Unfortunately, my few days at Daisy’s were far from joyous. I seemed to be getting worse by the hour, not better. It’s all a bit hazy, but I remember her family were funny and warm people and that their house was beautiful, charming, and very lived-in, in that special way only the Brits seem to know how to do right, and we Americans try desperately to emulate. They also had a darling little guest cottage, which I had all to myself, and almost never left. Daisy came in a few times, once to ask if I’d like to join the family, they were all watching A Christmas Carol.
I wanted to join them, badly. “Which version?”
“The black-and-white one. The oldest one, I think.”
Damn! I love that one. I couldn’t believe that I was in a gorgeous home in the Cotswolds over Christmas and I couldn’t even muster up the energy to lie on a couch and watch a film. Instead, as I’d done since my youth, I escaped by immersing myself in a book.
That worked for the first day, until even reading became impossible because the words began to blur together ominously. I also couldn’t eat. Meaning literally, for two days, I couldn’t put even one bite of food in my mouth. It was awful—I was the ghostly guest from hell.
After a long nap I’d convince myself I felt better, that I was over the hump, that I was starting to feel like “me” again. I’d shower, dress, put on some makeup (Is it the lighting or is my skin really lime green?) and I’d appear, much to almost everyone’s relief and cheer. The exception being the children, who had the good sense to stay as far away as possible from this creepy, silent ghoul. One of them, the two-year-old, would sob inconsolably from the moment I appeared until a few minutes later when I would quietly disappear again. Walking gingerly down the foggy, moonlit path, tears streaming down my hot, lime-green face, I knew why the children were so terrified. My creepy pallor and hollow eyes combined with my silent presence and long black parka made me a dead ringer for the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
Poor Daisy’s mum would bring me broth, but even that I couldn’t manage. This was way more than a lack of appetite. It was as if someone had simply gone into my brain and plucked out the part that allows even a morsel of food to pass one’s lips. I couldn’t even force myself to eat or drink a thing. Normally I’d think this was kinda cool, especially because of my recent discovery that I was a fat, fat fatty-kins, but all I felt was a hollow dread. Finally I decided to put this wonderful family out of their misery, and the morning after Christmas I called a taxi to take me back to London.
We had a matinee the next day, and when I woke up, I was feverish and extra-lethargic. I tried to take a shower yet couldn’t stand up without seeing spots. Sobbing and dripping shampoo, I lay on the bed quivering from coldand fear as it became clear that I had to call Malcolm to tell him I’d have to miss yet another show.
“Get back to ’ospital, right now,” he demanded.
I started crying harder. “No! I don’t want to go back there! Can’t I just go to a private physician and see what he says first?”
“Kristen, you get your bum in a taxi and go to ’ospital immediately, or I’ll come over and drag you there myself.”
I got my bum in a taxi immediately. I can’t put into words the sense of terror and failure I felt as I slowly hobbled into that emergency room again. But as stubborn as I was (am) even I had to concede that I had lost all control of this situation. I also knew that whatever death felt like, this was it. I could feel certain parts inside me shutting down, and I knew I didn’t have long. I was escorted once again to a curtained-off bed in the ER, except this time I wasn’t weeping or screaming. I made no noise at all. I just stared at the ceiling, hating my life and my awful, traitorous body.
I wanted death. I welcomed it. I really did. I couldn’t bear going through this again alone. An ER nurse finally showed up, and this time instead of grilling me for information, she took one look at my face (What, like you’ve never seen a dying lime-green person before?), and within seconds I was being wheeled back into the X-ray room. Except seeing it through death goggles instead of agony goggles, I realized what I thought was an X-ray room was actually a fancy-looking CT and MRI area. This time the head technician was incredibly sweet and gently explained that he needed to do a CT scan of my surgical site, to make sure there was no infection.
I could’ve told him what it took a half hour of frowning and looking at a screen to ascertain: I had an infection and it was a doozy. Still, I wasn’t prepared when, without warning, he cut a hole just below my left rib cage and shoved a tube into me, which immediately began draining—I’m not sure how much, but it looked to me like four or five of those huge Evian bottles—this yellowy-green liquid. The nurses kept taking the full ones away, and a new one would fill up immediately. This all happened in about ten minutes as I lay there, shocked. Shouldn’t I be put under for something like this?
