There were some birthdays on Saturday in the Bay area and abroad. Abroad if you imagine the Bay area as some sort of vegan-ridden, windy nation of pastries and bicycles, I mean. Meatloaf has once again made it through another year. L'il Wayne, who in fact was not a visitor to my grandmother's hair salon in Ohio, aged successfully. Cousins Margie and Barbara, sisters and birthday-sharers, happy birthday. In another weird turn, it transpires that the general wisdom that Bay area superheroes do not have birthdays, much in the way that tomatoes and potatoes do not have birthdays because they come from vine and earth, is wrong. The superheroes do have birthdays. Sometimes if you are lucky they will have their birthdays on the same day as your own. Lesser Wayne, Mr. Loaf, Margie, Barbara, we are some lucky bastards.
Amy, ambassador from our home nation of DC, and I spent much of the weekend Lazing About, petting Michelle & Nate's cats and napping in their chairs. Meanwhile I ferried myself back and forth to area bathrooms, moaning and Being a Crohn. I have begun to be able to smell foods and know if I can keep them down or not. (Last night I managed about eighteen pounds of Chinese food, so I hope this means I'm improving.) But Saturday night we had, with Michelle & Nate, at their grand abode, an inordinately (over-?) attended party.
And at this party I received a homemade beard. No, this is not a dyslexic misreading of a request for homemade bread, though I am always appreciative of baked goods. (More on that, and Magical Majkin's extraordinary cake, in the next post.) This beard is exactly what I wanted (although I cannot believe that my request was actually honored). The only issue with this beard is that its clever maker and co-birthday-haver glued it to my face with about an ounce of spirit gum. I wore it for at least an hour. I met many people this way. ("Oh, hey, I'm Kara, nice to meet you, I am clearly wearing a dress and a giant fucking beard.")
When it came time to take it off, I was left with a very painful sort of come-as-you-are mashup of cotton ball fuzz all around my mouth, which Nate declared made me look like I'd been "blowing Santa Claus." (Thanks, Nate.) If it hadn't been so hot, I totally would have worn that beard all night. After all, I wear a beard on the inside pretty much all the time.
I had some very brief errands to run this morning, one of which took me by the grocery store. Amy is visiting from DC (Phillip emitted a timid "Wei" from his now near-permanent perch in the shoebox when she arrived last night) and has had to eat toast and eggs for consecutive meals, which makes me feel a very guilty host. The only problem was that once I actually got inside the grocery store, even the thought of solid food started to make me feel funny. I sat on the floor in the vitamins aisle with my head between my legs for about three minutes having a pull-it-together moment until a Trader Joe's employee came by and asked me if I wanted a peanut-butter cup. (Do I look like I want a peanut-butter cup? Is that what this looks like it's all about?) I ended up buying a huge bag full of -- yes -- liquids. Protein shakes, some weird green sludge that claims to have vegetables in it that I don't have to digest myself, rice pudding (it's a liquid, bitches), juice, and so on.
So now, I ask you, what's Amy supposed to eat? Mission not accomplished. Though I have to say having juice for lunch instead of Ensure was sort of refreshing. (At least there's not a fearful warning emblazoned across the top that says, "DRINK VERY, VERY, VERY COLD!" I think the makers of Ensure may know how bad it tastes. If it has to be practically frozen to get it down, we've got a little problem.) If I were my mother, I would have an ear-horn shaped cornucopia of nuts, fruits, and challahs on hand for Amy at all times. Juan is the consummate hostess.
If I were my mother, it turns out, I would also have a broken wrist.
This afternoon I received an e-mail from my first-grade teacher (will wonders never cease, I know). She's now the director of an elementary school where my mom teaches. The first-grade teacher began the e-mail with scads of well-deserved lauds for Juan: How wonderful she is! How loyal and devoted! Why, she even came into work with a broken wrist!
