Around dinnertime I started to calm down a bit. After all, was it really that big a deal? So I ran a race. It wasn’t even a long race. As I said before, it wasn’t even a race. Six miles. That’s not even a quarter marathon. What did I really have to be upset about? Was this maybe about me wanting exorbitant praise for doing something that’s not that hard? Maybe. But then again, I’d just completed something I didn’t know I could even do a couple months before. I didn’t think it was wrong to want my family there to witness my accomplishment, however small. After all, I go to my kids’ musical recitals, and those are terrible.
Families sometimes hurt each other. That’s all there is to it. Martha didn’t intend to let me down. She was late, that’s all. Was I going to hold it over her head for the rest of our lives? Of course not. I would forgive her and then, a few years later, write about it in a book the way any good husband would.
Ultimately, the race didn’t matter. What mattered was getting out on the road. Using my body. Not being a slug. Plus, I’d gotten a gift that wouldn’t end with the race. I was a runner now! Running had become an integral part of my life. I was eating better, sleeping better, feeling better. That was the true gift. Not the congratulations, not the medal. It was those days outdoors, small pains and all. It was the sensation of autumn air moving across my face, just as I’d imagined it sitting at the cross-country informational meeting years before; it was the sting of cold water on my feet after sloshing through a puddle, my shadow chasing me across the miles. Also, it was the permission I gave myself to eat as much post-run ice cream as I wanted, because surely an elite athlete such as myself needed those extra calories. It wasn’t true, of course, but I was already lying to myself about enjoying running, so why stop now?
Chapter Thirteen
Fill it with premium
Mom cannot remember if she had her hip replaced in between or after her two hernia operations. You know things have gotten bad when you can no longer remember how many surgeries you’ve had, or the order in which they happened. What we both remember is the intense pain she was experiencing around this time, so bad that each step left her gasping for air, making it nearly impossible for her to walk. An examination revealed the radiation had caused her left hip to, in her words, “crumble.” Essentially, she no longer had a hip. One upside of her condition was that her surgeons “loved it.”
She says: “They were so excited when they saw me afterward because they didn’t expect it to be so bad and they rarely get to operate on one so bad. So they were thrilled. I told them I was very happy for them.”
From the operation, she went to rehab. “One of the worst experiences of my life.” This from a woman who had electricity zapped through her brain for five weeks. Finally, they released her back into the Florida swamps, where she recuperated. But the pain did not end with the new hip. If anything, it grew worse.
Pain became an unyielding, obtrusive force in Mom’s life. In addition to the hip pain, she began experiencing persistent back pain, which made it difficult for her to sit in one position for more than a few minutes. Turns out she has an “unstable spinal column.” Whatever supportive tissue her spinal column once had to keep her ambulatory and upright has been worn away, so now her spine has the structural integrity of a Jenga tower.
She cannot walk more than a few steps without the pain stopping her. Consultations with doctors yield no solutions. Because of her age and health history, she is not a candidate for reparative surgery, which involves plates and screws and some of those chip clips used to keep pretzels fresh in the bag. In the end, the doctors all tell her the same thing: Her condition is degenerative, inoperable, and eventually she will be confined to a wheelchair. In the meantime, pain is making life unbearable. A friend suggests marijuana.
“You tried marijuana?” I ask.
“Mm-hm,” she says, pleased with herself.
“Was that your first time?”
“Oh no,” she says offhandedly, as if it were Cheech & Chong & Jill.
I know being shocked to discover that your parents have tried drugs is passé, but for some reason, the thought of my utterly square mother toking up causes me greater mental distress than anything else she’s told me. I guess it’s like that dream where you discover a whole other room in your home you never knew existed. In this case, the new room is a dank, paneled basement from the ’70s.
“I tried pot a couple times,” she says, “but I could never really get high on it.”
Me too! I have also tried marijuana a couple (around thirty) times, finally giving up on it after I came to the conclusion that I would never get it to work right. Either I ended up unconscious, which was what happened the first time, or I just stood around listening to other people giggle. Which is such a shame, because weed seems to me like the perfect drug: non-injectable, easily obtainable, and available in brownie form. If only I could nail down the part where it’s an enjoyable, mildly narcotic experience and not a cotton-mouthed descent into gripping paranoia.
After giving up on weed, Mom and Sandy sought out a pain management specialist. They found one she now calls Dr. Schmuck.
They had unwittingly stumbled across a quack who began prescribing Mom megadoses of OxyContin, otherwise known as “hillbilly heroin,” which, ever the good patient, she took as ordered. Every few weeks, they returned to the doctor’s office where, she says, he cracked a couple jokes, refilled her prescription, and charged her several hundred dollars for the privilege of receiving suicidal doses of opiates.
“I found out later I was on extremely high, extremely dangerous doses of OxyContin. It was costing us upward of two thousand dollars a month. It was horrible. It got to the point where it was, ‘Do I take the OxyContin or do we eat?’ ”
Although Mom kept Eric and me informed of what was going on with her during this period, I guess I didn’t quite realize until now how dire things had become financially. Or, more likely, I knew but chose to ignore it because I did not want to send her money. Because I am a horrible son.
