A sovereign Cure

It’s 4:30 AM. I am wide-awake.   I pat myself down, conduct a quick Pain inventory. The Foot report trickles in, setting the stage for the official USDA’s dawn corn report

The official corn and bunion report will show some minor scattered cramping along the left lateral gastrocnemus.   I am pain free but haunted of memories of recent pain, oral and esophageal discomfort so overwhelming and pointless that it must serve some useful, evolutionary purpose. Perhaps HaShem just enjoys watching us tap dance across our darkened floors at 3 AM. Automatons in search for peace. .  What did Joan Didion write about migraine pain?  

…I had no brain tumor, no eyestrain, no high blood pressure, nothing wrong with me at all: I simply had migraine headaches, and migraine headaches were, as everyone who did not have them knew, imaginary. I fought migraine then, ignored the warnings it sent, went to school and later to work in spite of it, sat through lectures in Middle English and presentations to advertisers with involuntary tears running down the right side of my face, threw up in washrooms, stumbled home by instinct, emptied ice trays onto my bed and tried to freeze the pain in my right temple, wished, only for a neurosurgeon who would do a lobotomy on house call, and cursed my imagination

Kindred Spirit Joan.

I am trying to remain perfectly still in the tepid water. The liquid still holds some vague charged animal  energy, Dan and his crew were here a few hours ago, before the spit of the evening turned dawn-ward.

This is what it’s like to die. All options exhausted, no good medications available. No where to turn. I am up to my brain stem in warm water.. Any activity could trigger yet another pain cascade. This is how the end comes, not with a bang but with a whimper.

Last night’s pain reverberates in echoes,  small waves  against the  hot tub’s plastic walls. Last night was brutal. Complex cases . Another salary drop.  Angry patients, demanding patients.  By 8 PM, at shift’s end, my mouth was swollen and sore, a nefarious confrontation of GVHD and  thrush from the  steroids I gargle to keep the  disease at bay. We’ve reached an impasse .

            It’s  cloudy  in West Hartford.  Cloudy and quiet. The pain has subsided but I can’t return to bed, I associate our lovely tempurdedic mattress with pain. What next? Do I move to a Hampton inn where I have no pain associations?

Cyn is calling. It is starting to drizzle and she imagines I will fall asleep and then be flash fried in a lightening strike. It happens.

The point is…  so what? We all suffer in some way. My 95-year olders bring in gnarled useless fingers. Is their suffering less than mine?  What did Anne Lenox sing?

Now every one of us is made to suffer
 every one of us is made to weep
 but we've been hurting one another


And now the pain has cut too deep

So take me from the wreckage
 save me from the blast
 Lift me up and take me back
 don’t let me keep on walking on broken glass

 The mind wanders.  I think of Ray Bradbury on moonless night.   Ray described the central tenant of life:  We are born alone, we life alone we die alone. Pain and longing keeps us separate. I think of his short stories, where the protagonists are separated by space, desire or fear.

His astronaut candidates are   uniquely qualified to explore space because they have no friends, no entanglements.  Michael Creighton   discusses this theory in the Andromeda strain, where he describes the “lone man” hypothesis.   Only astronauts lacking personal connections can be called upon to do the right thing under pressure.  Perhaps only the lonely can tolerate pain, it becomes their constant companion. Am I the lone man?  In Ray’s world, People escape to Mars to flee the stench and crowds of earth.  His message was clear. You will die. You will die alone. Your classmates will lock you in a closet on Venus so you will never ever see the sun.  Your father, the astronaut is already a dead, the actual fact of his death is just one more piece of information that will complete your life.

Pain is numbing, isolating, really, the perfect Bradbury vehicle.  We are all alone in our selfish, intrusive pain.

Our Synagogue had “ projects” when I was young, the idea was to spend time with the congregants less desirable members. We’d buy groceries or read to our fellow congregants. I remember visiting their dark houses with sad wall hangings, sullen gifts given by a least favorite nephew. I remember the shut ins weeping, over loneliness, pain, and isolation. Even as a child, it made an impression on me: Don’t complain. It’s not helpful and makes others pity you.   My pain is transforming me into one of those old, old men who accepted our baked goods with ambiguous thanks, they never seemed happy we had taken some of our day to visit. The drama of the transplant is long gone, now its time to…fit in.

 I am one of those pathetic people.

 What to do about the discomfort?  What to do about the hot poker   that wends its way down my throat?  What I need is a sovereign remedy.

 I think about a cure for Melancholia, a typical  sexist  Bradbury story about a woman affected by the vapors, a woman dying without a diagnosis. 

Send for some leeches; bleed her," said Doctor Gimp. "She has no blood left!" cried Mrs. Wilkes. ""You but tell us as you go out what we told you when you came in!" "No, more! Give her these pills at dawn, high noon, and sunset. A sovereign remedy!"

