MIREILE SILCOFF
‘The result was like a thousand puzzle pieces falling into place; my summer of discontent brought into new light.’
Never great to start a column with a big quote, but I am going to do it anyway. In her famed essay “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag wrote, “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”
I have always found that idea, of dual citizenship, to be useful. Regular readers of this column know that I live with a chronic illness, a disorder of the spinal cord tissue. My spine tears and the result is spinal fluid leaks that rob my brain of its natural waterbed. For me, sickness is always just a badly planned arm extension away.
I have become used to the uncertainty. The successful sick person is an expert in adjusting quickly. I have long known that there can be a kind of luxury in the depths of illness, even with the harsh realities of unbelievably intense pain. The world stops, it becomes very quiet, and everything falls away except the moment you are in. The past is a joke, the future a question mark — in that kind of zone you can do some pretty good meditating. It’s like a fast-track to deep, deep focus, and these days, yes, that is a rare thing.
But sometimes I deal with relapses better than other times. If I am struck down in the middle of the winter, I can be a very good sport. In the middle of the summer? When the whole city is hooting outside my bedroom window? When friends are going on holiday and having second and third children, while I must accept that I am too sick for a vacation, and at 41, have likely reached my limit in children? I can get maudlin.
Last month I was teetering into a relapse. I could feel it coming, but it just wouldn’t break through. Going to the grocery store was like plowing through a lake of glue, but I could do it. I had headaches, but not so bad to reach for the codeine. Dressing my daughter became a minefield — one wrong move and I knew the threatening tear would explode. Plus my brain had grown fuzzy. I would walk down the street and be unable to remember the date, or which articles were due that week. I went to a hardware store to order some paint and got so confused about finishes that the man behind the counter asked me if I needed to sit down for a minute.
Finally, a couple of weeks ago, I gave in before my spine did. I was spending too much time wandering around, dizzy, not getting anything done, fortifying myself with too many croissants and storebought sandwiches. When I begin feeling like my spine is opening up, my appetite always kicks in, as if to counteract the weakness. As a symptom, it’s so predictable as to actually be a useful alarm bell.
I got into bed. I couldn’t relax though. I was all jumpy. I have a book coming out in August, so this was a seriously bad time to turn into a beached whale. But what could I do? Even lying down there was nau- sea and a strange, encroaching weakness. The only thing that seemed to make me feel better was eating. I ordered groceries by phone and made spicy chili, roast chicken drumsticks, homemade lentil burgers with mountains of onions on top. One night I sent Mike out for ramen noodles at midnight, the really cheap kind with the insanely salty broth, and when he carped about it, I yelled at him.
“I have been suffering in this horrible haze for a month now, and you can’t walk one block to get me a stupid package of 99 cent noodles?”
“Well it’s not like ramen noodles are medicine.”
“Well to me ramen noodles are very important! You don’t understand me at all!”
I ate the noodles, ravenously, crying and watching old sitcom reruns until 2 a.m. I thought of the only other time I craved ramen noodles, when I was pregnant with my daughter, and how much happier a time that was. I remembered how fascinating it had been, to me, how nice doctors and nurses were to pregnant ladies and how tough or cold they could be with sick people. I remembered the relief of being visibly impinged: on the bus, nobody gets up for the wan person secretly leaking spinal fluid into their subarachnoid space. But preggo? Pick a seat.
I went to the mirror. The weird thing about this relapse, I thought, is how well I looked. My eyes were bright, and my face was filled out. I wondered if it was because I was eating so much. I thought about that classic French woman’s adage, about how after a certain age one needs to choose between their face and their butt. Get a little chub on you and the wrinkles plump out. Maybe, I thought, I was entering a new era: fatter and smoother. Maybe I was becoming menopausal. After all, my period had become such a moving target, I’d stopped following it. Only God knew when the last one was.
I went into my daughter’s room, and looked down at her sleeping in her little bed. Two and a half years ago, the doctors had called her a miracle baby. All those doctors, who had said that the chances of my conceiving naturally were 3%. That was actually a number given: 3%. And yet, here she was, proof that sometimes doctors just don’t know; that sometimes things can present as disorders when they are anything but. When was my last period? I went back to the TV, with the bad sitcoms, counting backwards. Think, fuzzy-head, think. When?
The use-by date on the pregnancy test I had under the bathroom sink — a leftover from the years before my daughter — was only a couple of months past. The result was like a thousand puzzle pieces falling into place; my summer of discontent brought into new light. I suppose two miracles in one lifetime is possible. A more likely storyline is that doctors give wrong diagnoses all the time. After all, I had misdiagnosed myself for an entire month, thinking I was sick, relapsed, getting menopausal, losing my mind, when in fact my energy was being tapped by a baby growing inside me.
I went into the bedroom, to shake Mike awake:
“Mike, Mike, I’m sorry I yelled at you about the ramen noodles. Mike, Mike, wake up, please, I have some news.”