Money is an unacknowledged point of bitterness and contention between Mom and myself. The issue is complicated and laden with old hurts, so I will try to explain my side of it as fairly as I can, with the full understanding that, at some point, Mom will read this and get pissed at me.
You know how some people from poor families say, “We never had any money but never felt poor because we had love”? I always felt the opposite. “We never had any money and we always felt poor because our home life was a shit show.” Mom and Dad fought over it, and their drawn-out divorce cost them both plenty of it. Afterward, I heard what seemed like daily litanies about child support and alimony and the cost of school clothes, as well as the cost of everything else.
Then, when Elaine and Mom set up house together, they expressed the desire to become a family, but it was a lie from the get-go. I remember loud fights between them over grocery bills, for example, with Elaine claiming she should owe less because she had only had one kid. In those moments, I distinctly felt like the idea of our ever being a family was a farce. I was probably about eight years old, and I can tell you from experience that no eight-year-old wants to hear that he costs too much. Their money arguments extended to every niggling aspect of the household, provoking countless fights, stony silences, and tearful remonstrations. Money was our home’s perpetual emotion machine.
When I was around thirteen, Mom and Elaine decided to start a business together, a stationery and gift store. Mom and Elaine asked to borrow five thousand dollars from the life insurance money I’d received after Dad died. Eric and I had both elected to take much less than our equal share to ensure that Susan would always have enough. Our shares of the money were supposed to last long enough to see us through college, and five thousand dollars from that sum was a not insignificant amount.
“What if the business fails?” I asked Elaine, which seemed to me to be the kind of prudent question any investor would ask. Elaine didn’t see it that way. She grew furious and s
creamed at me, causing a huge stink. I never gave them permission to take the money, but they did anyway.
The store failed while we boys were at college. Mom and Elaine ditched New Jersey, absconding to Florida in the middle of the night, leaving our home to the bank. A few years after that, they broke up, and Mom sank into a deep depression, during which she hibernated and did not work. How did she manage to live? I don’t know, but if I had to guess, I would surmise she borrowed money from Susan’s account, money she had no way of repaying. This is a subject that has never come up between us and probably never will. I am not going to ask her about it because I do not want to hear the answer and also because I am afraid.
As it happens, although her medication bills remained high, they lowered considerably once the feds started closing in on Dr. Schmuck. South Florida had become a hotbed of prescription abuse due to the population of vulnerable elderly people and the presence of Rush Limbaugh. The government began cracking down on questionable medical practices, and one week Dr. Schmuck announced to Mom and Sandy that he would be shutting down his practice effective immediately. Before he disappeared to Argentina or wherever quacks fly south to in times of trouble, he did refer Mom to a different pain specialist, who took one look at Mom’s chart and told her she was lucky to be alive. She said Dr. Schmuck had basically turned Mom into a heroin addict, which, while tragic, did give my mother some much-needed street cred. The first step would be to wean her off pain pills, a process the doctor warned would be difficult. To Mom’s surprise, though, quitting the OxyContin gave her no trouble at all, which led to the obvious question: What happened to all the extra pills, and could I have them?
To replace the OxyContin, her new doctor surgically implanted a pain pump, which alleviates the worst of her pain, allowing her to function again. So now, instead of going to Dr. Feelgood every couple of weeks, she visits her new doctor every few months to get her pump refilled with a pupu platter of morphine, Dilaudid, fentanyl, and whatever opiates are on sale at Costco that week. The pain is still there, and her spine is so badly misaligned that when she sits on the electric scooter she now needs to get around, she looks like a question mark. But at least she has enough pain-free moments that life is again tolerable.
(No word on whether or not she says, “Fill it with premium,” when she gets the pain pump refilled, the way I would. I would do this every single time. And it would never, ever get old.)
In the end, I did start giving Mom money because she needs it and I am her son and I love her. And because I felt so fucking guilty. The right thing to do would have been to just offer it, but I didn’t do the right thing. Instead, I waited for her to ask for help, which makes me feel sick every time I think about it, because I know how hard it must have been for her. Once I did start giving, I wanted to be glad to do it, but was not. These are the sorts of thoughts that tumble through the brain when running, and in those moments, it becomes clear that at least half of running’s purpose is trying to run away.
Families are meant to take care of each other, even when it feels unfair. It’s not fair that Mom got sick. It’s not fair that she and Sandy only had a couple healthy years together beforehand. Nor is it fair that Mom couldn’t get on Sandy’s health insurance plan for years because, you know, gay. None of it is fair.
So how do you deal with unfairness? Pain management. We’re all pain management patients in one way or another. My preferred method is pills of any size, shape, or substance. Anything that will alter the way I feel is acceptable, even if I already feel pretty good. In the last couple years, I’ve also taken a small shine to booze, preferably the kind that tastes like something other than booze. For example, there’s now a honey-flavored whiskey that I enjoy because it’s like butterscotch that gets you drunk.
I’ve tried any number of things, pharmaceutical and otherwise, including running and writing this book. None of it works, at least not all the way. But I don’t mind. If anything, I’ve learned to accept most of the bad shit with as much of a shrug as I can muster, because I have so much to be grateful for. Gratitude is the best antidote to pain I have found for every problem, except for slow Internet, which is the worst thing that can befall a human.
