It began with a
broken femur. I’d broken my right femur playing in a sandbox the year
before, and, using a still-new technology for the time, “internal
fixation,” the surgeon had placed a titanium rod inside my broken bone
for it to heal around. That rod lasted, in fact, for the next forty
years, and when it finally gave way in an airport parking lot, its
timing was such as to play a significant role in my getting to know your
mother, and hence, in your existence. But that’s another thread. When
my remaining, left femur broke the following year, the plan was to rod
it the same way my right femur had been rodded. This time things did not
go as well.
An odd thing about the left femur
fracture is that I can’t remember how or where I fell. The memories of
most of my major breaks and a great many of my minor ones stay with me.
And yet that one I can’t recall, beyond being pretty sure it did not
happen at school, where I was in the second grade class of Miss
Fornelius, who wrote her name in flowing cursive on the board each
morning, so that I fell in love with the capital letter F. There, I was
one of only two children in the class, the other being Sammy Armijos
from Venezuela, who were so small that we still had to use kindergarten-size chairs to
keep our feet on the floor. Sammy and I hated that, but there I never fell.
In
my earliest recollection of the injury, I’m already in the hospital. My
left leg is in traction, the standard approach to femur fractures back
then, but has no cast on it. It’s been a day or two since the surgery,
at least, because I’m already past the grogginess and the post-operative
nausea that always afflicted me. For medication, I’m taking ground-up
aspirin in applesauce. I’m in a semi-private room in the Chilton
Memorial Hospital’s pediatric wing. I do not know it, of course, but the
hospital will one day be converted into condos, and my paternal
grandparents, who are both volunteers at the hospital, will own their
last home right below my current bed. My grandfather will die there in
that condo, in his own bed, and there my grandmother will have the
massive stroke that leaves her hospitalized herself for the last four
years of her life. Right now, Chilton’s just the place I go when I
break, the place where I was born.
My roommate
is another little boy, named Chris. He’s in for a broken collarbone and a
separated shoulder that he got playing pee-wee football. He’ll go home
soon, that I know. At dinner time, which is also parental visiting hours
(very strictly rationed and monitored), his father and my father chat
amicably between our beds. His father crosses the room to change the
channel on the hanging, black-&-white television set. My father, in
his wheelchair, reaches to help me open my milk carton and cut my meat.
These
evenings will be memorable mainly because Chris’s father has found a
really absorbing TV show for us to watch while we eat. All day, when not
dealing with nurses, Chris and I have been suffering stoically through
adult soap operas and asinine programming designed to sell packaged
sugars to preschool kids. There is no educational TV, unless you count
the likes of Mr. Rogers, and only the pre-soap morning reruns of I Love Lucy and the The Andy Griffith Show alleviate our misery. Chris likes both those comedies, but I don’t really understand poor Lucy, whom I pity, and the whistling intro to The Andy Griffith Show mysteriously depresses me.
Then
Chris’s father discovers a new syndicated show that comes on during
dinner hour on Channel 9 TV. It’s like nothing that I’ve ever read, had
read to me, or seen. Not even remotely. It’s set in outer space, begins
with an absolutely eerie theme, and then shows people using technology
that’s pure magic on the screen. It’s called Star Trek, and I’m
entranced. We watch it every weeknight that week. After one episode,
Chris’s father entertains me by standing at the foot of my bed, turning
sidewise, and shrinking out of sight while making warbling noises in
imitation of the dissolving crew members in “transporter room” scenes.
By
the weekend, Chris has gone home. I am doing fine, almost to the point
when stitches get removed. My mother comes by each afternoon for a
while, leaving my five-year old kid sister Alleene with a neighbor for
an hour or so. My father comes straight to the hospital to see me after
work. Mashed potatoes and peas are the most common sides to the supper
dishes, and because I am clumsy scooping my peas, he encourages me to
mix the two and use the mashed potatoes as glue. “I eat my peas with
honey,” he sings. “I’ve done it all my life. It makes the peas taste
funny, but it keeps them on the knife!”
The plan is for me to stay another week. Two-week stays after orthopedic surgery are the norm, of course. Monday
morning, my stitches are removed. It’s a curious sensation, when the
small, cold steel scissors slip under the black threads. A mildly
painful tug, like a bug sting, a snip, and then the feel of a bit of
thread being teased from my skin. A wipe of stinging alcohol. An urge to
scratch the itch. All the way down my thigh, the nurse works
methodically, from just below the hip to just above the knee. It’s
discomfiting, but it’s a relief.
Tuesday
morning, taking my vitals, a nurse notices I have a fever. Nothing too
high to worry about, but something to keep an eye on. Extra aspirin in
applesauce for me.
Wednesday
morning, after the doctor’s rounds, my leg has been taken out of
traction and casted. The nurse cleaning me up with a sponge bath
afterward, notices my skin is covered in spots. She asks me how long
I’ve had them. They’re news to me.
By
afternoon, my bed’s been wheeled to ICU, not because I’m in any great
danger right now, my parents are assured, but because it might be
scarlet fever, in which case I could be dangerously infectious and need
to be sequestered from the other patients. (Decades later, it will dawn
on me, the spots were hives, an immunological stress response to the
actual infection. Mysterious outbreaks of them will reoccur at
apparently random points in my adult life. But in 1969 the misdiagnosis as
scarlet fever costs time while the fever worsens.)
