By school he meant varsity football team. Our football team’s rivalry with that of an adjacent town was the oldest high school football rivalry in the United States of America, and there was an engraved monument downtown, in front of the police station, to remind us.
When I was a freshman, I went to the pep rally. I hadn’t figured out yet that as long as I got good grades, no one would care if I spent two entire semesters of Spanish in the photography darkroom, or if I left school after sixth period to hang out downtown at Coffee Connection.
At the pep rally the principal introduced the football coach, and the football coach introduced each team member individually, and everyone in the bleachers cheered when each player entered the gymnasium from one end and walked across to the other, where the coach was standing with his megaphone.
The football players were shirtless, their muscular chests painted with red “war paint,” and they swaggered as if they’d taken the virginity of half the girls in the sophomore class, which they had.
And all the women in the whole senior class, even the fat and ugly and unpopular ones, wore red felt dresses they had made, with scissor-cut fringe and matching red felt headbands decorated with white feathers, and they wore red “war paint” on their faces, too, because they were the Senior Squaws. And they were addressed by the football coach and saluted for their great spirit and for their help to the cause at hand, which was to beat Needham.
The cheerleaders cartwheeled in their red and white and black, regulation skintight uniforms in rows across the gym, then danced like strippers to bass-pumping music. They jumped and flashed their asses, and at the end there was a pyramid, and then more screaming, after which the football coach congratulated the young women on their display of talent and skill.
In a yearbook photo of this very pep rally, I am sitting in the bleachers with my friend who dropped out to go to art school, and the two of us look stoned. All around us are blurry teenagers, their faces just sharp enough to broadcast their ecstasy.
At the powder-puff football game the Senior Squaws wrestled in the mud and were very drunk. It was summarized, in code, in the Senior Voice, the underground newspaper for seniors, which detailed the events of their last month in high school, the month of spirit days (Hat Day! Shaving Cream Day!), and which was very easy to find lying around the cafeteria every morning.
Seven years later, I was in the hospital, too nauseated to eat. I was too nauseated not just to eat but to swallow even a sip of water.
I was prescribed a strong antiemetic. In suppository form. And the nurse who pushed it into my ass had been one of the varsity cheerleaders from that 1988 pep rally.
Like all good nurses, she understood that inserting a bullet of hardened gel into someone’s rectum was just another thing that had to be done, no more or less willingly than picking up a dropped rubber glove or stripping a bed after someone died in it.
She radiated love without smiling. And when she finished her shift at seven that night, she sat with me, still in her tight white uniform, and we watched Dirty Dancing on television, talking a little during the commercials.
That’s what she was like.
The Forgetful Nurse
She worked the morning shift and she understood slow, simple English. Every morning she came in to help me to the bathroom, and she grabbed my arm at the biceps and yanked it up. And every day she did that, I cried out because it hurt a little and because I knew that if the tube in my chest were pulled out, I would bleed out. I wouldn’t bleed to death, but I’d probably fall down, and she wouldn’t be able to pick me up to see where the blood was coming from, and I’d pass out from fright and blood loss, and eventually the wound would be found and pressure would be applied, but not before I’d bled out enough to cause myself even more trouble.
Every day, after that happened, and after I got back from the bathroom, she gave me a sponge bath and toweled me off. Since I wasn’t wearing a hospital johnny and the line in my chest was exposed, I wasn’t afraid she would knock it out of the vein or pull it out by accident.
But then she always took out a little container of baby powder and started shaking it onto my torso. And I had been reminded by the surgeons, every time one of them implanted a line, that nothing powdery should be used near the entry site, because the powder could get right into my bloodstream.
So then I reminded her, my voice raised, to keep the powder away from my line.
And both of those things happened every day she worked.
The New Machine
A new apheresis machine was delivered to the hospital. It was the manufacturer’s prototype. The company had sent it out for human trials.
This machine worked faster than the old one. Instead of withdrawing a cup of blood, cleaning it, and reinfusing it, the new machine withdrew and reinfused my blood continuously. And it could reinfuse at a faster clip because it had a built-in blood warmer. There would be no chills, no shaking.
I was the first human to use that machine.
The day the machine was delivered, Tabitha hooked me up to the albumin, gave me a wintergreen candy, and told me an engineer was coming to talk with me — one of the engineers who had designed the new machine.
She brought him upstairs and left us alone. For a moment, he just looked at me, connected to the machine he had helped invent, and I just looked at him. I was happy to be able to shake his hand, as I was using a central line and my arms were free to bend at the elbow.
He asked me how the machine felt, and I told him how good it felt to have a blood warmer, how I would miss it if I had to go back to using the old machine. I told him how good it was to know that the treatment would last two hours instead of four.
And I told him what it was like to arrive at the hospital with paralyzed legs and then to have six or seven treatments over six or seven days, using an apheresis machine made by his company, and then to walk out of the hospital on my own legs, my arms held out a little for balance.
He tried not to smile, but he smiled. I hope he felt proud. He had made something good, and it had helped me. And he had seen it — seen the moment his invention worked.
We talked about my college studies, and about his work, and about his volunteer work with the Boys Club of America. He stayed with me until a half hour was left in the treatment and then said he would go and find Tabitha. She needed to disconnect the last of the four bottles of albumin that had emptied into me, and to disconnect me from the machine, and to seal and remove the four-liter bag of my dirty plasma. Tabitha came back and did all the things she needed to do. The engineer said goodbye.
But he returned, with a bouquet of flowers.
Paralyzed
A spinal cord injury can paralyze you in a moment, but the paralysis of my disease is a long story. Worse, then better, then worse, then better. For years.