Mom manages her own pain with more grace than I would think possible. For all that she has lost, she retains a bright sense of humor. Yes, she has her bad days, but those are far outweighed by the good. Despite being largely confined to her condo, she remains interested in the world outside her window. To keep herself occupied during her days alone, she’s dabbled in watercolors (“Terrible,” she says) and photography (“I have no eye for it”) and lately, she has begun asking me for advice on writing, a pastime she returns to now and again, and about which I have very little constructive advice to offer, especially considering that the book you are now reading is currently a year past its deadline. She makes friends easily: with her doctors, the woman who visits with her from the synagogue, the paramedics who right her when she falls and cannot stand back up. People like her. I like her. And, of course, I worry about losing her.
Chapter Fourteen
Fine, I will save a stupid human life!
I tried to save somebody’s life once. I didn’t know her personally, and if I ever knew her name, I have long since forgotten it. All I knew was that, like me, she was a student at NYU but, unlike me, she needed a bone marrow transplant. The girl had a rare bone marrow type, and they needed to cast as wide a net as possible to find her a match. Volunteers had fanned out across the campus, taping flyers to dormitory bulletin boards, begging students to register with the bone marrow people. I signed up, endured a small bloodletting, and walked away feeling like a hero. Obviously, I would not be a match, but I held my head high knowing I had done everything in my power to save that poor, dying girl. “I am an amazing human being,” I thought to myself. There is no feeling quite so delicious as that of being virtuous without having had to do anything.
So it was with some alarm that I found myself, a couple of weeks later, in my dorm room speaking on the phone with the bone marrow people about the opportunity to save a life. As suspected, I was not a match for the NYU girl. But it turned out I was a potential match for a sickly, middle-aged man somewhere else in the country. Would I like to come in for further testing?
What kind of bullshit bait and switch was this? I’d signed on to save a fellow student, not some random dude. I had no idea that when I enrolled, the bone marrow people would then check my blood for all potential matches. I mean, there must be thousands of people—tens of thousands, perhaps—in need of bone marrow. Now they expected me to be some kind of bone marrow Oskar Schindler?
I hemmed and hawed with the guy. What did further testing involve? More blood tests, he told me. And if those tests matched? A small operation. An operation? Yes. How small an operation? Small. No, it wouldn’t cost me anything. Would I like to come in? Well . . . “Because if you don’t,” he said, “it will be exactly the same as killing somebody.”
(He didn’t say that, but he might as well have.)
Ugh. Fine! FINE, I WILL SAVE A STUPID HUMAN LIFE! I made an appointment at the local hospital for further blood work. When I arrived, the receptionist directed me to the blood lab, located in a windowless tomb miles belowground. There, the technician directed me to a reclining pleather chair and instructed me to “just relax,” as she drew out all of my blood. All of it. She took vial after vial after vial while I stared at a poster warning about sharing needles and communicable diseases. Damn it, I hadn’t checked to see if the needle jutting into my arm looked secondhand or not. “Just one more,” she said, wringing out my veins for any stray platelets she might have missed. Afterward she gave me a cookie, a thimble of orange juice, and a pamphlet about donating bone marrow.
I read the pamphlet on the subway ride home. It informed me that donating bone marrow requires surgery because bone marrow, unsurprisingly, is inside the actual bones. They have to drill down for it, like oil. Surgery requires hospitalization and anes
thesia and recovery time and pain. How much pain? Minor, the pamphlet said. Some “bruising and soreness.” How much is “some”? The pamphlet did not elaborate.
This was all pre-Internet, so I had no way of consulting Yelp for actual reviews of the procedure, but I have since done research and what I read seemed at odds with the “minor” pain promised in the pamphlet. One guy donated bone marrow without anesthesia and said, “It is the worst pain I have ever felt in my life.” Yeah, dummy, because they frack your bones. Somebody else said, “The only things that are supposed to be more painful are a spinal tap and giving birth.” So yes, it’s minor pain when compared to being drawn and quartered.
Back in my dorm room, I struggled with my potential decision: Would I really go through actual surgery for a stranger? Actual painful surgery? All surgery entails a risk, however small, of death. Would I really risk my life? I tried to reason my way out of it. Maybe the guy was a dick. Maybe the guy was a pedophile. I mean, it made sense. Who other than a pedophile would put me out like this? Even as I asked myself these questions, I knew it didn’t matter. If I matched, I would have the operation.
I didn’t match.
Relief followed, but also an unexpected sadness. Without even realizing it, I’d geared myself up to be cut open, my marrow sucked through a silly straw. As crazy as it sounds, I’d almost begun looking forward to it. Surely we are meant to help others. That’s the credo of every religion. Some of those religions even follow their own advice. And while I am not a person of faith, my own ethics demand that, when given the opportunity to help somebody else—even at some cost to myself—the right thing to do is to give that help. I sort of wanted to suffer for this stranger. A little bone drilling seemed an appropriate way to pay off whatever karmic debt I’d accrued. Plus, the pain pills would have been excellent.
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