She inspected the wounds on my right arm and let out a heavy sigh. “Okay, let’s try this arm one more time. Here,” she said, turning to the original phlebotomist, “hold her arm like this and I’ll try this vein.” She pointed to one that had grown purple and now resembled an earthworm. The original phlebotomist held my arm out straight and gripped it so that I couldn’t move it. I turned my head and felt the saw in my arm. She struggled with it a bit and the entire left side of my head buzzed in pain. After a few more seconds of wriggling the needle into place, she placed both of her hands on her hips and said, “With your veins, you’d think we wouldn’t even need to be trained to do this. Sorry about that! This needle is not a fun one.”
Ha! Haha! Not a fun one! This needle was becoming the worst part of the entire death experience.
I returned to the waiting room with purple paper tape wrapped around my left arm and slouched into the seat next to my mother. Just then a nurse walked in and asked if I was ready. This is when I wished that time would slow down, because the time between walking out of the waiting room to the time that the propofol would overcome me felt like a scene being fast-forwarded. I wanted to take in all the details of the experience, but a treatment this serious doesn’t fuss around with nonsense.
The nurse led me to the gurney while asking my name and birthday. I always had to resist answering, “Don’t you know who I am?” Because that joke doesn’t ever get old. Even Leta makes this joke about me. If we get bad service at a fast-food restaurant, she’ll whisper to me, “Don’t they know who you are? TELL THEM WHO YOU ARE.” And I’m, like, “Leta. ‘I am the Mommy Blogger’ isn’t going to get us your chicken nuggets any faster.”
I told the room my name and hopped up on the gurney, and then I asked for the warm blanket, since they had forgotten to offer it. The team began affixing all the various instruments to my body, a precise series of maneuvers involving Velcro and vials and tubes and tiny adjustments. I looked at my mother, who was standing next to Dr. Mickey, and blinked several times to remind her about the constipation. They were ready to start the treatment—it had not even been two minutes since I was sitting in the waiting room—when my mother put her hand on Dr. Mickey’s arm.
“Hey, guys,” she began. “It’s time to talk about poop.”
“Oh my God,” I said, the Velcro from the wire itching my forehead. “Are you seriously—”
“Oh, so NOW you’re a prude? I don’t think so,” she shot back. “Yes, today we are gonna talk about poop. Specifically, Heather’s poop. Could there be anything in the combination of drugs you’re giving her that could cause constipation? She hasn’t pooped since she started the study.”
“Mom, how many years have you been waiting to do this to me?”
“I would have done this at your wedding, but you eloped.”
I could see Dr. Mickey going through the list of drugs in his brain and on his fingers. This one? No. That one? No. He turned to the anesthesiologist on call that day, Dr. Beck, who furrowed his brow.
“Well, you are having to go long periods without eating food,” Dr. Beck said. “But we can do some research before you come in next time to see if we can find anything.”
“In the meantime,” my mother said as she walked over to place her hand on my foot, “I have some poop tea I can give her. We’ll fix you some poop tea today, okay?” And then she winked at me.
And with that final pronouncement about the poop tea, it was time to die.
Dr. Beck asked me if I was ready for the Zofran and lidocaine. I nodded and clenched my hands against my chest. My mother was still standing at the foot of my gurney, her hands now behind her back. I sought out her eyes and she found mine.
“And here’s the propofol,” he said as he held up the milky liquid. I glanced quickly at the vial, and then found my mother’s face again. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him exerting pressure on the vial. How long could I withstand it? I wondered again. Could I will myself to stay awake? Several seconds passed and I didn’t feel anything, so I looked around the room to see if everyone could see that I was willing myself to stay aw—
Nothingness.
Then suddenly I could feel the weight of someone’s hand on my left leg. I could feel that I was not lying flat, that my body was propped up. I blinked a few times and found it very difficult to swallow. My mouth was parched. I didn’t recognize the person sitting to my right and blurted, “Who are you? What are you doing here? Why are you going around scaring people like this?”
That drunk girl at the party.
“You don’t remember me? We met last time. I’m Chris,” he said. His voice was so gentle that I suddenly felt like a jerk.
