Every evening we watched the setting sun’s hallelujahs beyond the sealed window and ached to go home. At least I’d been able to come and go, while Paul felt bedfast and caged almost to the point of frenzy. The inescapable din of shifts changing, trolleys rattling, visitors streaming, and machines pinging had played havoc with my peace of mind. The past three weeks had been alternately calamitous and withering, as Paul battled the staph infection and also kidney stones that had to be shattered with laser strikes, and I’d felt picked over by the gulls of worry. Paul adapted in his own inimitable way: he grew so bored that he wrote a complete sonnet cycle about the Egyptian god Osiris. I provided a pantry of canned goods and snacks on a corner table, scented soap and favorite comb in the bathroom, cozy slippers, my knitting, and a library of books along the windowsill. Since the hospital was likely to be our home for a few weeks, we had settled in as best we could. This time, a systemic infection was scary enough, but not as harrowing as what we’d been through before. Or the days he fretted in the hospital in Ithaca, receiving IV antibiotics for cellulitis, an infection of his body tissue that began innocently, at a small scratch on his toe, but quickly launched a dangerous campaign up his foot and leg. Or when Paul’s blood pressure kept soaring, and we had to drive that glassy road to Syracuse again and again, to monitor and reblend his cocktail of medicines.
Other medical escapades followed, like the time when routine lab work revealed a blood sugar level of 800 (normal is around 100), signaling diabetes, and a new regimen began of blood-sugar tests, a special diet, and three more pills. When he woke up, after a four-hour surgery during which his heart had twice spat out a pacemaker wire, cleverly insinuated down veins and lodged in the heart muscle, I’d greeted him with my best hundred-watt smile, and holding a stuffed lion.Įver since that day, we’d driven the hour-and-a-half over wintry, dimly lit roads for checkups, pacemaker tests, and echocardiograms, always anxious, then relieved, and sometimes edgy again, living a predictably uncertain life, much like the “regular irregularity” of his arrhythmic heart. For Paul, that meant a weeklong hospital stay in Syracuse, the first of many such trysts, and Paul lamenting, broken-spirited: “I used to be such a lion.” Otherwise he might suddenly pass out, maybe for good, just as his father had from the same malady in his seventies. A friend had recommended a superb and kind cardiologist in a nearby city, whose verdict was that Paul needed a pacemaker to chime in whenever his heart paused too long between beats. After months of my sensing that something wasn’t quite right-the jazz I heard in his chest when we curled up in bed how pale and clammy he sometimes grew, especially after meals-I’d finally convinced him to see a doctor by insisting it was the only thing I wanted for Christmas, the gift of being able to set my mind at ease. Twenty years earlier, when he was only fifty-five years old, Paul had battled a devastating heart arrhythmia that nearly killed him. From my thermos, I poured us cups of the hot grain drink Roma, which smelled of chicory and graham crackers.Īfter all, we’d been down this wharf before, too many times. But the magic and glory of the brain was still very much on my mind, so, lounging in a visitor’s chair, propped up on pillows, I passed the time browsing back issues of Cerebrum and Brain in the News. I’d been on book tour for An Alchemy of Mind when I learned Paul had to be hospitalized, and curtailed my travels to fly straight home. The prospect made us both a little giddy.įor three weeks, he’d languished in this high-tech cove, with a kidney infection that had waxed systemic, one of those staph bugs older than sharks or ginkgo trees, and I’d camped out with him lest he trip over the leashes dripping fluids into or out of him. “We escape at dawn!” he stage-whispered over his shoulder in a British sergeant-major voice.
But all that would soon change because he’d been cleared to leave the following morning, though he’d still be taking potent antibiotics. Lugging tubes and cables, he had joined the hospital’s bloom of deep-sea creatures.
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TRAILING PLASTIC TUBES, PAUL MADE HIS WAY ACROSS THE room, steeped in twilight, and I was struck by how the body sometimes looks like the sea creature it is, a jellyfish with long tentacles, not really a fish at all but a gelatinous animal full of hidden symmetries, as well as lagoons and sewers, and lots of spongy and stringy bits.
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