Despite my soldiers, I felt so agitated from the massive amount of extra steroid in my body that I was screaming. I screamed until I ran out of breath and then took breath to scream again. I got out of bed and ran in place like a boxer. I was running and screaming because I was full of adrenaline. My body had made a sensible decision.
A nurse heard me screaming and gave me a shot of Demerol to calm me down. I stopped screaming for half an hour. Then she gave me another shot of Demerol.
In a couple of hours I had been given as much Demerol as the hospital would give me, so I spent the rest of the night running in place and screaming. Since I was hoarse, the screaming was quiet.
Lockdown
The next day, I am told, I had several visits and phone conversations with people from my graduate program.
They called and visited because the director of the program had spoken with a representative from the hospital and misheard the phrase adrenal failure as the phrase renal failure. And she had announced to everyone that they should call or visit to say goodbye, because I would soon die.
I don’t remember the visits or the phone calls. Later I heard I’d told a visitor that I’d slept with someone else from our graduate program, which I had, once, a year before.
In a few days I was discharged from the hospital and moved back into my apartment, but I hadn’t recovered from the overdose.
In two months, unable to get out of bed, I called my parents in Massachusetts and said I needed them to come to Iowa and bring me home.
I had a fever, aches, rashes, muscle weakness, and extreme fatigue.
As soon as I was back in Boston I went to see my neurologist, expecting he’d send me right downstairs to be infused with gamma globulin.
But my neurologist said the weakness and fatigue weren’t CIDP symptoms, and he was right.
He said there was nothing he could do to make the symptoms go away, and that it was a separate, probably viral, syndrome, and that I should see an infectious disease specialist.
I got home, got into bed, and began yelling with grief, which was something I hadn’t done before. Again, as it had in the hospital in Iowa, my body decided sensibly on a course of action. I was too sad to cry. I had to yell. The yelling relieved my sadness better than crying would have.
After five more months of the fever and the other symptoms, the cause of which was never determined, and after living at my parents’ house all that time, mostly in bed, I woke one day knowing I couldn’t tolerate another day of my life, that this would be the last day. I told my mother. She asked me how I was going to do it, listened to the answer, took away my car keys, locked the garage, and drove me to see a therapist, who talked with us together, and then to my mother alone.
Then my mother drove me home and helped me pack a few things. And drove me to a different hospital from the one where I’d spent so much time being treated for CIDP.
During the evaluative interview, made one mistake. I said I didn’t believe I would ever get better from whatever was wrong with me.
And so I was admitted, with severe depression, to the locked ward.
I was still taking a daily dose of steroids.
Last Words
Wait — what would I have done if I’d been told one of my classmates would soon die of renal failure at twenty-five?
Would I have phoned? Visited? Brought a gift?
I was told that two men from my graduate program called me. One poet and one fiction writer. I don’t remember.
It is sweet to imagine the conversation they might have had before calling me. One of them asking the other if he’d like to come over and talk with their classmate, together, before she died.
Maybe afterward they talked with each other about how I’d sounded — as if I would soon die, or as if maybe I wouldn’t.
What would I have done? If it were, say, the guy from New Hampshire I’d always liked? I think I’d have called him.
What if it had been the girl with the glass eye, whose life seemed so boring, with her fiance and her car and her many hobbies? I’d have sent a card, maybe.
The stunning woman from Brussels — she visited. And brought a pile of magazines. But now that I think of it, she may have sent the magazines with someone else. It is hard to remember. I was blacked out, so anything seems plausible.
I like to think I would have said something to the dying person.
Would I have written about the dying person?
If I were a little in love with the dying person, would I have written little secret poems about this love? Would I have showed them to anyone, submitted them for publication?
Did anyone do that?
How did my classmates experience my death by renal failure in 1999?
Prayer
Once in my life I promised to say a prayer for my Catholic grandmother.
I picked up the phone when she called one morning at seven o’clock. She begged me to come and visit her. She said she was lonely. She was eighty-three years old and her friends were dead. I said I would visit if I didn’t have to go to school. I was in the seventh grade. She said, Oh, school. Then she thought for a moment and said, Say a prayer for me.
I was self-conscious generally, and prayer embarrassed me. I had learned phonetic Hebrew and had been taught Hebrew prayers, which, to me, were just a sequence of sounds, but I didn’t know how to pray in English.
After my grandmother’s death I remembered my promise and felt sad, but less about my grandmother than about the idea of a young person promising to say a prayer for an old person and then forgetting to do it during the old person’s lifetime.
Twelve years later, in the psychiatric ward, I was eating crackers in the kitchen when two other patients sat down with me.
One woman was my age. She was schizophrenic and had spent her first few days in the dayroom, standing, holding a Bible, reading loudly and clearly, and sometimes singing in a pure soprano.
The nurses asked her to stop. Later she explained, I just wanted to bring the Lord into this place.
The other woman was poor and had a very ill son who lived in a state home. Like many of the patients, she chewed nicotinelaced gum, because smoking on the ward was prohibited. And like all of us, she had no pretensions of superiority to anyone else committed to the ward.
She asked me, Do I seem depressed? I looked at her desperate, ruined face, and answered with careful solemnity, Maybe a little.
The ward was the only true community of equals I have ever lived in. What I mean is that we all knew we had already lived through hell, that our lives were already over, and all we had was the final descent. The only thing to do on the way down was to radiate mercy.
The singing schizophrenic, the sad mother, and I sat quietly for a few minutes, and then the schizophrenic asked, Would you like to pray with me?