At which point the joy train screeched to a halt. Terrified, I immediately began calling every man, woman, and beast in my family to find out what had happened to Juan -- to no avail, of course, since every man, woman, and beast in my family, like me, never picks up their freaking phone. Some minutes later, Juan herself called, direct from a challah store. (Of course.) She had broken her wrist two nights ago while walking Bis'l, and had certainly not been trying to keep the news from me -- she was totally fine now, had a cast, went to work, and when we had spoken before -- her only chance to tell me -- I had been mostly asleep.
"So let me get this straight," I said once it had been confirmed that she was perfectly all right, somewhere in suburban Maryland ordering challahs. "You broke your wrist and cut your chin, then woke up in the morning and went to work. You went to work. Juan, I don't know about all this."
"Well, yes," said Juan. "I felt okay. And besides, what else was I going to do, sit at home and think about how sore I was?"
Good news, Crohns. We have a good reputation out there in the medical world.
This morning at my MRE, having already vomited up several giantess-sized cups of milky contrast, having nearly popped my IV out of the crook of my arm and bled all over the poor IV technician, having been docilely swaddled in more cotton bare-ass finery than was strictly necessary and then placed into the MRI tube, I explicitly heard the technician tell me over the intercom -- before she told me to hold my breath for the umpteenth time -- that we Crohns were a solid, tough-as-nuts bunch, that all the Crohns she'd worked with had been uncomplaining and steel-balled no matter what, even if we did vomit a bit more than our fair share. I nearly bursted with pride for us right then, Crohns. Bursted with pride as well as 32 ounces of contrast in my stomach, and another few through my IV line. Bursted.
High. Five.
It turned out, as I discovered at my later appointment back in No-Luna-Bar-In-Waiting-Room land, a.k.a. the gastroenterologist's office, that while indeed things are not looking so spectacular in my intestine, they are neither so awful that hordes of crisp-white-suited hamsters need to be deployed to the interior to fix the problem with jackhammers and chainsaws. And as for my premature boasting about having dense bones last week, it turns out my bones aren't so dense after all. ("But dairy... and me... like this!" I protested, lacing my fingers together.) After which followed some examination and more blood tests.
("What happened to your usual vein?" asked A., the lab technician. "I can't use this vein today. It looks awful."
"Ferrets," I said baldly. Then, when he looked confused, I clarified, "I had an IV this morning. Don't worry.")
But that's not what I really want to tell you, Crohns.
I want to tell you about the hours before the MRE, at which time a San Francisco Area Man, Superhero, and apparent vampire reversed his usual schedule to awaken at the hour he usually goes to bed. He did this to ferry a Crohn to an MRE. After which he sat there in the waiting room and watched this Crohn down part of the first cup of contrast, sniffed it investigatively and declared it to smell like pina colada, and then almost proceeded to take an ill-advised sip. And there this Area Man, Superhero, Vampirewas when the whole thing was over, with coffee -- and a ride to the No-Luna-Bar-In waiting room -- and there he was again when the prodding and the "here are your results" and the tubes of blood were done, hours later, the picture of jauntiness.
"Ma'am, the results of your test are in," he reported in the car on the way home. "You are a stone-cold fox. I'm sorry you have to hear this news from me. There's nothing we can do. It's just my job. I have to report it."
The best news I've heard all day, Crohns, is not that we are the toughest motherfuckers out there. (Let's face it; we're tough, but the toughest we aren't.)
The best news I heard today was when I talked to my parents and heard how Dan is starting in the football game on Friday night, and about how my mother learned to identify rancid graham crackers in her cabinet. (Well, thank God.)
And the best news I've heard today was when I spoke to SL and MS and PB because they wanted to know -- just, you know, casually, mind you -- if I was dead yet. I used to hate it when people helped me when I was sick because I could do it all myself, damn it. Part of that was that I didn't know how to handle and accept the help. And part of it was that I couldn't see the larger context of that help -- that sometimes people help you because they genuinely want to, and that you would, and do, want to help them in return. That it's part of letting someone really know you, and vice versa. I was so hell-bent on being tough that I couldn't bear the idea of someone seeing me untough.