I
have the feeling that something is wrong with the grown-ups, that my
parents are acting distressed. I don’t know yet that my mother grew up with
an awareness of scarlet fever as a killer, one of the many spectral
diseases that haunted the world of her childhood. Her own father had
died of an undiagnosed species of fever, three months before she was
born. My mother rarely worries and frequently prays, but now she seems
unhappy and her praying seems somehow excessive to me.
I
have my own cubicle of a room. I can’t say I much like it. It’s small,
with one interior glass wall through which I can see an always-attended
nurse’s station, from which a nurse can always see me. The opposite,
exterior wall, barely three feet from my left bed rail, has one small
window that gives directly on a view of solid bricks. I am, apparently,
facing a courtyard or a corridor, some kind of fold in the hospital’s
architecture. The wintry outside light is dim. When it snows, I watch
the flakes swirl past the bricks, never sticking to them, floating down
from high nowhere to disappear from the frame before landing on
anything.
My fever rises and the grownups are
visibly more concerned. I am tired. I am tired all the time. I lose
track of the weekdays, normally so unmistakably ritualized in hospital
wards, and I eat almost nothing. They reopen a vein on my right hand and
begin a fresh saline IV. There is another little boy, smaller than me,
with a heart condition, in another ICU cubicle across from me. His
relatives bring him a bunch of balloons to cheer him. He plays a bit
with a purple one and loses it. It bounces from his cubicle, across the
intervening room and into my space. He makes a plaintive cry. I tell my
mother to give it back to him, but the nurse says that she can’t. I
might contaminate him. And his balloon might contaminate me. Wearing her
face mask and latex gloves, the nurse removes the balloon as medical
waste. I hear the other boy whimpering, but I’m overpowered by the
desire to sleep.
Later my parents will tell me solemnly of the Wednesday
night prayer meeting at church where I was the object of everyone’s
prayers. They will credit those prayers and their God that I remained on
earth. But for now, nothing seems to be working. I hit a fever of
Fahrenheit 108.
One of the happiest, dreamiest
memories of my life emerges from these days. I begin skirting the edges
of coma, slipping in and out of sleep. When I am aware, it is often
barely and with my eyes closed, but behind my eyes I do not see the
usual darkness or daytime wash of pink. I see gold. I float in a golden
haze. The only other sound is of my mother’s voice reading Little Women
to me. She reads the entire thing, I think. I am already an avid reader
myself by this age, so she has been reading to me less and less. I don’t think she will ever read to me again. Later,
when I am eighteen, I will write one of my first poems, struggling to
articulate that sensation of drifting, all but disembodied in a
contented, golden haze without any other sensation, only the continual
murmur of my mother’s voice, slightly muffled by her medical mask,
reading about a strange, gone world from the previous century. I will
never read Little Women again. I could never bring myself to overwrite the unreal prose of that memory.
One
day, when neither my mother or father is with me, and I feel I can
barely breathe, a nurse attending me notices a yellowish stain on the
outside of my plaster cast. Within the hour, the cast has been cut off
and a massive, suppurating staph infection has been discovered in my
thigh. It has begun to split the just-healed skin of my surgical scar.
It is the source of my fever and has been too well entrenched for
medicine to defeat it.
A doctor comes and
reopens the wound wider with a scalpel. I don’t even feel it. A fresh
regime begins of cleaning out the wound several times a day, combined
with heavy doses of intravenous antibiotics. Once the wound is open and
the deep infection cleaned, my fever stabilizes and then begins a slow
retreat. After a day or two, I can increasingly feel the nurses' swabs moving
inside my leg, slightly disgusting me. The doctors are in no rush yet, however,
to restitch me. When it is all over, the infection will have eaten a permanent dent in my flesh, just below my hip, a feature that you will notice as a child and ask how it was acquired.
On a grey morning, as I sit staring
through my window at the rows of bricks, a nurse enters my cubicle
excitedly. She knows that I hate most of what’s available on daytime TV,
and at this point in my recovery I’m still too weary much to read. But
she’s got news. There’s a new program on, designed just for younger
school kids such as me. It began broadcasting while I was floating in my
haze, and now that I’m alert again, she’s going to put it on for me.
The name of the program is Sesame Street.
I’m
terribly eager to watch it, but terribly disappointed. I can’t explain
why to the nurse or my parents, although my mother, who never lets us
watch any TV at home, proudly interprets for me: “He’s too advanced for
something like that. They’re rehearsing letters and numbers, and he’s
already reading at the seventh-grade level. Do you know, he’s read all
the way through the Bible?”
(Forty-odd
years later, I will discover to my immense amusement that my preschool-aged and not-reading-at-all-yet daughter, you, also will turn
up your nose at Sesame Street and its muppets, despite a
short-lived fondness for Elmo before you turn two. Maybe it’s just
genetic. We like what we like, and then we invent plausible-sounding
reasons. From the way that you’ve taken to Harry Potter, I’d guess
you’ve at least got my weakness for the physics-defying worlds of the fantastic.)
Except
for one detail, the end of that hospital stay will become blurrier in mind than
even the memory of its days of golden haze. After seven weeks, when I’m
released at last and my wheelchair is pushed through the hospital’s front doors,
the taste and bite of outside air in my breath and on my skin is a
revelation, as if I had acquired an additional sense of perception. I breathe it in as
deeply as I can, even the acrid odor of car exhaust in the parking lot.
The world is real again. I forget what happens next.
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