The Evian procedure eventually ended. But the tube remained in me, now draining into a pouch. Fantastic. Another pouch. Now, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I was now savvy enough to comprehend that a tube connected to a pouch meant I wasn’t going anywhere.
I did feel a bit less dead, however. So as they once again wheeled my bed through the eternal white hallways of my old home, I took out my cell and called the director of the play, John Crowley. The nurse at the end of my bed was about to say “no cell phones” until she saw the look on my face and wisely thought better of it. She turned away just as he answered.
“John, I’m so sorry.” I burst into tears as he murmured his sympathies in his comforting Irish lilt. I thought to myself, Get it together, you fucking pussy. Be professional for once in your life.
When I finally managed to sound like I wasn’t crying, I said, “Look, John, the bottom line is, I don’t know how long I’ll be here. It’s a really, really bad infection, it could be weeks.”
“Don’t you worry, we’ll make do—”
“No, listen, John. Really listen, okay? You have to fire me. This isn’t fair to anyone, and I can’t handle the stress of you guys waiting again—”
That’s when he interrupted me. “I’m not firing you, Kristen. I don’t care how long it takes. You’re who I want in this role. Just take your time, get better, and we’ll see you very soon, all right?”
I didn’t know what to say. I was truly thrown by his loyalty and knew I hadn’t earned it. “I, John. . . I’m just so, so sorry about this.”
“Nonsense! Just some bad luck, is all.”
I hung up on him before I began to make crying noises.
As it turns out, he was absolutely right. I was shit out of luck, because at that very moment, I looked up and saw that I was being wheeled directly toward enormous doors marked ST. someone’s public ward.
“No, no, no. Stop, please. Stop!”
I was finally brought to a halt.
“Yes, miss, what is it?” asked the nurse at my feet.
“There must be some mistake. I’m supposed to be in a private room.”
“Yes, well, there are no private rooms available, miss. But you never know, one might open up in the next few days.” Then she winked cheerfully. I hated her.
We entered the crowded ward. Without Mr. Morphine, this was a completely different place. It was loud, overcrowded, and stank of death. And through all of that was the unmistakable stench of loneliness. An old woman was crying out for her son, who I knew would never come. A weeping woman was bent over a still young girl, while her father was fruitlessly begging for her to wake up. “Astrid! Oh, Astrid—” But I knew Astrid would never open her eyes again. Two beds over, Astrid’s teenage boyfriend (the driver) was hoarsely weeping, “It wu’nt me fawt, it wu’nt me fawt” over and over and over.
Hell. I had entered hell. I’d always known I’d end up here, I just didn’t know I’d have to be alive at the same time. I turned my head toward the wall and longed for someone, anyone, to comfort me. I would have given everything I had to be anywhere but this place, in this body.
In the middle of the night, a y
oung nurse tapped me gently. “Miss?” she whispered. “So sorry to wake you, but I’ve got to change your pouch and I didn’t want to give you a fright.”
“Thanks,” I whispered back. After a few moments of silence, I asked, “What’s your name?”
No answer. I looked down below the side of my bed and saw that she had disconnected the full pouch and had gone into a spasm of some sort. That’s when I realized she was dry-heaving. Three, four times. She even made these little ayup noises. I prepared myself for the spray of vomit. But it never came, and a second later she looked up at me, her eyes watering.
“So sorry, miss.”
“No, seriously, I’m sorry. I guess that stuff smells pretty bad, huh?” I asked as she attached a new, fresh pouch.
She smiled, then put her arm on mine and said warmly, “I’ll be quite honest wit’cha. That—” She pointed toward the nasty pouch now safely ensconced in some closed plastic bin. “Smells far, far worse than anything I’ve ever smelled in me life. And I’m including rotting dead people!” She slapped my arm as if to say, Naughty girl!
“Oh, all right. Thanks?”
“You’d be quite welcome. Now, get some sleep, you!” she scolded, as if instead of waking me up, she had caught me doing jumping jacks or guzzling a beer. She chuckled and, shaking her head, picked up the offending bin and hustled away.