So the best news I've heard today was also when Area Man, Superhero, vampire dropped me off at the Fort and I heard myself say,
This morning on the phone my dad was telling me about how Dan, my youngest brother, is reading some interesting material in his high school. They were not exactly short stories, Dan reported to Dad; they were kind of more like, you know, journals. This olden guy was on the road. It was totally boring.
"Do you see where I'm going with this?" my dad asked.
"The Canterbury Tales," I said.
My dad had encouraged Dan to call me, the Unofficial Canterbury Tales Hotline, but so far no call has been placed. If you're out there, Canterbury Tales readers, we're manning the phones.
Later in the conversation we were discussing how Dan has a big day on Saturday -- an important football game. (Yes, we enjoy talking about my siblings.) Dan is a lineman on his high school football team and has about eight million concussions to prove it; on Saturday his school will be playing his former school.
"I understand Saturday is also a big day for other reasons," said my dad. I think he was referring to the fact that Saturday is my birthday.
"Yeah," I said. "It's Cousin Margie's birthday, and Cousin Barbara's birthday. And the singer Meatloaf's birthday. And Li'l Wayne's birthday."
"Li'l Wayne..." said my dad. "Is that the guy who was in Mom's hair salon?"
"I have no idea. What was Li'l Wayne doing in Mom's hair salon?"
Maybe Li'l Wayne has decided to start visiting the haunts of middle-aged Jewish women in the suburban mid-Atlantic as a public service.
"It was one of those Li'l guys," my dad continued. "It may not have been Wayne. No, I think it was Bow Wow."
"Li'l Bow Wow was in Mom's hair salon?"
"He was. I think it was Bow Wow."
"What was he doing there?"
"Well, he was getting his hair cut."
You heard it here first, friends: He was getting his hair cut.
*Update: After having spoken to no fewer than three members of my family in the past few hours, I have determined that the actual hair salon in which the Lesser Bow Wow was seen was not my mother's, but my grandmother's -- in Columbus, Ohio. It appears that Grandma was able to identify Mr. Wow only after a "ruckus" from outside the hair salon alerted her to his identity.
Out-of-touch has been the descriptor of the day for the past week or so around here, and not just because I was born into this world as an 80-year-old man and still don't know how to click on web pictures to enlarge them. I'm becoming one of those poor correspondents you read about in Jane Austen novels, the ones people only refer to in their drawing rooms in hushed tones. ("He could have sent word by stagecoach or mule, but instead he was at home still trying to figure out what the difference is between ripping and burning CDs!") Okay, now we have other problems, too.
In a recent e-mail to JS, written so late at night that my filters were firing awkwardly, I described the current situation as such:
"I'm:
1. Very sick,
2. Very overworked, and
3. Very happy."
As for Item 1, to every season, turn, turn, Crohns. You know how it goes. Earlier in the week at my Dexascan -- from which I will learn the density (and, in case of typo, perhaps also the destiny, the sea destiny) of my bones -- I was installed in a carpeted room with heavy floral drapery and placed under a machine that informed me that it was about to be radioactive. I was instructed to sit very still and to listen to some music that sounded like some dudes on a hillside playing LSD-powered lutes. The purpose of the music was to relax me, I realize. I relaxed, apparently, to the point of vomiting. Yeah, I vomited during the scan. What can I say? I'm hard-rock. Lutes make me vomit? No offense.
Later in the week I made Michelle & Nate spend an entire evening helping me research the possibility that I was having a heart attack. (I wasn't.) And keeping food down? Hilarious! You jest. I know you jest. It's because you're such a kidder. Here and there, however, I have been meeting with great success in the food department. It appears that the Crohn likes seaweed.
