Prognosis

by Vallance, Sarah

Around one month after we had settled in DC, a dinner was organized for the Harkness fellows at a hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, and I was seated next to a woman who headed up the Visiting Nurse Association in New York. Her name was Amy, and I liked her almost instantly.

  “How are things coming along with your research?” she asked.

  “Not great,” I said. “I haven’t come up with a topic yet.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, looking concerned.

  “It’s my own fault.”

  We talked a bit more, and she asked if everything was okay.

  “This sounds ridiculous,” I admitted, “but I’m scared of my mentor.”

  “That’s not good,” she said. “You have a whole year here.”

  “I know,” I said, feeling pathetic.

  “A good friend of mine is a professor in the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard,” Amy said. “She’s a lovely woman and very approachable. I’m sure she would be happy to take you on. I can get in touch with her and ask. You can’t waste a year with someone you don’t like.”

  Later that evening, I talked to Laura about the possibility of us moving to Boston. She was ecstatic.

  “I can switch across to Harvard and finish my coursework. That would look better on my CV. Let’s do it!” she said, hugging me. “It’s going to be fun!”

  I woke the next morning to find an email from Amy telling me that the Harvard professor had agreed to mentor me. My mood shifted almost instantly.

  My new mentor was warm, sharp, funny, and kind, all of which I gathered from our first fifteen-minute phone call. She was polite enough to say she would be thrilled to mentor me. I explained that I really hadn’t made any progress, that I needed to find a new research topic, and she assured me not to worry. She had a couple of ideas that might be of interest.

  I called the program coordinator at the Commonwealth Fund to tell her the news. She wasn’t happy. Switching mentors presented an awkward and unprecedented situation. “What about all the trouble your Georgetown mentor has gone to?” I explained that I had only met my mentor twice and that on the second meeting she couldn’t see me because I had apparently made a mistake with the date. I tried to be as polite about her as I could, but I made it clear we had got off to a poor start. When I mentioned the name of the dinner guest who had set things in motion with the professor at Harvard, the tone of our conversation changed.

  “Alright,” the woman from the Commonwealth Fund finally conceded. “Let’s see what can be done.”

  People needed to be talked to, and agreements made. Then I needed to ring my Georgetown mentor and explain why I didn’t want to work with her. I had wasted the first six weeks of the fellowship, and I couldn’t afford to waste any more time. I wrote down exactly what I needed to tell her, counted to ten, and picked up the phone. She was cold and aloof, and I was relieved that I would never have to see her again.

  Laura and I bequeathed our front-row tickets for Gladys Knight and the Pips to my friend in the State Department and bought tickets instead for a train to Boston that weekend. Our departure from DC happened to coincide with the end of the Promise Keepers rally, in which one million Evangelical Christian men had gathered to keep their promise to the Lord, stay faithful to their wives, and tend to their children. The whole experience was creepy. Union Station heaved with men, heads bowed, holding hands, spreading the Lord’s word. It was an odd spectacle for an Australian: a giant gathering of men where no one was drunk, vomiting, smashing beer bottles over people’s heads, or urinating in the street. I wondered what was worse: a cheating husband or a man who enjoyed events like this.

  Our train car was packed with Promise Keepers going home after the rally. One of them strummed a guitar while the others sang. It was a long nine-hour ride, but we were going to Harvard!

  The first thing we did in Boston was visit Filene’s Basement, where we purchased some of the ugliest, most affordable cold-weather clothing we had ever seen. We had lost a lot of money breaking our lease in DC, and rents in Boston were even higher. In her bright-green ski jacket, Laura looked like a cross between the Michelin woman and a giant toadstool. I resembled Joseph in his amazing technicolor dreamcoat in a fluorescent-green jacket with purple-and-red trim around the collar and sleeves. At least I would not have to worry about crossing the street at night in that coat. We looked absurd—two grown women wearing coats favored by small children—but we consoled ourselves with the fact that we were warm. The night before, a homeless man had frozen to death in Boston Common.

  We spent a day walking around campus in our bright new coats. The Harvard students dressed in the uniform of the wealthy and privileged: black overcoats and occasionally muted tones of brown, any color reserved for scarves and mittens and their rosy upper-middle-class cheeks.