I had become some  20 year old  hysterical  Victorian woman.

"Where do you hurt?" "My arms. My legs. My bosom. My head. How many doctors - six? - have turned me like a beef on a spit. No more. Please, let me pass away untouched."

My vicious cycle of therapy continues: Steroid mouthwash and oral prednisone, resulting in oral thrush. So I gulp Diflucan an antifungal which sort of works,  Then zantac,.  My pill  bottles  line my bookshelf,  a  yellow landing  strip along the runway of my dresser.

In the Ray Bradbury book, the  elders decide Camellia needs an exposure to moonlight.  I’m way ahead of you all, lying in out hot tub at 5 AM

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But let us hoist Camellia, cot and all, maneuver her downstairs, and set her up outside our door." "Camellia?" Mrs. Wilkes turned to her daughter. "I may as well die in the open," said Camilla, "where a cool breeze might stir my locks as I . . ." "Bosh!" said the father. "You'll not die. Jamie, heave! Ha! There! Out of the way, wife! Up, boy, higher!" "Oh," cried Camellia faintly. "I fly, I fly . . . !"

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 "She's not well." The man scowled. "She does poorly." "Does poorly-" Mr. Wilkes wrote, then froze. "Sir?" He looked up suspiciously. "Are you a physician?" "I am, sir." "I thought I knew the words! Jamie, take my cane, drive him off! Go, sir, be gone!" But the man hastened off, cursing, mightily exasperated. "She's not well, she does poorly . . . pah!" mimicked Mr. Wilkes, but stopped. For now a woman, tall and gaunt as a specter fresh risen from the tomb, was pointing a finger at Camillia Wilkes. "Vapors," she intoned. "Vapors," wrote Mr. Wilkes, pleased. "Lung-flux," chanted the woman. "Lung-flux!" Mr. Wilkes wrote, beaming. "Now, that's more like it!" 2

" The Dustman's smile flashed like warm sunlight in the growing dusk. "I have but one advice." He gazed at Camillia. She gazed at him. , "It is the night of the Full Moon. So," said the Dustman humbly, unable to take his eyes from the lovely haunted girl, "you must leave your daughter out in the light of that rising moon." "Out under the moon!" said Mrs. Wilkes. "Doesn't that make the lunatic?" asked Jamie. "Beg pardon, sir." The Dustman bowed. "But the full moon soothes all sick animal, be they human or plain field beast.  "It may rain-" said the mother uneasily. "I swear," said the Dustman quickly. "My sister suffered this same swooning paleness. We set her like a potted lily out one spring night with the moon. She lives today in Sussex, the soul of reconstituted health!"

"Mother," said Camillia. "I feel it. The moon will cure me, it will, it will . The last lights out. London asleep. The moon rose. And the higher the moon, the larger grew Camillia's eyes as she watched the alleys, the courts, the streets, until at last, at midnight, the moon moved over her to show her like a marble figure atop an ancient tomb."for it was told me, the moon is my cure." . "Am I then my own affliction? How sick I make myself! Even now, feel my heart!" "I feel it, so." "My limbs, they burn with summer heat!" "Yes. They scorch my fingers." "But now, the night wind, see how I shudder, cold! I die, I swear it, I die!" "I will not let you," he said quietly. "Are you a doctor, then?" "No, just your plain, your ordinary physician, like another who guessed your trouble this day. The girl who would have named it but ran off in the crowd." "Yes, I saw in her eyes she knew what had seized me. But, now, my teeth chatter. And no extra blanket!" 
Somewhere, cats sang. A shoe, shot from a window, tipped them off a fence. Then all was silence and the moon . . .

"Shh . . ." Dawn. Tiptoeing downstairs, Mr. and Mrs. Wilkes peered into their Sweet Camillia, alive and well, made whole again!" They bent by the slumbering girl. "She smiles, she dreams; what's that she says?" "The sovereign," sighed the girl, "remedy." "What, what?" The girl smiled again, a white smile, in her sleep. "A medicine," she murmured, "for melancholy."
My disease bores me, my  pain bores me and I need a carefully  controlled assortment of  medication to  beome whole again.  I debate  raising my prednisonerendoisone dose,  increasing the anti fungals and regulate my  pain medication.  My leukemia  reminds me of Camilla's treatment, sometimes,  sometimes the best therapy  consists of lying in the moon light and waiting for the GVHD gods to  burn themselves out. 

The sun rose over West Hartford, , the pain faded.  Mike and Ellen visited,  The pain ebbs at sunrise  and I spend the day leaning on them, hoping they don’t notice how I need them for support.

I may be coming to the end of my career.  I don't have a lot of choices. I cant  work in pain, can't work sedated.  I have one goal, to shut off the pain.  If I can accomplish  this, then I will have found a sovereign remedy.