As for Item 2, whether it was a good idea to once again indenture myself to two sections of university composition, a panel of private students in the city, five copyediting clients, and a crazed Sisyphusian bullheadedness toward completing my own book, has yet to be seen.
And Item 3? I'm still coming up with a good way to put it. I have been reading a lot of poetry lately, working on exercises for my private students. Some of it is magnificent and some of it just gives you that oh, all right feeling you get when you have no choice but to sleep on something very old and floral-smelling and maybe pissed upon, like when you are a guest at a strange person's house. But I am waiting for the poem that speaks to the feeling that is easily arrived at, the feeling you don't have to try for, that just comes on its own. Too often you have to summon good feelings toward you, practically strongarm them, will them into being. And then once in a very long while, you don't.
This afternoon I was sitting in the Fort reading about early 20th-century German foreign policy in preparation for a meeting with my new tutoring student (a high schooler -- and an unusually intelligent personage, if you ask me). There was a faint buzzing, an intolerable buzzing. At first I thought it was my soda. You know how sometimes sodas in cans are kind of like, "Hhhh! Hhhh! Yes, hello there!" in such a way that they may or may not be trying to get your attention? It was not the soda, but it was something nearby -- a fly vigorously attempting to excuse itself from the Fort and making very little progress in doing so.
I decided I would do it a favor. I opened the window and removed the screen. Out the fly went. Benevolent, altruistic me. Congratulations to me, and so forth. Except then I couldn't get the screen back in. How did these screens install? I checked the other window. I tried it one way, then another way. I tried several ways. Time was a-wasting. There was more Bismarck to read about. I decided I would just unhinge the window. That would make it easier. Then the screen would surely slide right in.
What a great idea! Before you could say counterproductive the entire window was in the Fort, in my lap, and there did not seem to be any way to right this wrong. Furthermore, I was imminently on my way to meet my student. It did not seem like a good idea to leave a window-sized cavern in my apartment while I was away -- not at all. I tried everything I could to fix the situation and ended up with a stopgap measure that made it appear that the window had been fixed, although you and I both know that it remains broken. I hope that fly is happy.
Later on, returned from my student, there was a knock on my door. It was my landlord. He was holding my laundry bag.
"Is this your laundry bag?" he asked. I confirmed, cheerily and in my best Anne of Green Gables mode, that it was.
"You can't leave this next to the water heater while you're doing your laundry," he said. "The whole building could go up in flames."
Broken window: check. Building nearly incinerated: check. All in a Monday's work.
"Could I come in and check on the gnat situation?" he asked.
Number one, I didn't want him coming in because my apartment looked like it had been hit by a tornado. The bed was completely discombobulated. There were clothes and student papers everywhere. And there was that small matter of an entire window lying in the middle of my floor.
"Uh..." I said, "it's actually cleared itself up, so there's no need. Plus I sort of am in the middle of something." How unassuming, Kara. In the middle of what, idiot? Boning Gael Garcia Bernal? On the spot I am a master of sounding innocent, clearly.
I've had a (not contagious!) infection for the past two weeks that's now gone, and the treatment for it is a drug that "may cause confusion." You may experience side effects of, um, yeah -- just a little confusion? Just sit right over here. Riiiiight over here. Just on the... There you go.
More than once today I have begun to think there might be some truth to this. I was sitting on the CalTrain on the way to that city where I teach, working on a story. When I looked up, I momentarily wondered when we would be in DC (as though I were on the Amtrak going back to my parents' house from Philly or New York). Needless to say, the confusion passed and we never arrived in DC (which would have put a severe damper on my workday, to say the least). Later, I attempted to drink from an empty water bottle in the middle of my lecture. The students looked at one another in amusement/concern. Then I attempted to drink from the empty water bottle again about five minutes later. I also called a colleague "Mom." That colleague is a man.
Is this the result of the medication (which, thank the merciful heavens, I no longer am taking)? Or perhaps the general lack of sleep I've been getting recently? Either way, I am no longer as eager as I once was to be raucously spun around blindfolded and then sent careening inexorably toward a literal or metaphorical pinata.
