“Wow, nothing says ‘You’re dying’ like ‘Here, have this fucking daisy.’”
* * *
Around and around and around I went. Dr. Goldfinger advised me to give it some time before coming back to his office. This was fine by me. My body was like a dreidel bomb that could go off any minute. Plus, his office is located on the Upper East Side, which is just a hive of doctors’ offices. Cab rides to the Upper East Side should really count toward one’s health insurance deductible. Alas, I moved too slowly and for no perceptible reason to take the subway. There wasn’t much to be done besides wait it out. Vertigo is neither rare nor fatal. Something like 30 percent of Americans experience it. It can be a symptom of stress or teeth clenching. People on sedatives report waking up with it. Surfers get it if they fall on a wave at the wrong angle. Some women get it with their periods. Because periods are refugee camps for all nondescript maladies.
But then another week passed. And another. And another. Then four.
Plans fell like bowling pins until I stopped lining them up. I turned to the holistic, experimenting with breathing and oils. There’s a Buddhist meditation in which the objective is to imagine the world on the head of a pin—but each time I tried, the world wound up on the tip of a conductor’s baton. For the friends and loved ones who called or texted, I apologized for being MIA. But I was neither missing nor in action. Just in. Some came over, carrying soup—a well-meaning gesture that reminded me of how ill-suited I was to my condition. My age bracket is trained to equate illness with the flu. People asked what more they could do and were disappointed when the answer was “Please mail these letters.” Soup is the gesture of a hero. Letters are the errand of an intern. And for those who happened not to get in touch? I began to hold little grudges. At least now we knew who my real friends were, didn’t we?
This is what comes of too much intimacy with one’s ceiling.
Of all the indignities, showering was the worst. I was too young, with too many of my original teeth, to die a shower death. Other deaths, okay. Exploding manhole covers are ageless. But falling in the shower? Why don’t I just charge up a mobility scooter and mow myself over with it now? But hygiene won out over dread. I got undressed, leaned on the tile with both hands, and let the water spill down the back of my neck.
Because I have seen too many movies during which people cry in the shower, I cried in the shower. Was this my life now? Would I only ever be able to walk two blocks and read half a magazine article? Pinning down the words was like removing shards of eggshell from a freshly cracked egg—possible but annoying. But mostly I cried because I was primed for hysteria. Unable to sleep without being spun awake, I had been indulging in the cinema of the confined. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Murder in the First, Awakenings, The Sea Inside, Room, and that most sacred of the claustrophobia canon, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. I was a meticulous curator: trapped, bedridden, or abducted only. Stranded could suck it. Stranded was always temporary. Go crack open a fresh coconut and cry to NASA, you big babies.
I watched these movies because they presented a unifying tone, a myopic view of life in which there was no reality beyond their characters’ predicaments. With most movies, be they grim dramas or romantic comedies, there is an invisible door to a different version of the world and the unspoken idea that everyone on-screen could just walk through it. Even when we are not explicitly told so, we know the characters in the dramas have seen the comedies and vice versa. The people in Mystic River have definitely seen How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. They just have other things on their minds right now.
Not so in the claustrophobia canon. Those people haven’t seen shit. They haven’t laughed or texted or touched a blade of grass in years. When we watch these films, we adopt their experience, trying it on like a tight coat. And suddenly it’s as if all the documentaries and romantic comedies and thrillers no longer exist, not for us and not for them. This is the essence of their appeal. We do not so much binge-watch them as purge-watch them, spewing the tapestry of our complicated lives onto their threadbare ones. It’s why, if you are healthy, you walk out of the theater with a newfound appreciation for your life. And if you are unhealthy? It’s as if someone has put horse blinders on you for a couple hours and said, “Here, miss the world a little less.”
* * *
Then it was six weeks. Everything slowed to a crawl. I’d written nothing. Well, almost nothing. A nameless document on my computer read:
The desire to be healthy is different from the desire not to be sick.
Sheryl @ BlueCross
One assumes those lines are operating on two distinct planes of thought. I don’t think Sheryl @ BlueCross told me that. Though, really, she could have.
* * *
I made my way back to Dr. Goldfinger, who had me walk up and down his hallway, touching my nose. The only conclusion he drew was that I was definitely sober. I did not tell him that I had also managed to cheat on him with a second ENT, who had unceremoniously shoved a fiber-optic cable up my nostrils and gave me no new information in return. It felt tawdry, leaving my copay on someone else’s nightstand. This woman billed herself as an “ear specialist.” It saddened me to think of Dr. Goldfinger knowing precisely one-third as much about the human ear.
“I think we should send you for an MRI,” Dr. Goldfinger
