The only catch is that you then have to face perfectly forward for the next twenty-four hours to allow the crystals to settle back into place. You’d think these instructions would be easier to follow in New York City, as most of us are not circling parking garages or merging onto highways. Alas, taking the subway is pretty much out of the question. As is descending steps, jaywalking, ducking, or reacting to noise. Oh, and drop something on the floor? That’s where that lives now. But twenty-four hours is a small price to pay for something that works.
Except that this time, it didn’t.
After sleeping as instructed (“like a mummy”: Dr. Goldfinger crossed his hands over his chest to be sure I got the picture), I woke up full of hope. I wanted to start the process of being thankful for my health so that I could go back to taking it for granted like a normal person. When we’re sick or in pain, even if it’s just a case of “something in the eye,” we swear up and down that we will be grateful for every moment from this day forward when there is not something in our eye. I don’t know with whom we’re bargaining or with what lousy chips. But I could worry about that once the ceiling stopped melting into the walls.
Alas, the dizziness had not only worsened, it had mutated. Up until now, the vertigo attacks—or “spells,” as I liked to call them when I wanted to make them adorable and Victorian—had been peppered with hours of normalcy during which I could work or pick up socks. Those hours were gone now. I tried to stand but fell backward. My vision blurred. It was like riding the teacups at Disney World, if Disney World was built on a fault line that shifted every fifteen minutes. I watched myself go through this with as much of a sense of curiosity as fear. The moment something goes wrong with you that has not gone wrong before, it seems at once tragic and temporary. Imagine if you had made it this far without getting a common cold and then you got one. You’d probably think you were dying. This is because the frightened brain becomes a binary place: It’s “probably nothing” or you’ve contracted an incurable flesh-eating disease. That’s it. Those are your options.
* * *
Writing about illness is a form of travel writing. The writer’s mind stands at attention, even when her body cannot, because she has entered a new environment—in one case voluntarily, in the other not. Everything feels as if it’s of note. As it is in travel writing, the difficulty is not in taking a small incident and expounding upon it but in whittling a new world down to a manageable size. Every article on kite surfing in Tahiti has a larger narrative behind it of flight delays, food poisoning, and fraught texts with an ex. The big difference between travel writing and medical writing is that those extra details do not lend themselves to repurposing. Not at a party, talking to your friend who’s “super into weird medical shit,” not with your mom, who’s preprogrammed to care, not even with someone who turns out to have the same problem but would rather stick porcupine quills up her nail beds before revisiting it.
If you’re the kind of person who gets off on daring people to be offended by a play-by-play of your mole removal, well, at least you’re not boring people. But being sick for an extended period of time isn’t about disgust—it’s about tedium, which is like toxic mold to entertainment. And yet here is where the truth of the infirm lives, in those in-between spaces of bed/transit/medicine, medicine/transit/bed. Here is a parallel universe of hold music and water glasses and make-a-fist montages. Come one, come all! Behold screenshots of my call logs to the insurance company!
“This is what I’m dealing with,” I typed, anger-forwarding the pictures to friends.
“That sucks!” they wrote back, because it did suck.
What else was there to say? It’s not that people don’t care, it’s that they’re not there. What’s alluring about travel writing becomes repellent in medical writing. No one is asking to be “made jealous” by photos of your stitches. No one hears a rumor you’ve gone to Duane Reade and says, “Bring me back something.” In response, those of us living on the wrong side of the hospital curtain pick over our own misery for trinkets that might amuse a healthy person. It’s a form of digestion but it’s also a form of regurgitation.
Here is my own best example of this: A while ago, my father was diagnosed with one of those ambitious cancers that demands a bone marrow transplant and quarantine. His doctors took away all his white blood cells and pumped him full of chemicals. (The trick with cancer is that you have to play dead in order to keep it from actually killing you.) He’s in remission now, but this was the largest-scale medical disaster ever to hit our family. It was all we thought about for a year. Yet this is the only story I tell from that time: I was sitting with my father during one of his chemotherapy sessions, reading a trashy magazine as he was fiddling with his iPad, when a volunteer opened the door. She was holding a fistful of wildflowers, which I was pretty sure were contraband in a cancer ward.
“Good morning!” she said, in a high-pitched voice. “Would you like a flower?”
I looked at my father. Should I call security on this squeaky toy in a skirt? He thanked her, gestured around the room, and explained that he didn’t have anywhere to put a flower. So she skipped off down the hallway. He returned to his e-mail, I to my magazine.
Then, without taking
