But I went back to college still sick, with my central line, not having had intercourse with any medical students, and every month or so I went back to the hospital to sit in the Oncology Outpatient ward to have my plasma replaced or to have a bag of gamma infused. And the only people there were the hem-onc nurses, who were women.
My line was implanted in June 1995, and in May 1996, after eleven and a half months, it was pulled.
I wasn’t well yet — I was taking steroids and gamma globulin. But those treatments kept me healthier than plasma replacement had. Those treatments actually slowed down the rate at which my immune system secreted the poisonous antibodies.
I would still relapse, but it was clear that the steroids and the gamma would keep me at least as well as apheresis would, so it was decided I wouldn’t have my plasma replaced again. The gamma from March had already lasted three months. My neurologist believed I’d turned a corner.
I believed, though, that I would stop secreting antibodies forever only after I had intercourse. And though I looked worse than I ever had in my life — thanks to the steroids I was fat and swollen, covered in acne, and had a gruesomely round face — I knew I would have to go through the humiliation of finding a man who would agree to have intercourse with me.
I thought my friend Victor, who was legendarily promiscuous and who had shown interest in me shortly after my college boyfriend dumped me, might still be interested.
So I called him and invited him to have a drink with me that night. We had our drink and walked back to our dorm and sat down in the courtyard, just talking.
It was two days before Commencement. Early June. He was graduating, and I was graduating, too, sort of, but the envelope I was getting wouldn’t have a diploma in it. It would be empty, because I had another semester of classwork to complete.
Since it was two days before Commencement, only the seniors were left at school, and everyone was awake, and most of them were in the courtyard with us. It was a party that had been going on all week.
And so I felt exposed — I felt too shy to seduce Victor in front of the entire senior class of Dunster House, even though I knew no one would notice or care.
Finally, Victor said, Your place? getting up from the bench we’d been sitting on.
And we went to my dorm room, which was a single suite I had all to myself, with my own living room and my own bathroom, because my neurologist had written a note to the university explaining I needed my space.
And we sat on my futon, taking turns drinking out of a plastic bottle of cheap vodka.
I was still unable to put the plan into motion.
Eventually Victor said, Do you have any other rooms in this places and walked me to the bedroom, and lay me on my bed, and had intercourse with me.
Then he asked me about the scabs on my chest from where the line had just been pulled out of me, and listened to the things I told him, and held me very tightly.
Two mornings later, when we were in the courtyard again, seated in rows, about to receive our diplomas, he was wearing a buttoned shirt and sweating, because his neck was covered with bright red marks.
Almost seven years passed. Victor and I wrote every day. I lived in New York and he lived in Chicago.
He told me some of his secrets, and I told him some of mine.
Our letters were intimate, but I didn’t get around to explaining to him that I’d recovered from my disease only because he had selflessly had intercourse with an ugly version of a girl he’d once had a crush on.
A little less than seven years after I was cured of my disease through the mystical power of intercourse, Victor had an aneurysm and died.
Cured
I remember three things about the gamma globulin infusions.
The first is that when I was in Emergency for the fourth or fifth time, and my breathing had become shallow enough for Triage Level 1, and I needed another central line implanted right then, I begged for gamma instead of apheresis.
But my blood was already too poisonous to leave as it was, and the doctors said they had to replace my plasma in order to remove the antibodies that were there already, or I might stop breathing.
So even though I was sobbing and begging not to be implanted with another line, I knew it would be implanted. I was too agitated to have the surgery right at that moment, so it was decided I’d be given a half milligram of lorazepam, which is what I was given when I had a panic attack.
Because of an administrative error, I was given four times the amount of lorazepam I was usually given. And I knew it. They gave me four pills instead of the usual one, and I didn’t say anything. I was hoping I would pass out, but I didn’t. Not quite. I was sedated just enough. The regular dose wouldn’t have worked.
The second thing I remember about gamma is that during a later hospitalization, I was hooked up to a small pump, much smaller than the almost car-sized machine used for plasma exchange. At last we would see whether gamma would work.
It didn’t do a thing except slur my speech for a few hours. And so for months afterward I continued with my tedious rounds of plasma replacement to clean up the poison that I still, despite the gamma infusion, continued to secrete into my blood.
And the third thing is that in March 1996, I had another infusion, of a much higher concentration than the first two, and received the infusion while lying in a meditative state in the Outpatient Oncology ward, and felt fine, maybe a little tired, and was driven home, and by the time I got into bed my head hurt so much I vomited. And I was sick for the next couple of days, too sick to think about the gamma.
But after that week was over, the tingling and numbness in my limbs wasn’t any worse than it had been before the infusion, because the gamma had worked. Sort of. It didn’t cure me, but I didn’t relapse for four months.
The way I see it, gamma gave me three months, and Victor gave me one more after that and then some.
I didn’t tell my doctors about Victor.
The Dump
After my third gamma infusion, my mother and I drove to the town dump on a weekday. Our town dump was not so much a dump as a futuristic recycling station with three kinds of glass, six kinds of plastic, two kinds of paper, compost and mulch and firewood, a book swap, and a section labeled Recycle, which was where you could get a pretty good pair of skis and where my parents got most of the furniture on the first floor of our house, including an antique Shaker chair.
My mother and I brought three of my canes there, and two walkers, including the one with the racing stripes.
And that day we ran into a neighbor, which was not uncommon. People went to the dump weekly, at least, to take a treasure hunt through Recycle. There were stage lights there that day, and I wanted to bring them home. Maybe because they were the heaviest things I saw there, and I wanted to see if I could lift them.
Our neighbor told us her mother had died just that week and that she was at the dump with some of the things from her mother’s apartment. Alzheimer’s, she whispered.