Sick Girl, page 3
By the time my parents’ car stopped in front of the medical building, I had worked up a huff of angry disappointment that radiated far beyond the confines of Dr. Clark’s office and my own foolish denial. I was already irritated at my future cardiologist, Dr. Bradley, and I hadn’t even met him yet. I was also plenty leery. Thirty blocks northbound in my father’s car had given me enough time to arrive at a troubling conclusion: doctors cannot be trusted; they make awful, awful mistakes.
My father and Beverly, though, would keep the faith and hold fast to the idea of super-doctors, with Dr. Clark being the most illustrious among them. By extension, Dr. Bradley was raised high in their esteem for having been his top cardiologist pick. Were it not for Marvin (Dr. Clark’s first name rolled off my father’s tongue as if he were referring to a golfing buddy), it would have taken weeks to land an appointment with a cardiologist of such renown. My father insisted I was fortunate: Marvin was there when we needed him, with his sharp diagnostic skills and unparalleled web of best-doctor connections.
Lucky me. Lucky us.
“But he got it wrong,” I said, surprising my father. I hadn’t yet detailed for him the progression of my office visits with Dr. Clark, because up until this point it hadn’t seemed important. But now that my father was expecting me to worship this new cardiologist as a blessed offshoot of our family internist, I felt compelled to speak up and put both merely mortal physicians in proper perspective: neither one of them deserved our blind devotion.
My father appeared not to have heard what I just said—or else he was pretending real hard.
“I went to see Dr. Clark last year because I was passing out a lot. He said it was just low blood pressure. Obviously he was wrong.”
“Come on, honey, did you tell him you were passing out? Did you? Really, did you actually tell him?” This was Beverly talking. She turned her head to glance back at me from the passenger’s seat and threw off that high-eyebrow mother glare of hers, accusatory and questioning at the same time. It was a look she’d been flashing my way since I was eight years old, perhaps because Beverly understood that young girls needed to be on the receiving end of this kind of lingering stare from time to time. It was a sign of love. Beverly knew I had never gotten much in the way of affectionate maternal scorn at home. My parents’ divorce had left me at age five with a mother who wouldn’t bother expending the effort it would take to raise an eyebrow for my benefit; she was too busy fawning over a glass of scotch—and then another and another. I had begun mixing my mother’s drinks on request in the second grade; a hair-raising howl would float up to my room, and quickly as I could drop a Magic Marker in my lap, I would be down in the drinking den with the red-haired terror I was forced to call Mom. I’d count out three ice cubes into her favorite glass and then douse them with Johnnie Walker, poured to the level that matched the length of my ink-stained thumb.
This would all continue until it was time for me to go to college, at which point I left my bartending duties behind forever, along with the face, voice, and liquor-soaked rages of the exacting patron in the hell-pit cocktail bar that was my childhood home. I didn’t look back. Didn’t call. Didn’t write. Didn’t share my college academic awards, my law-school admission, or even my heart illness. It seemed to me I hadn’t lost much by running off this way; all I had really given up was a mother in the most attenuated sense. It was Beverly who had truly raised me and Jodie since little girl-hood, taking root as a nurturing presence in our lives—if only on weekends and school holidays, according to my father’s rights under the divorce agreement. In between visits, there were frequent conversations on the phone. Beverly showered us with attention, doling out love, guidance, and advice wherever Jodie or I ran short.
And today, in the midst of a tense car-ride discussion, I would accept Beverly’s insistent prodding begrudgingly, even as part of me was glad to be needled with so much interest and caring.
“Of course I told him.” It was a perfect place to throw in an eyeball roll, and so I did, with drama; it was the kind of roll a mother might expect from a daughter like me.
“Maybe you should have been more insistent,” she said.
“I told him what I was feeling. That’s all I had to do. Dr. Clark was supposed to figure it out from there.”
“And he did… eventually. We’re lucky he caught it, I tell you. So lucky.”