You can’t really sleep on a ward. Someone’s always moaning, crying, begging, pissing, or talking in that “nurse whisper,” which is so loud I’m fairly certain they could easily be heard in the cafeteria, four floors down. There is a small amount of privacy, in the form of a white shower curtain. But the curtains are whisked open and shut with such shocking speed that you begin to live in fear of the jarring shliiiisk noise. It begins when your finely tuned ears pick up on the rubbery boing sound of rubber-soled shoes, and suddenly there’s a shliiiisk four beds down. You know it’s at that ancient man with Parkinson’s because he always lets out a terrified yelp. Phew, you think, certain you’re safe, then SHLIIIISK!!! and you almost crap your pants.
I’m not sure how long I spent in the ward but it felt like months. I was given crappy tramadol, and no matter what I said, they wouldn’t give me real painkillers. Apparently, a tube jammed into one’s ribs doesn’t constitute “pain.” Which it really doesn’t, I suppose. But I wanted to scream, What about the pain in my head? Or in my heart? Yet I knew no one would listen; that kind of pain was handled in a very different kind of hospital. The kind that usually involved the word “institution.”
On the third morning, my sexy surgeon Mr. James finally took time off from saving drug addicts’ lives and performing gastric bypasses to visit me. He was, as always, surrounded by his worshipful posse of young-uns, which included the dashing nicotine and model aficionado, Dr. Smythson-Jones.
Because I needed to come off as sane and healthy as possible to earn a rapid release, I burst into tears. They were all used to this by now, and seemed to find my hysterics ridiculous. A few rolled their eyes, and of course, Dr. Smythson-Jones cleared his throat.
Mr. James, however, just looked at me calmly. I loudly blew my nose into a sandpaper sheet a young girl handed me and then nodded at him to say whatever news he’d come to deliver.
“Ms. Johnston, you unfortunately have a very serious infection, and although it’s rather common with the sort of surgery—”
I interrupted him. “Listen, Mr. James, I appreciate all you’ve done for me.” I tried to sound together and healthy despite my noisy sobs. “But you have to understand. I can’t stay here.”
I’ll never forget the look on his face: It was true, real anger. I was so shocked I stopped crying.
“Ms. Johnston. Let me be very clear with you. If you leave this hospital, you will, without question, die. I’m completely serious.”
My face reddened. I’d offended my sexy surgeon. Who does that? I’m an awful person. “Okay.”
He looked relieved and put his expressionless Danielle Steel face back on. “Good.”
I was flooded with relief. “But, sorry, Mr. James? Really, how long will I be here?”
“Until your infection is gone. I don’t really know.” He saw the look on my face and added, “I’m terribly sorry, I know it’s not ideal. But you have no other options, really.”
“I understand.” I wanted them gone. I didn’t want these healthy young creatures staring down at my infected, ruined body any longer. So I turned my face to the wall, closed my eyes, hiccuped, and longed desperately to be other. Think of a time when you were happy, Kristen.
A mishmash of memories bombarded me. Of being cradled on my mother’s lap in a rocking chair when I was three; my sister and I playing endlessly in our attic playroom; the joy of staying at my beloved Aunt Kay and Uncle Robert’s house in Oak Park every summer to take her art classes; feeling so grown-up when I took the train to Chicago by myself at seventeen to audition for NYU; the first boy I kissed outside of a spin-the-bottle game; the day I jumped off the highest rock in a quarry in Vermont; falling head over heels in love for the first time; playing with Beau and Mercy in Connecticut; laughing my ass off with Hickey and Joe on the front lawn of Joe’s house in Sag Harbor; kissing Jimmy Smits at the end of Much Ado About Nothing in Central Park under a full moon.
And finally, there was peace, for a moment.
Until the obese woman in the bed next to me moaned, shat, and then died.
Just a darling li’l reminder that life isn’t perfect.
eleven
PAPILLON
“I accuse you of a wasted life!”—Judge
“Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.”—Papillon
—FROM THE 1973 FILM PAPILLON
i’m convinced that the only people worth knowing are those who’ve had at least one dark night of the soul. Now, a dark night of the soul is completely different from simply having a very bad night. A very bad night might include being stood up, discovering a rather large canker sore on your lip the eve of your wedding, or when someone excitedly asks you when the baby is due.