Yesterday I discovered that at long last, next semester I will be teaching a section of creative writing at that university where I teach -- in addition, of course, to continuing to ride the glory-bound composition train. (All. Aboard.) I have been in the departmental office week in and week out over the past eighteen months or so, pestering and making my case and updating my resume and so on, in the hopes of receiving such a course. ("I will make this course the best it has ever, ever, ever been!" I promised in my last campaign sometime last week. I gesticulated like a freakish mystic in the throes. And I really meant it.) I was so happy upon receiving yesterday's news that I may have frightened a wizened, gnome-like person who was with me in the faculty copy room -- someone who, upon further reflection, was probably another adjunct but did not appear altogether human. At that university where I teach, I totally wouldn't put this beyond the realm of possibility.
I am filled with ideas. All the things I want them to write. The exercises we're going to work on. We're doing this kick-ass dialogue unit. Profiles. Poems. They're going to read the best, most toothsome (yes, toothsome) stuff out there. They're going to say something. I just know it. Man, this is going to be awesome.
"Sounds good," said P. yesterday when I mentioned that this was happening, "but when are you going to say something?"
What P. was asking, of course, was when one of my stories is going to get published.
I know that even those who are supposedly your fans and friends start to lose faith in the quality of what you do after a while, if no Larger Entity like a literary magazine or a publishing house corroborates that value. And getting published is supposed to be easy, right? I mean, look at all those awful pieces out there in heavy circulation! If I can't even do that, my work must be beyond awful. Poor, deluded me.
But you know, I just can't bring myself to feel that way. I know my stories will get taken someday. I know because most of them -- except for the turds -- do say something. The example you set for your students can't be that the things you express, if they truly are expressed with intention and some modicum of finesse, aren't worth anything until someone distributes them and gives them a seal of approval. To say getting published is taking too long is to say that publication is reason to write -- or that other people, people who you don't even know, get to decide whether your stories are worth telling. That's not the instinct a writer ought to have. The instinct ought to be to tell the story in a way that makes the language and the narrative matter, and to let the rest -- with a real effort to get your work out there -- settle itself.
And when it does settle, it's going to be awesome. I can't wait.
The way they do it now, you do all your talking with a resident or a nurse practitioner, and then the doctor comes in for her three minutes of fame. The nurse practitioner there is pretty rad. Rad though she may be, words regarding this colonoscopy I have to get in October were still coming out of her mouth.
"The fact that you've had elevated inflammation for seventeen years straight kind of warrants one," she said, "especially since you haven't had a colonoscopy in" -- she glanced at my records -- "you can't remember."
"Probably college?" I wagered. "I'm sure it was memorable."
"Be that as it may, it's time."
"I won't fight you," I said.
"It will be better this time," she explained, "because you don't have to drink all the pre-surgery fluids. There's now a pill that you can take that does the same thing."
"Jamaica me crazy," I commented.
After she left, I could hear her consulting with the doctor in the next room. I was sitting in the consultation room with my shirt half-off, grading. (All grading, all. The. Time.)
"We have a comedian in there," I heard her say.
In came the doctor like a Tasmanian Devil for her three minutes of hurried Wisdom From the Mount. I ask you, is it so much to request a conversation with one's doctor in which one isn't speaking like the legal caveats guy at the end of a Mattel commercial? I had three minutes to hear about my colonoscopy, the MRI I'm supposedly now getting too, my upcoming bone scan, how I had to get blood tests for my creatine, and how I'm now going on the pill. Take these pills, show up, ask for no contrast, make your appointment, go down to the...
"Are you okay with this plan?" she asked.
"I, uh, am not really clear on what the plan is," I admitted. "A blood test, a bone scan, an MRI, and a colonoscopy? And the pill? Am I sick or something?"