I slid across the backseat and out into the hard cold rain. My father and Beverly managed to make their way from car to doorway before I did because they ran like mad. At first I set out to jog the thirty feet along with them, but my strength gave out and I couldn’t catch my breath. Then I remembered what Dr. Clark had told me Friday about walking slowly, and it all began to sink in: the pelting rain, the cardiologist appointment, the horror and strange humiliation of watching my father and Beverly, both nearly sixty years old, make it inside a full twenty seconds before I could. They watched with patient smiles as I slow-stepped toward them through sheets of rain, wincing. It was in this moment that I experienced for the first time in my life what it was like to be dis-empowered by illness; I was not able to move as fast as I wanted or needed—my twenty-four-year-old body wouldn’t let me—and if I pushed through limitations with my usual stubborn strength, I feared it might cause my heart to give out. How terrifying even to think it: that I could die while trying to save myself from getting sopped by this rain! Thirty feet of distance from car to doorway appeared before me like a life-and-death choice. It was the first choice of this kind that I’d been forced to make in my life; it would not be the last.
It seemed I was caught in a rainstorm full of lessons: a momentous mind-altering downpour that would teach me with a slow, soggy trek up the steps of a medical building that youth is no protection from illness. It would also remind me—forever—that extreme weather can be an omen (for me, at least). Whenever I woke again to the sound of rain splattering sideways against my bedroom window, I would sense a portent of bad news to come. It was all I needed to set off on a slide—down, down—to a place of worry and fear about my body. I’d drop like a shot, ending at a black bottom no healthy person would ever understand, trembling beneath my quilt in secret panic.
I’m dying again. I’m dying again.
“Who wants to hear a joke?” My father was ready, as always, to distract with humor, pulling my attention away from this waiting room of cardiology patients three times my age.
“Sure, Dad, lay it on me,” I said, leaning closer to him.
“A doctor finishes examining this guy and says, ‘Look, I’ve got bad news and good news. Which one do you want first?’ The guy tells him he wants the bad. ‘Okay, you’ve got two weeks to live. I’m so sorry.’ Then the guy asks what the good news could possibly be, and the doctor answers, ‘See that blonde nurse down the hall there, the one with the big boobs? I’m fucking her.’”
Good one, Dad.
My father always managed to get a laugh out of me, even with the crudest and most offensive jokes. He had a gift for lighthearted delivery and a comic sense that never failed—not even in a cardiologist’s waiting room.
Looking at my father’s face as the smile faded from his lips, I saw nothing in his expression but easy confidence, as if he were sitting with Beverly and me in a nice restaurant waiting for our menus to arrive. Maybe it was just optimism, or maybe a worried father’s denial all dressed up to achieve that casual appearance. But it was his ability to hold on to this nonchalance after our appointment that seemed to me most ludicrous. My father would tell me the details of a phone call he received later on from a friend, who’d reacted to my bad news by saying, “Gee, Arthur, that must’ve been a terrible day for you.” My father had told him, yes indeed it was a horrible day—for his stock portfolio.
It so happened that my appointment with Dr. Bradley fell on October 17, 1987—also known as Black Monday—the day when the stock market went wildly bad and took a giant nosedive. It was a downfall reminiscent of the crash that set off the Great Depression. As stockbrokers and securities analysts considered whether to jump from their windows just after the four o’clock closing bell, I rode the elevator up to the cardiology suite with my father and Beverly. By the time we rode down again one hour later, a few Wall Street lives had been lost and the value of innumerable stock portfolios stunningly obliterated.
There had also been a prophecy fulfilled: You have two daughters. One of them will get very sick.
Dr. Bradley’s findings on Black Monday marked the definitive beginning of my life as a sick person on the edge of dying. I would never again know any other kind of life again. The stock market, though, recovered and in time reached unprecedented levels of robust trading and widespread prosperity. Some of these profits would come to benefit me directly, helping to pay the massive medical bills that lay ahead.
Madame Clara had been right; she’d seen it all in my father’s palm years before: dark and light.
2
ANOTHER HOSPITAL GOWN, THIS TIME A WHITE ONE WITH LITTLE blue pin dots. I left my jeans on and my bra. Dr. Bradley would just have to work around them.