A dark night of the soul is very, very different. Recovering addicts and alcoholics sometimes refer to this as their “bottom,” but it happens to almost everyone, at some point or another. It’s that life-changing moment when everything you’ve always wanted to become, everything you actually are, and everything you know you’ll never be, all slam into each other with the deadly force of three high-speed trains. It’s the night of your reckoning, the terrifying moment when your mask falls away and you’re forced to see what’s actually been festering underneath it all these years. You finally see who you really are, instead of who you’ve always pretended to be.
My dark night of the soul occurred in a peach-colored hospital room on New Year’s Eve, just as 2006 turned into 2007. I had finally been moved back to the private wing, and when Nurse Wretched saw that I was back in her care, she cleverly pretended we had never met before, which made me love her even more. Because of the holidays, there was only one nurse on duty that night. Who else but she could help me ring in the New Year with such panache?
It seemed that almost all of the private rooms had suddenly emptied. “Goddamnit, Carol, I’m telling you, this damn hernia won’t keep me from partying on New Year’s Eve. Now stop crying, shut up, and wheel me out!” Since New Year’s Eve is, without question, my least favorite holiday, I’ve always been baffled by those who seem to enjoy it. Even when I was a huge lush, New Year’s Eve always seemed like the perfect night to curl up with a good book, a bottle or three of wine, and elegantly pass out by 11:00 p.m.
The only patient besides me in the private wing was a silent, dying woman in the room next door. Every day her daughter kept a faithful bedside vigil. I would see her as she passed my room to get tea or speak to one of the nurses in a hushed, worried tone. The daughter appeared to be in her sixties, so in my imagination, her mother was at least a hundred and five. That afternoon, the quiet was suddenly shattered by terrible screams. “Mum, oh, no, Mum! Please, no,
Mum!” echoed through the halls, and I assumed the old gal had finally croaked. During the ensuing hubhub, as the daughter continued to emit the most heartbroken, awful noises, I remembered the horrible day I’d been admitted to this place and wondered if perhaps some rude nurse would tell her to shut up, so as not to disturb me?
After a long while, all was quiet again as I watched the late-afternoon winter sun slowly fade to dark. From my window I had a stunning view of London, in all its haunting, majestic glory. With the exception of that sunny day, the city was usually shrouded in fog, which matched my mood perfectly. In my new hospital room, the cityscape included a fairly close view of the London Eye, a huge Ferris wheel perched right on the edge of the Thames.
Many months before, the morning I had arrived from New York and was suffering from an intense bout of jet lag, I had aimlessly wandered from my hotel along the Thames. The sun was just beginning to come up when I spotted the Eye, and I promptly decided that riding it would be the perfect (if a bit touristy) thing to do on my first morning there. You know, to get to know the city better. Surely I’d be first in line to ride it. How crowded could it be at 6:15 a.m.? I quickly got my answer when I spotted the line of hundreds of camera-wielding, pamphlet-shaking tourists impatiently waiting for it to open. I hightailed my overtired ass back to the hotel as fast as I could.
Two months later, as a different person, I would endlessly stare at that wheel from my bed as it went around and around and around. It’s almost as if I thought that if I stared long enough, somehow I could become one of those lucky people on it, whose only concern was if she should go to Buckingham Palace or Harrods when she disembarked.
As night began to fall, Nurse Wretched came in to check my p.m. vitals.
“They make you work tonight?”
“Hmm.” She wrote something down.
“That sucks. I bet your boyfriend’s bummed about that, huh?” For weeks I’d been pumping her for some tiny morsel, anything to help me flesh out what I imagined her world to be. Unfortunately, this was one tight-lipped lady, so my imagination was pretty much doing it all. (Here’s where I was so far: A tiny, dingy flat kept ruthlessly tidy. Framed pictures of President Kennedy, Lady Di, and Queen Elizabeth on the wall. A sickly, demanding mum in the back room. Many, many, many cats.)
Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster Page 11