“Wait . . . Chris? Chris. Chrissssssss. Chrisopher. Yeah. Heeeeyyy!”
He smiled. “Can you tell me your name?”
“Heather Armstrong. Wait, Heather B. Armstrong.”
“Great. Can you tell me what year it is?”
“Two thousand and twelve.”
“Hm . . . can you think about that a little more?” he asked.
“One, two, three . . .” I looked down at my fingers to count. “It’s 2012.” Everyone in the room got silent again, all of them exchanging glances. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Did I get it wrong again?”
“Try one more time,” my mother said. I saw that it was her hand on my leg.
I closed my eyes and could see clock gears shifting around, interlocking with each other until the number “2017” suddenly appeared in my head.
“Oh my God, I am so embarrassed. It’s 2017. Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” Chris offered. “This happens a lot. We just want to make sure you’re fully awake before we let you go anywhere.”
“Where’s my damn apple juice?” I said jokingly, slamming my fist on my thigh. Another nurse took a container out of a small refrigerator at the other side of the room and poured some into a plastic cup. “I’m going to need more than that!” I hollered.
My mother, who hasn’t ever really witnessed me when I’m drunk, said, “Heather, she can pour you another cup after you’ve finished this one.”
“I KNOW THAT, MOTHER,” I said. “But I can’t control what comes out of my mouth—oh God. Poop tea! You talked about my poop in front of everyone. Why do I have to remember this? Here I am all ‘2012,’ but I can’t forget poop tea?”
She was cackling at this point, because I was bringing China Slim Tea, Extra Strength, Herbal Tea Delight up in front of two recovery nurses who had not been privy to the original conversation. “Heather is constipated,” she said to Chris.
“MOM—”
“And we’re trying to figure out if it’s a side effect of one of the drugs. Heather, there is an Asian market around the corner from your house. We’ll stop there on the way home to pick up your poop tea.”
After two more cups of apple juice that I drank without taking a breath, I swung my legs over the gurney and stood up. My stepfather steadied me, and he and I walked arm in arm out into the long hallway, out into the parking lot. I could hear my mother lingering behind, telling one of the nurses to remind Dr. Mickey about checking into the medications. She caught up with us just as my stepfather was about to open that giant minivan door and I caught a glimpse of my face in the window. I reached out to touch it. In the haze of drunken, incorrect years and poop talk I suddenly realized: Wait. Wait. I’d taken two showers in the last four days. Two. And put on makeup. How I hadn’t realized the significance of this as I was doing it, I cannot know. I reached my hand out to touch the reflection of my face where I’d applied mascara that morning and traced the two gaping holes where my eyes used to be.
TEN
A BOWL OF CHIPS AND SALSA
WE DIDN’T GET HOME until almost 4:30 that afternoon. I had not eaten food since 8:00 the previous night, so I’d essentially been fasting for twenty straight hours. I gobbled a 20-gram protein bar in the car on the drive to my house—I made actual “gobble” sounds, like a turkey—and when I walked
in the door, Marlo was sitting at the countertop next to her babysitter, Lyndsey. Friends who knew about the treatment asked how I was going to manage my girls during these weeks, and the truth is that all of us just agreed that we’d wing it. When I say “all of us,” that includes Lyndsey. I had hired her at the beginning of the school year to pick up my girls from school, bring them home, and stay with them until 5:30 every night so that I could get in a full day of work. She helped Marlo with her homework, prepared snacks for both kids, and kept them entertained so that I didn’t lose my mind trying to manage all of that with my workload and a boss who randomly texted that a certain form on the website was broken and why had I not fixed it already? A form so buried inside a maze of menus that no one in the world had ever used it or even seen it except for me and him.