I couldn’t tell whether it was something about me that made this seasoned cardiologist appear so uncomfortable, or whether he was just a skittish guy who needed to fidget regardless of the patient lying on his examining table. Even as Dr. Bradley held the stethoscope steady against my chest, he continued to sweep his feet from side to side ever so slightly, in what looked like an abbreviated ballroom dance move. I thought maybe he had to go to the bathroom—with those little nervous shuffles back and forth, back and forth—and then suddenly he came to an abrupt stop. Freeze! He let go of the flat circular end of the stethoscope and left it resting lightly on top of my chest. His hands floated into the air as if someone had just come up behind him and whispered, Put ’em up real slow.
I felt my lip begin to curl in an arc of disgust: what was wrong with this guy? A minute ago he couldn’t stand still. Now he’d become a statue, an open-mouthed, poorly groomed, stationary block of a man with wild eyes rolled up into his head. This was my new doctor—my cardiologist—the weirdo. I stifled a snicker.
“Well, I think that’s enough,” he said, the brown centers of his eyes reappearing in their sockets again as he emerged from the fog of listening.
“Why did you do that?”
“What?”
“You just let go of the stethoscope. I’ve never seen a doctor do that before.”
“You haven’t been a heart patient before,” he said, flashing an imperfect line of yellowish teeth. “Meet me in my office. I’ll ask your parents to step in.”
“They’ve never been heart patients either,” I said, testing the waters for a sign of humor.
“No matter. You’re the patient, right?” Again the yellow smile. “See you inside.”
I knew I wasn’t going to give this doctor a great big hug. The thought of even having to open my gown for Dr. Bradley’s stethoscope again in the future was repulsive. It wasn’t like me to be moved to such an extreme level of dislike, but this time I found myself on the lookout for all the things about this particular cardiologist that I could possibly hate. The hostility was new. So was the judgment. I’d never before had any inclination to pick a doctor apart: his physical appearance, his mannerisms, his skill and intelligence as a clinician. But in the wake of being let down so severely by Dr. Clark, I felt free to abandon the kind of worship that had been handed down to me by my father, a man who maintained an almost religious faith in the existence of an all-knowing unassailable higher being known as “the best doctor.”
A misdiagnosis from one of these “best doctors” (or a dangerously delayed diagnosis, anyway) had left me with no choice but to break away from my father’s belief in medical deities. Dr. Bradley was, after all, just a white-coated guy who’d come recommended by another white-coated guy.
To me, doctors were now just guys.
Sitting with my parents in Dr. Bradley’s office just minutes after my examination, it became apparent that this particular medical divinity did not have any easy answers for us. He couldn’t explain why my heart was in failure: whether the problem was in the arteries or the muscle, whether it could be treated with medication or not. But he was certain that congestive heart failure in a young person like me was rare and could be quite serious. We would need to determine its root cause as soon as possible in order to avoid “further damage.”
Further damage?
Dr. Bradley threw out a few diagnoses that could possibly explain my heart failure. First, my immune system might somehow be implicated and if this were the case, high doses of prednisone, a steroid, could be the solution. In his opinion, this scenario represented the simplest possible cause of my heart problem and was the easiest to resolve. The prednisone would, of course, cause me some unpleasant side effects—things like a thickened neck, a round moon-shaped face, and the possibility of significant weight gain—but if prednisone was all it took to make me better, we’d be lucky.
“I won’t take it,” I said.
Mistaking my defiance for a lack of understanding, Dr. Bradley slowed his voice down to first-grade-teacher pace and tried again. “I didn’t say you had to take it. I’m not even sure if prednisone will help. I only said it was a possibility—the least serious possibility, I believe, at this point.”
I had heard him loud and clear the first time; the second go-round only served to heighten my fear. This consultation had become unmanageably scary, deflating my capacity to think clearly and remain calm. The newly bold, keenly critical patient in me began to slip away. In its place came the dreadful sense that I was being forced to take on the concerns and worries of a much, much older person; no part of me—mind, body, or spirit—was equipped to handle heart failure. I began to backpedal, moving away from everything I’d promised myself about being a smarter, more insistent patient this time. My accumulated years began to fall away from me one by one until I landed in the safe haven of a ten-year-old girl—and a bratty one at that.
