7 April 2014
0756 hrs
10 April 2014
0819 hrs
Well, Dear
and Patient Reader . . .
I hope you
have found the last few posts interesting, at least. As is quite obvious, I have been in a
reflective mood, and I really don’t know if that is good or bad. I do know that it just is, and that I need to
go with it whenever it pulls me away.
Yeah, I
used to fight it; one could see the gouges in the hallways of my mind as Mnemosyne
dragged me unwillingly down them to some long-ignored abattoir or oubliette.
What was I
to do? I became weary of the fight and
now I let her take me by the hand and we show one another the little vignettes,
muted in color, mostly; dark and sad in many; far too few in bright
sunniness.
Anyway, I
haven’t much run into anything against which I wish to rail and rage. So I remember, and I write.
Spring is near and I think of Fonda and her
death-day, 30 Mar, and I realize she has been dead 17 years. 25 April would have been her 45th
birthday, but she was not allowed to see 30 because she was good and the good
do not deserve to be here too long. BuyBull
god sees to that.
So I begin
to tell you of my dear friend. She was a
woman who knew I loved her, but never heard me say the words, because I am bad,
and the bad live forever, filled with regret.
Shall I proceed to tell you of her? Do you not mind more introspective
melancholia that is becoming my memoir?
Splendid!
Fonda and the Cunning Fennec Fox
Part I
My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma . . .
The cool
marble floors of my mind lead past many hard and silent walls; down dark yet
comforting corridors, and pause outside the rooms of my memory, waiting. Some of these doors require knocking; some of
them knock back . . .
The door to
Fonda’s room is hard and beautiful. I
made it blue, bright and aquamarine, the colors seen in dreams or sunsets,
perhaps. Blue was in her eyes; blue
lived, sometimes in her mind; blue is the color I painted her heart.
Were there
really angels, they would have envied the love that Fonda deserved.
If only I could have given it . . .
The blue of
Fonda’s door is brilliant, as her mind was brilliant. Had I been born without sight, her mind would
still be Venus in my heart. I would feel
the warmth of her thoughts on my face like the sun.
The door is
cool and strong. The door and my memory
can keep Fonda safe.
I enter
this room as little as possible. I have
oiled this lock and these hinges with my warm, salty tears over these long
years, and still the lock sticks . . . still these hinges scream.
I come to
this door, this memory, because someone asked it of me, and because it is time
to visit my old friend.
I hope the
Fonda I have kept safely in this room is a fair and just representation of one
of the loveliest women I have ever known.
It will be
good, I think, to visit this room again, and for my sins, I am allowed to.
***
I met Fonda
outside the gift shop of the hospital where I taught third-year neurology
residents how to read electroencephalography.
Though we rode down the elevator together, it was only outside the gift
shop we introduced ourselves.
She was
surprised that I did not think it odd, her medical status. She was twenty-two years old and admitted as
an inpatient in a children’s hospital.
I noticed
the pajamas she wore down to the lobby; baby blue men’s style top and
bottoms. Tiny pink teddy bears appeared
as polka dots from a distance.
Flip-flops. The J-shaped heparin
lock in the fat vein on the back of her hand taped, fastened fast.
She became
short of breath when she spoke for too long without a rest. She coughed periodically. She had cystic fibrosis.
CF is a
disease of cruel genetics; both parents must carry the allele on their genes in
order for the child to develop it. Since
the disease manifests in childhood, there is no better place to treat for CF
than a children’s hospital.
As it was a
medical school, I bounced around the three hospitals on campus: The main University Hospital, the Veteran’s
Administration Hospital, and the Children’s Hospital. Most medical schools are set up thusly.
I had three
patients at the kid’s hospital, and having just completed my charting for the
morning, was on my way out the door.
This
hospital, full of bright colors and staff sporting scrubs and lab coats dotted
with animals or clowns, still reeked of melancholia.
Forced
smiles worn on so many faces; it was impossible, for me at least, to ignore the
battered hope cowering behind the eyes.