Lyndsey is the last in a long line of babysitters who have helped me out over the years. First there was Katey, and then my niece Mariah. There was my adopted sister Cami who used to drive up from Provo, Utah, on the weekends to help out with Marlo. My cousin McKenzie lived with us for almost a year, and unfortunately Marlo came to believe that McKenzie was hers and hers alone. She believed that she was owed an actual person. When Kenzie got married and then pregnant, she couldn’t care for Marlo anymore, and I hired a girl named Kelli to pick the girls up from school and help with homework. And then Marlo thought Kelli was now Her Person. Hers alone. Whenever I tried having a conversation with Kelli in the afternoons, Marlo would talk over us or, you know, scream and kick walls. Sometimes she screeched and threw her body on the floor. I’m a pretty strict parent, stricter than a lot of my friends, and I don’t normally let my children get away with this kind of behavior. But when her father moved across the country, I eased up on a few things. In the case of Marlo owning Kelli, I figured that I didn’t need to further distress the edges of that enormous vacancy. I quickly learned that the best way to have a conversation with Kelli was to text her to meet me in the bathroom. There we would whisper or flush the toilet to mask the sounds of our voices.
When Kelli left to do corporate work, I found Lyndsey. After the second treatment I let her know exactly where I was going to be three days a week. Flatlining! On the Michael Jackson drug! Obstinately saying crazy nonsense to strange nurses! Her reaction was similar to those I’d already confided in: a little dubious, but “Do what you gotta do.” She didn’t know the Wanting to Be Dead part, but she could tell that I’d seemed a bit down. Haha! Ha. Yes. Down.
When I walked in that afternoon, the combination of hunger and fatigue must have made me look somewhat strange. I came to this conclusion when Lyndsey startled so visibly that the stool she sat on scooted two inches. She asked if I was okay, and I nodded and pointed toward the basement, where I really wanted to be. Right then, in my bed: Just let me be in my bed. I walked over to Marlo, kissed her on the forehead, and somehow found the strength to turn to my mother, who had walked in behind me, to say, “Please tell Leta I love her. I have to go lie down.”
I stumbled down the stairs into my bedroom and crawled underneath the covers, but not before setting my alarm for 5:30 p.m. I was too tired to eat anything, even though my roaring stomach was barely muffled through my duvet. An hour would be plenty; I just had to close my eyes. Dr. Bushnell sold me on this clinical trial by telling me it would work. But he also promised that I’d finish up each treatment and be able to go about my normal life, and this fatigue kept happening. All three times I’d been so tired on the car ride home that my head would bob with each turn and stop. And there in my bed I instantly fell asleep, my phone still aglow in my hand.
When my alarm went off, I didn’t know where I was. My room was almost pitch-black, save for a tiny space in the curtains letting in the diminishing light outside. I had to blink several times to get my bearings, and then I heard the scuffling of feet upstairs and the muffled voice of my mother saying goodbye to Lyndsey. My village was tag-teaming.
I pulled the heaviness of my body up and out of the bed—the Peanut Butter Pool—and climbed the stairs into the blinding light of the kitchen. My mother was wiping up something on the counter, when she turned to me and saw me covering my eyes with my hand.
“Why don’t you go back to sleep? We’ve got everything covered,” she said.
Asking for help still didn’t feel right or normal. In fact, it still felt downright weak, and I hated that I was consuming so much of her life. “I’m okay,” I said. “I want to see the kids. Where are the girls?”
Both of them had finished up their homework and were snuggled up together on Leta’s bed. Leta was on her phone, Marlo on an iPad I’d bought for her on sale at Christmas. The two of them, always seeking each other out in quiet moments. Always hugging and sharing things they’d discovered, always ending up on the couch or the bed, a leg or an arm entwined. Marlo was born early on a Sunday morning, and I remember the following Saturday being overcome by a feeling of sorrow and regret. I truly believed that I had ruined Leta’s life by burdening her with a little sister—a sibling she might or might not like, a younger human she’d be stuck with for the rest of her life. Why had I done this to her? What had I been thinking the whole nine months I’d carried that strange, wriggling eventuality in my womb? Why had I not given my five-year-old a say in whether or not she should have to be related to a sister? It was all my fault: she would end up homeless and alone. Coincidentally, the following Monday I started taking a load of antidepressants again.