“I refuse to take a pill that will make me into a fatso with a tree-trunk neck. If it comes to that, you can just forget it. Why don’t you go take some prednisone?” I said, jutting my chin forward at my new cardiologist, who’d begun clicking the top of his pen in rapid-fire thumb presses.
Beverly reached over and put her hand on my forearm, “Amy, listen to the doctor. He didn’t say that you need to take prednisone for sure—”
“I won’t take it! I won’t!”
Dr. Bradley stopped fidgeting and looked at me in wide-eyed bewilderment from across the desk. I noticed with a wave of renewed revulsion that he’d suddenly become a mouth breather, his tongue resting on his bottom lip just the way it had when he listened to my heart—hands free—a few minutes earlier. He quickly blinked himself back into the present moment and reached for the pen he’d let fall onto his desk. Then, with the sound of my threat still ringing in his ears, Dr. Bradley began to scribble feverishly—line after line—on a fresh piece of paper he’d pulled from my chart. I looked down at the floor in uncomfortable silence, feeling like a bad kid who’d been forced to sit and watch the school principal write a tell-all letter home, only I was a grown woman and the principal had morphed into a cardiologist whose good favor might figure in saving my life.
It was a lapse in behavior that would stay with me forever. The words written in my chart that day would, as it turned out, move along with me into the future as part of my permanent medical record when referrals were made on my behalf among physicians. Nearly every doctor involved with my heart transplant would know that according to the veritable sage Dr. Daniel Bradley—a cardiologist who had made New York magazine’s elite list of Best Doctors—I was a patient who had some issues. For one, I was emotionally fragile. Also, there was a chance I might be noncompliant, a characterization apt to make doctors recoil.
Dr. Bradley jerked his head up and out of his writing. All of a sudden he had an announcement to make—in a bright, newly energized chirp. “Okay, here’s the deal. I won’t start you on any prednisone right now. How’s that, okay? But I need to put you in the hospital for some tests—just two of them, fairly routine stuff. Once I have the results, we can talk about whether you need steroids or not.”
I agreed with a slow nod, content to have scored at least a temporary victory on the prednisone front.
“So we’re all set then? Fine. My assistant will make arrangements for your hospital stay,” he said, rushing to conclude our meeting. He pushed himself out of his chair and began to stand up. I couldn’t help but curl my lip at him one last time, his body language stood in such obvious contradiction to his final words. “Any questions?”
About two dozen of them, yes.
I shook my head no. My parents said thank you. They’d already heard the best-case scenario—the prednisone possibility—and it was their tacit intention to escape Dr. Bradley’s office without our having to hear anything worse.
I just wanted to get the hell out of there.
In the elevator, my father looked straight ahead at the closed doors for the whole ride down. When we reached the lobby, he swung his hands around in front of him in a single clap. “Good, then everything is in order,” he said. “The man is on it.”
This meant Dr. Bradley: medical god.
I waved good-bye to my parents and slipped inside a telephone booth just off the lobby. It was an old-style cubicle with inlaid wood and a glass-paned door that closed tight with a thump that felt like privacy. Alone at last (I’d passed on my father’s offer for a ride downtown), I dropped onto the red leather seat and fumbled for enough change to make the call to Philadelphia. My fingers couldn’t dial fast enough. The tight space between me and the glass door was palpable; the air had become like wet cement, impossible to take in without opening my mouth as wide as I possibly could and fighting for it. Each successive breath became more of a struggle, until finally I was in an all-out gasp. I’d already loaded the proper change into the pay phone, and now all I had to do was wait a few seconds until the call went through. At once, I became unnaturally aware of my heartbeat. The pounding in my chest was now a magnet, pulling my focus inward and opening my mind to the thought that I might not live beyond this telephone call; my sick heart might not be able to withstand the acute panic coursing through my bloodstream. I became afraid that if I didn’t calm the pounding immediately, something terrible might happen.
