I’d felt the bone break, but just to be sure, I skated to a pay phone and called my friend’s father in St. Louis. He was an army doctor. He asked me how my arm and hand felt when I moved it up, down, around, how my fingers felt. Then he said I should go to an ER and have an X-ray taken.
I thanked him and thought to myself, Well, so I’ll have a broken arm for a while. I wasn’t going to another ER ward ever again. Not if I were conscious.
Five days later, while trying to chop carrots with an arm I knew was broken, I called my friend Vivian and said I wouldn’t be able to cook dinner after all. I had invited her over to prove my arm wasn’t just functional — it was good enough to julienne carrots. I hailed a gypsy cab and told the driver to take me to the nearest hospital. I should have taken the subway to a good hospital on the Upper East Side, but I didn’t know any better, so I wound up at Woodhull Medical Center.
In the Emergency waiting room were two men in orange jumpsuits, handcuffs, and leg irons, covered in blood, eyes swollen shut, and two or three police escorts for each of them.
A nurse asked me if I would please come into a ward to translate for a Polish patient, and I told her I didn’t speak Polish, and she stared at me until I noticed I was the only white person in the waiting room. The only pale white people treated at Woodhull were Polish immigrants from Greenpoint.
A doctor took an X-ray and gave me a sling and told me to come back in a week. I didn’t. The radial head fracture didn’t heal properly, but I don’t mind.
I’ve always had health insurance — if I relapsed without insurance, my parents would be homeless within a year — but other than that visit to Woodhull, I didn’t see a doctor for two years after I got out of lockdown.
In 2004 I fell on my kneecap while chasing my friend’s dogs in an ice storm in rural New Jersey. I drove myself to an orthopedist, skidding all the way, knowing I’d need surgery to fish out the bone chips. God, it would be horrible. I’d be admitted to the bone ward and everything would go back to the way it was when I was helpless.
But all the calcium supplements I’d taken, all the miles I’d run, had made my bones strong again, and I hadn’t broken my kneecap.
Even now, when I crack a bone on something hard, I still think I’ve fractured it, and in a flash I can see my wasted body in a bed with side rails, but I haven’t broken any bones since the night I broke my arm at Chelsea Piers.
Scars
For years I liked thinking of the ways I would erase all traces of the disease.
First I would stop taking the steroids.
Then I would have someone unclasp the impossible clasp of my MedicAlert bracelet.
Then I would go to physical therapy every day and my muscles would grow, and my heart and lungs would strengthen, and the fat deposits in my face and on my upper back would melt away, and I would run three miles along the Charles River, which was what I did at least twice a week during the month before the diagnosis.
I would apply expensive creams that would dry up the steroid acne.
I would have my teeth bleached of their tetracycline stains.
And so on.
Finally I would have plastic surgery for the thirty scars on my chest from the four central lines. I ruminated on that surgery obsessively. It was the last thing! The last thing, and then all evidence of the disease would be gone forever. No one, not even I, would be able to tell I’d been so sick.
I stared at the scars in mirrors. I could point to the four large ones without a mirror, without even looking down. I could practically feel them on me.
Once the disease went into its most recent remission, the one that’s still going on, I got fit again, just as I’d planned.
In 1996, I’d given all of my scoop-necked tops to my roommate, as it would have been rude to walk around with a big wound and a couple of tubes flopping around, scaring everyone.
For years after the line was out, I didn’t wear anything that exposed the scars.
But now that I look quite healthy, I like exposing them, and I don’t want the plastic surgery anymore.
The Point and the Ray
I grew used to being sick and looking forward to recovering.
Then I grew used to being well again for a short while, knowing I’d be sick again sooner or later.
Then I grew used to having no prognosis at all, because with a mysterious disease, all things are possible.
My existence shrank from an arrow of light pointing into the future forever to a speck of light that was the present moment. I got better at living in that point of light, making the world into that point. I paid close attention to it. I loved it very much.
And then one day, my life was a ray again, and the point was gone.
I tried to find that point after the latest, longest remission began.
I thought of the point as a moment in spacetime where I could be free of all memory and all desire — a point that existed apart from everything before and after it.
Sometimes I can feel myself getting close to finding the thing in spacetime I lost by getting well.
I didn’t start writing this until my body made another decision.
The day before the decision I wrote, Can’t catch my breath all morning because of a wildness in my body that is like birds flying me toward his body.
The next day I wrote, I resisted as long as I could. A narrator must keep a safe distance from the story, but a lyric speaker must occupy the lyric moment as it’s happening. Or so it seems to me at this moment.
A crow stands outside my window all day, reminding me of the best thing about my life — that it ends.
I think my body’s decision shone a light on the memory that once my body steered me. Or that it steers me.
Music
How long was I sick?
I know that March 26, 1995, was the morning I awoke with numb feet.
But before that morning, I’d had a head cold stirring in my body for weeks — an infection for which my immune system had been generating antibodies on top of antibodies.
That head cold triggered the mechanism in my immune system that resulted in the syndrome called CIDP.
But it wasn’t the head cold — it was the great beauty of the Allegri piece that had made me keep the head cold in my body for so long. It was the promise of singing that Allegri solo that made me keep the virus from running its course. I had to put off the cough until after that performance, and instead of going away, the virus waited patiently to be allowed to make me cough.
But that story began in the seventeenth century, before Mozart was even born.