious health, how our physical suffering threatens our emotional strength, and of how amazingly frail, yet marvelously resilient, our bodies are.

The sky is blue today. The snow is melting.  Life is beautiful again.  Hallelujah.

The Power in Sean's Palm: A Short Story

     Evening breeze, indigo sky pierced by early stars, sharp and shimmering. This is August in Colorado, just past dusk: cool, dry, and violet. I make my way up the trail from the culvert, across the field and towards the car, with Sean at my heels. No flashlights. He pants and shuffles along, struggling to keep up. He's a foot shorter than me, and as is his custom, he keeps on talking. 

     ". . . and then the ghost waved his arms and because the Indian was afraid of ghosts he jumped on his horse. . . "

     Sean talks, but we rarely converse. These excursions of ours across the expansive meadows at the edge of suburbia are exercises of his legs, tongue, and imagination--and my ears. I take him on these hikes by choice, but not for the conversation. I feel some sense of obligation towards Sean, though I’m not sure why. Maybe it's my inner nice guy. Or maybe it’s just fatigue that makes me relent to his constant requests, because I have a hard time saying no. But something tells me the real reason has little to do with Sean. These trips are for me, too. An imperfect antidote for loneliness. On a otherwise perfect Friday summer night, it’s either Sean, or no one.

     Sean has a syndromic appearance: short stature, misshapen face, mild developmental delay. But either through denial or bravado, his parents don’t acknowledge that he is different, determined that he be treated as absolutely normal. Since they moved onto our cul-de-sac two years ago, they've never made mention of him being different—playing catch in the front yard, inviting me over to watch movies, going to football games. Or encouraging him to ask me to go on these evening hikes. Sean is eighteen years old, a year older than me, on track to graduate from high school next year in the special ed program. He is nearly "normal" enough that at times I've wondered if he has any true handicap other than being slow. He is nice, harmless, not unpleasant in any way. But his small size, compact facial features, and thick gaze mark him physically. I took the cue from his parent's and became his friend, treating him as normally as possible. He sits with me at lunch. But what does normal mean to Sean? He’s still talking,  

     “. . . then the chief shot the arrow straight through the heart and then the Indian . . .”

     I’m ready to change the narrative. “Hey, Sean,” I interrupt, and we stop walking. I point upward. “Look at the stars tonight.” Sean continues to blithely tell his story for a few more steps until he collides with my leg and his narration trails off.

     “What?” he asks, stumbling backwards through the weeds. He sees that I'm pointing and looks up. “What?”

     “See that really faint cloud up there?” I feel like a museum guide. My elaboration of random facts is another standard feature of these treks. I continue, “That's really a billion stars or more that are so far away that to us they look like a cloud of light. It's called--”

     “--that's the Milky Way,” he finishes for me, matter-of-factly, staring at me now rather than at the stars he’s just named. I cross my arms and look back at the sky.

     “Yeah,” I say, “you're right.” Sometimes he knows more than I expect. I breathe deep and feel the cooling, dusty air in my nostrils, and for a moment I feel like I'm breathing in stars. So vivid, so far away. The breeze glides open and vast across my face.

     “Mark,” Sean calls, “do you know what stars are?” He has yet to lift his eyes off of me, continuing with that thick gaze. I look down at him, waiting for his answer, preparing a gentle correction. He concludes emphatically, “They’re burning planets.”

     A thin smile escapes my lips. After a second, I respond smoothly, “Well, kind of, Sean. They're actually huge balls of gas that burn super hot. They're like the sun, just farther away.” 

    "What makes them burn?" he asks. 

  

    "Well, let's see, when gravity pulls the gas into the star, it starts to heat up, I think. And then . . ." Now it's my voice trailing off as I realize I don't have any depth of knowledge about what's next or why, and I'm also highly doubtful that Sean cares about anything more specific anyway. I could say whatever I want, but instead I just stop talking. His gaze remains unbroken. In the starlight, I can't tell what he's focusing on—my nose, my cheeks—but it’s not my eyes. Silence. I wonder if he is thinking or if his brain is just on pause. We're only few feet apart, but suddenly it seems there is a great distance between us. I glance towards my car a hundred yards away and start to walk towards it.

     “Mark . . ." I turn my head back around and see Sean holding up his palm. He whispers, “Wait.”

     I stop walking and turn to face him, wondering what he's going to do. He is breathing deeply and closes his eyes, bending dramatically forward. He squats and brings his palm down among the weeds, passing his stubby hand back and forth a few inches off the ground. He whispers, “I can feel them.” I say nothing. A moment passes, and he tries again. “I can feel them,” he repeats, adding, “They were here.” He grabs a handful of dust and pebbles and lets them sift slowly out of his thick fingers. He soulfully turns his gaze back to me and begins to speak.

     But I beat him to it.  “Who?” I ask. The line between reality and imagination is thin for Sean. Apparently I have run out of patience for tonight. “Who was here?”

     Sean theatrically sweeps his gaze across the fields, to the mountains and back, fingering the dust. With his eyes on me again, he intones, “The Indians.” Tension mounts in his voice. I wonder what movie gave him this idea. “Six of them. They died on this ground, because of. . .” Once again, his eyes sweep to the ground, back to me. "Because of . . . the white man."

     He says "the white man" with an affected, introspective guilt, as emotionally raw as an 90’s TV Western. When he pauses again, I blink and turn away, walking briskly towards the car. Sean churns his legs and stumbles through the weeds, struggling to keep up. The drama intensifies in his voice. “Mark, I can FEEL them.” He waits for me to say something, but I don't. He grabs my arm, but I'm not stopping. “You don't believe me, do you?” I have little desire to respond and can’t think of anything to say. We have reached the car. I walk over to the driver's side door. Sean follows me around, watches as I slip into the driver's seat, and then walks back around to the other side. I turn the ignition as he opens the door and plops down. The radio comes on loudly, and I turn it down to a murmur. Sean stares forward and asks again, “You don't believe me, do you?” 

     I roll down the window and put the car into drive. I glance at Sean, then back to the road. What should I say? “Sure,” I shrug, “there used to be lots of Indians around here. Utes, Arapahoe, some Cheyenne, I think . . .” Then I stop, realizing I don’t really know any more beyond that. What do I really know anyway, except for things that other people tell me? How do I know what Sean knows, or doesn't know?

    The lights from the suburbs shine across the fields. In the daylight, I can pick out my house from the crowd, but at night they all meld into a wash of sodium lights and empty spaces. The cool Colorado air flutters through the open window, drowning out the radio.  I reach over to turn up the volume. I look at Sean. His head is bent over like he might be asleep, but I catch a wet glint of the distant lights reflecting off of his dull eyes. He's awake, staring at his open palm like a Bible.