I sat down at the foot of Leta’s bed as she put down her phone to hug me. I felt bad that I had been too tired to find her when I’d gotten home. Our afternoon ritual included a hug the moment she walked in from school. Always a long, lingering hug. Didn’t matter if I was on a conference call or in the middle of calculating quarterly taxes: I would stop whatever I was doing as she’d run in to hug me. Marlo? She had Her Person, and that person was giving her undivided attention. She would get to me later when she needed more undivided attention, plus ice cream.
“How did it go?” Leta asked, and her voice wavered a bit. I hated that my firstborn child was as worried as I was that I might not ever again smile the way I used to.
“Good,” I assured her. “Everything is good.” I pulled her in tightly and stroked the back of her head just as my mother rounded the corner and poked her head through the doorway.
“Rob and I are going to get them a pizza and then we’re going to stay and help put Marlo to bed,” she announced. “You have no say in this, so don’t open your mouth. Also, I’ve put a load of laundry in and it’ll be done and put away before we leave.” She then held up her hand as if to stop traffic.
* * *
My mother had always been my backup since my divorce, especially since my ex had moved and I started doing all of this alone. But it wasn’t until I asked my mother to come to a therapy session with me about three months before the treatment that she finally understood the extent of what doing all of this alone had done to me. I didn’t want her to come to a session. It meant I’d be asking for help, and I couldn’t do that. I didn’t want to admit that I desperately needed the occasional extra set of hands. My therapist, Mel, said that if I didn’t have her come in, she would track my mother down and call her in herself. Illegal? Probably. But it was a good tactic, and Mel knew it would be.
So I called my mother and asked if she would accompany me to one of my weekly sessions. She didn’t hesitate, given, you know, all the phone calls and screaming and the once or twice I might have mentioned that I wanted to be dead. On a snowy Wednesday afternoon in December we pulled into the parking garage of my therapist’s building.
“We can take the elevator if you want,” I said as we approached the entrance. “But I usually take the stairs, and those five flights are no joke.”
“Is that a challenge?” my mother shot back. “I may be old, but I am not old. Do I need to remind you how many times you’ve ever beaten me in steps? And that the only two times were, first, when you cheated and, second, when I was undergoing
radiation for my breast cancer?”
“Stairs it is!” I enthusiastically cheered, to distract my brain from the memory of my ex claiming that my mother’s “newly diagnosed medical condition” would render her incapable of helping me take care of my children. It was yet another reason he thought I was unfit to be their mother. Little did he know that during the four months that my mother endured radiation, she clocked more than 15,000 steps each and every day.
We entered the cold concrete corridor of stairs and slowly ascended to the fifth floor. These stairs, like I said, were no joke. In fact, when my therapist had moved her office a few months earlier, I realized that each floor was so high above the one below it that every set of stairs equaled two flights. Counting the stairs that went down into the parking garage, the five-story building offered approximately twelve flights of stairs.
Three times a week I’d walk Marlo to the door of her classroom and then drive five blocks down the street to this office building, where I would trespass those twelve flights of stairs twelve times, my iPhone strapped to my waist with a workout band I’d bought while training for the Boston Marathon. I’d listen to a running playlist of more than two hundred embarrassingly awful pop songs and fly up and down those stairs, always making sure to avoid eye contact with anyone entering the stairwell heading to their professional office. This would make them believe that a woman dressed entirely in workout clothing and white earbuds with sweat pouring from her temples belonged in that stairwell more than anyone had ever belonged, so please don’t call the cops.
My therapist’s office sat at the end of a long hallway on the fifth floor, and my mother and I walked toward it in silence. Neither one of us knew quite what to expect. I’d freshened up a tiny bit by wearing a pair of yoga pants that could pass as gray slacks and put on an old sweater I used to wear when I hated myself less. My mother, as always, was dressed as if she would be briefing the president about an air strike. (She doesn’t walk to her mailbox without ironing her shirt and putting on lipstick.) When we reached Mel’s office, we sat in the waiting room in silence. I think I may have fibbed a little earlier, because I knew a bit of what to expect. Remember: me, china shop. Mel, bull.
The Valedictorian of Being Dead Page 9