Sometimes I
would catch a mother, in her fatigue, forget her role, staring her
thousand-yard stare, lost in the thought of things that which the mother of a
sick child should never have to think.
Too often I have seen the same look
in the eyes of patients themselves; those old enough or mature enough to
realize their own mortality. Most could
even put a name to the dark spectre lurking in the corners of their hospital
rooms. Looming near the ceiling past the
reach of the light; lurking beneath the bed, some haggard and shambling
moistness. Each name is different,
depending on the patient, and those not sensitive enough to know Its Name still
felt its presence through his or her own pain.
From time to time I imagine the
veil of sanity pulled aside for a moment.
What would I, so envisioned, observe as I wandered the halls of
hospitals? What manner of ghosts and
daemons; what pantheon of phantasms- what spectrum of spectres would my weary
eyes then see? Pandemonium, indeed . . .
it would be the sight through Pandora’s eyes as she pried open the eponymous
Box.
These are the boogeymen that, since
the birth of life, horrify us.
People, I think, instinctively know
when they are terminal. There is a
moment, long before the doctor reads a scan and sees a smudge and steels
herself before coming into the room to speak to the patient; long before the
blood work comes back with sorrowful news; long before the ink dries on the EEG
tracing that localizes the tumor, that the patient feels his body betraying him. Feels the cancer is spreading; feels the
imminent stroke or the heart failing or the wounds and injuries are too severe
to overcome . . . that the body will not heal faster than the overwhelming
insult that damages it. The realization
that grinning heartbreak conquers all.
The
Japanese blame their demons, or Oni, for
the angry humours of sickness and death.
I blame them on the absence of gods.
No just and infinitely kind being
would allow a child to cry herself to sleep because the waking state hurts so
bad. No wish-granting old man in the sky
would make a terminal mother suffer the thought that she has poorly prepared
her family for their all-too-soon-to-be loss.
No loving spiritual father would crush his children under the weight of The Lesson. This life . . . this fucking TEST.
No omniscient, omnipotent being, an
all-encompassing Good, would let cystic fibrosis patients helplessly suffocate
in their own mucus.
The mutated and twisted allele that
forces CF to emerge causes the body’s mucus membranes to produce, in an
accelerated fashion, an abnormally thick and highly viscous form of the
substance.
The body’s natural lubricant, mucus
is supposed to be relatively thin.
Moving along a coated membrane by specialized cells, it carries with it
impurities and toxins, constantly flushing out the lungs, upper respiratory
structures, and digestive tract. Think
of our runny noses flushing out invasive microbes whenever we are sick with a
cold.
A variant of mucus is solely tasked
for pleasure: it is the lubricant that facilitates, through arousal, the act of
lovemaking.
The thickened mucus of the CF
patient expectorates poorly, thereby trapping particulate matter and microbes
which then propagate and aggravate the affected, sensitive tissues.
Infections such as pneumonia are
frequent and bronchitis is quite common from chronic coughing. Scar tissue forms and encroaches upon healthy
lung tissue, choking it out like weeds in a garden.
Alveoli, the structures within the
lungs where external respiration occurs (internal respiration occurs at the
cellular level; CO2 exchanged for O2 on the red blood cell itself),are shredded
by lesions and disease. Cystic Fibrosis
is lethal and terminal. On the way to
The Dark, the patient gasps for air, blue from the cyanosis of hypoxia,
drowning in the fluids we, billion-year-old carbon atoms that we are, evolved
to save us.
I used to fish. My old man taught me that it was cruel to let
a caught fish suffer. “You got to thump
him on the head, son . . . you got to
crush his skull.” So I did, not wanting it to drown in the
atmosphere that sustained me.
Since meeting Fonda, I had lost
all interest in fishing. Fonda, de facto
leader of this Secret Society of Cee Effers.
Perhaps they too, as the pain becomes too great, wish for someone to
gird his loins and crush their skulls.
end part i; part ii soon to follow
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