I recognize now that she was feeling frail.
I recognize now that she was feeling then as I feel now.
Invisible on the street.
The target of any wheeled vehicle on the scene.
Unbalanced at the instant of stepping off a curb, sitting down or standing up, opening or closing a taxi door.
Cognitively challenged not only by simple arithmetic but by straightforward news stories, announced changes in traffic flow, the memorization of a telephone number, the seating of a dinner party.
“Estrogen actually made me feel better,” she said to me not long before she died, after several decades without it.
Well, yes. Estrogen had made her feel better.
This turns out to have been “the situation” for most of us.
And yet:
And stilclass="underline"
Despite all evidence:
Despite recognizing that my skin and my hair and even my cognition are all reliant on the estrogen I no longer have:
Despite recognizing that I will not again wear the red suede sandals with the four-inch heels and despite recognizing that the gold hoop earrings and the black cashmere leggings and the enameled beads no longer exactly apply:
Despite recognizing that for a woman my age even to note such details of appearance will be construed by many as a manifestation of misplaced vanity:
Despite all that:
Nonetheless:
That being seventy-five could present as a significantly altered situation, an altogether different “it,” did not until recently occur to me.
27
Something happened to me early in the summer.
Something that altered my view of my own possibilities, shortened, as it were, the horizon.
I still have no idea what time it was when it happened, or why it was that it happened, or even in any exact way what it was that happened. All I know is that midway through June, after walking home with a friend after an early dinner on Third Avenue in the eighties, I found myself waking on the floor of my bedroom, left arm and forehead and both legs bleeding, unable to get up. It seemed clear that I had fallen, but I had no memory of falling, no memory whatsoever of losing balance, trying to regain it, the usual preludes to a fall. Certainly I had no memory of losing consciousness. The diagnostic term for what had happened (I was to learn before the night ended) was “syncope,” fainting, but discussions of syncope, centering as they did on “pre-syncope symptoms” (palpitations, light-headedness, dizziness, blurred or tunnel vision), none of which I could identify, seemed not to apply.
I had been alone in the apartment.
There were thirteen telephones in the apartment, not one of which was at that moment within reach.
I remember lying on the floor and trying to visualize the unreachable telephones, count them off room by room.
I remember forgetting one room and counting off the telephones a second and then a third time.
This was dangerously soothing.
I remember deciding in the absence of any prospect of help to go back to sleep for a while, on the floor, the blood pooling around me.
I remember pulling a quilt down from a wicker chest, the only object I could reach, and folding it under my head.
I remember nothing else until I woke a second time and managed on this attempt to summon enough traction to pull myself up.
At which point I called a friend.
At which point he came over.
At which point, since I was still bleeding, we took a taxi to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital.
It was I who said Lenox Hill.
Let me repeat: it was I who said Lenox Hill.
Weeks later, this one fact was still troubling me as much as anything else about the entire sequence of events that night: it was I who said Lenox Hill. I got into a taxi in front of my apartment, which happens to be equidistant from two hospitals, Lenox Hill and New York Cornell, and I said Lenox Hill. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell did not demonstrate a developed instinct for self-preservation. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell demonstrated only that I was at that moment incapable of taking care of myself. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell proved the point humiliatingly made by every nurse and aide and doctor to whom I spoke in the two nights I would eventually spend at Lenox Hill, the first night in the emergency room and the second in a cardiac unit, where a bed happened to be available and where it was erroneously assumed that because I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem: I was old. I was too old to live alone. I was too old to be allowed out of bed. I was too old even to recognize that if I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem.
“Your cardiac problem isn’t showing up on the monitors,” one nurse kept reporting, accusingly. I tried to process what she was saying.
Processing what people were saying was not at that moment my long suit, but this nurse seemed to be suggesting that my “cardiac problem” was not showing up on the monitors because I had deliberately detached the electrodes.
I countered.
I said that to the best of my knowledge I did not have a cardiac problem.
She countered.
“Of course you have a cardiac problem,” she said. And then, closing the issue: “Because otherwise you wouldn’t be in the cardiac unit.”
I had no answer for that.
I tried to pretend I was home.
I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night.
Only shifts.
Only waiting.
Waiting for the IV nurse, waiting for the nurse with the narcotics key, waiting for the transporter.
Will someone please take the catheter out.
That transfusion was ordered at eleven this evening.
“How do you normally get around your apartment,” someone in scrubs kept asking, marveling at what he seemed to consider my entirely unearned mobility, finally providing his own answer: “Walker?”
Demoralization occurs in the instant: I have trouble expressing the extent to which two nights of relatively undemanding hospitalization negatively affected me. There had been no surgery. There had been no uncomfortable procedures. There had been no real discomfort at all, other than emotional. Yet I felt myself to be the victim of a gross misunderstanding: I wanted only to go home, get the blood washed out of my hair, stop being treated as an invalid. Instead the very opposite was happening. My own doctor, who was based at Columbia Presbyterian, happened to be in St. Petersburg with his family: he called me at Lenox Hill during an intermission at the Kirov Ballet. He wanted to know what I was doing at Lenox Hill. So, at that point, did I. The doctors on the scene, determined to track down my phantom “cardiac problem,” seemed willing to permanently infantilize me. Even my own friends, dropping by after work, very much in charge, no blood in their hair, sentient adults placing and receiving calls, making arrangements for dinner, bringing me perfect chilled soups that I could not eat because the hospital bed was so angled as to prevent sitting upright, were now talking about the need to get me “someone in the house”: it was increasingly as if I had taken a taxi to Lenox Hill and woken up in Driving Miss Daisy.