The doctor looked at the nurse practitioner blandly.
"We have a comedian," she said.
In the downstairs blood lab, I was ushered into a curtained area and told to wait. In came F_____, Blood Technician Trainee.
Trainee! I thought. She looked younger than me, and when she asked me for my date of birth, she confirmed that she was.
"Wow, you look young!" she said.
"I get that all the time," I muttered, rolling up my sleeve.
F_____ clearly had no clue what she was doing. She kept exclaiming things like, "Oh, shoot!" and "Oops!" particularly when she stuck me once, twice, three, four times in places where I had assured her no veins were about to make themselves known. (The upper arm? Like, who goes there?) Don't pass out, I told myself sternly. I had a feeling F____ would be more terrified than I was.
"My veins are like wood gnomes," I explained. "They don't just come out. There's one right there in my right inner elbow. Just go for it, girlfriend. You go. Go for it."
On the fifth try, F_____ tried my suggestion and got the vein. I applauded with my other hand on the table holding the vials.
"You probably hate me," she said.
"I don't hate you," I told her. "You did great." I wonder what she will be like when she's been a technician for twenty years and has been sticking people day in and day out except for lunch breaks. I wonder if she'll still be nice.
The denouement to this visit, however, came on the bus ride home. The bus was packed with kids coming home from school, as well as every manner of other person. It was extremely hot and smelled strongly of people. There were no seats. I held onto a pole about halfway down the bus and just waited it out. I was holding on, of course, with my right arm, the one that F____ had chopped up in the blood lab. One moment I was holding on like a champ, and the next I was lying on the floor of the bus in the arms of a very hot man.
Oh, I, I thought. I just died in your arms tonight.
The Very Hot Man was asking me if I was okay and slapping my cheeks. A bunch of other people were crowded around, although they had been crowded around before anyway.
"You passed out," said the Very Hot Man.
At this moment I remembered that scene in The Little Mermaid when Eric washes up on the shore, comes to, and sees the mermaid Ariel there, a vision singing some Enya-esque song. I checked that the Very Hot Man had legs. Affirmative. I was waiting for him to burst into a rendition of "Part of That World," mournfully protesting that he wanted to be where the people were, wanted to see, wanted to see them dancing.
For the rest of the ride the Very Hot Man -- WAIT FOR IT -- name of Eric, held onto my arm like a superstar, grinned at me, and told me about his yoga practice and veganism. (Unfortunately I don't think Eric and I can have a land-sea romance anymore.)
Next time I go to the blood lab, I'm totally asking for F______.
I may possibly have dysentery. I generally group all Oregon Trail diseases under the same umbrella -- pre-death malaise; gone hunting -- but dysentery has always seemed the closest to my heart. Having Crohn's Disease, I suppose that makes sense. Dysentery is the Crohn's of the Oregon Trail. In younger years, I did what I could to inflict it upon unlucky enemies who had been -- whoops! how did that happen? -- placed into my accursed wagon. Broken leg? Increase speed. Only three pounds of food remaining? Quel dom-freaking-mage. Oh, it was beautiful. Many an unlucky douchebag was deposited roadside on the Trail. And all rejoiced.
Tonight over the phone, I told Amy all about it.
"I have dysentery," I announced baldly. (Amy, who has known me since I was nine and before I even had Crohn's Disease (or knew I did, anyway) is quite used to these sorts of pronouncements.)
"You shouldn't have tried to caulk the wagon and float it across," she replied. "Should have forded. Tried to tell you, but would you ford? No."
"Kara has been bitten by a snake," I added. "Kara has cholera."
"Well, which is it?" she asked.
"Kara has gone hunting."
Amy sighed.
Whatever it is, I can't keep food down. I hear that happens when you go hunting. Or trading. Or whatever.
"Or maybe I have Crohn's Disease," I remarked to Abby in a separate conversation.
We both giggled.
"That joke," Abby observed, "never ceases to be funny."