  “Harvard attracts millions of badly dressed tourists each year,” I told Laura, watching her cringe as we explored the campus. “On the balance of probability, some of them will look even worse than we do. So let’s not worry about looking conspicuous. In any case, would you even want to be mistaken for one of these Harvard students?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  There was a bit too much Ralph Lauren on campus for my liking. I was happy with my practical winter coat, and I enjoyed flaunting it around.

  In Harvard Yard, Laura fumbled inside her pocket and produced an old camera loaded with black-and-white film.

  “That’s the answer!” I said. “Let’s use that camera for all our winter photos! No one will ever see our coats!” We each took turns standing in front of the John Harvard statue and took photos. It was incredible to think that I was at Harvard. On a scholarship. I squeezed Laura’s hand to make sure I wasn’t dreaming.

  She hugged me.

  “How did we end up here?” I asked her.

  “I have no idea, but we did!”

  We walked across to the Coop later that day and bought a Harvard collar and leash to send home for George.

  Laura’s charm garnered us an invitation to stay at another fellow’s apartment in Cambridge until we found a place of our own. We had arrived at a bad time of year for real estate, and the only available apartments in our price range looked like the crack dens we’d seen in DC. After a week of looking at all manner of hideous, windowless, roach-infested apartments, we realized we couldn’t afford to live in Cambridge or Boston. We set our sights on Somerville, the slightly rough-around-the-edges town that borders Cambridge to the north, and we liked the first apartment we saw there. It was the only residence on the street that didn’t have a PebbleCrete front garden filled with statues of angels and garden gnomes. Better still, we liked the landlord. I let Laura deal with him. He seemed to like her, and she liked him until he told her he had a passion for collecting guns. American men liked Laura. No one looked twice at me, apart from a chihuahua in a trinket shop on Commonwealth Avenue that stared me down from his velvet bed on the shop counter before lunging and clamping his jaws down over my hand.

  My mother emailed us days after we moved into our apartment. She had experienced twenty-four hours of hell with George when a thunderstorm hit while she was at work. When she returned home, she found a broken window and no George. George, it turned out, had leapt straight through a glass window—but not just any glass window. He chose the lounge room window above the garage, where the drop to the ground was more than twenty feet and the ground below was concrete. George’s hair and blood were stuck to what remained of the windowpane. My mother wrote that she left a frantic message on her answering machine: “If you’re calling about a brown kelpie called George, please leave your name and number and I will call you as soon as I get back from looking for him. Thank you.”

  She drove around the neighborhood, past George’s favorite haunts—the back of the Pizza Hut, the back of KFC down the road. George had mates there who snuck food out to him, or so my mother believed. She had found him there before, too tired to walk home, his belly the size of a soccer ball. It horrified me
to think that my mother let George roam the streets; I never let him out of my sight. My mother said that as the rain got harder and there was no sign of George, she went home and found a message from a woman at a childcare center about a mile away who had found George.

  My mother hopped back into her car and raced over a railway line, over the six-lane Pacific Highway. It was a miracle George crossed either without being killed. She pulled up outside the childcare center to find a pretty blonde woman sitting on the front step with her arm around George. Then my mother had to endure the indignity of tugging George by the leash to get him to leave his new girlfriend. Eventually the woman coaxed George into my mother’s car. The email ended with: The glazier just left. $300 for a new window.

  My instinct was to take the next flight home. Laura promised me that would not be necessary.

  “We’ll buy your mother a nice thank-you present and post it to her. Today,” she said. And without further discussion, Laura went into Boston that afternoon and bought my mother a scarf. She mailed it with a thank-you note she signed from both of us.

  I met my new mentor, Liz, in her office at the Department of Social Medicine. There are highly intelligent people, like my Georgetown mentor, who make no secret of their intellectual superiority. And there are highly intelligent people like my Harvard mentor—humble, generous, and kind—with no need whatsoever to assert their superiority over anyone. Five or so years older than me, slight, and dark haired, Liz had two young kids and a husband who worked as a management consultant.

  In one of our earliest conversations Liz told me that she struggled with depression. I wanted to leap up from my chair and hug her for her candor. The fact that she also happened to be one of the smartest people I had ever met left me in awe of her. My new mentor spoke to me like a friend, a confidant. But she also illuminated all of my intellectual anxieties, and I worried that in befriending her, I would let her down. I wasn’t ready to be honest about my own struggles with anyone other than Laura.

  On the way out from her office, I spotted a flyer on a communal table that listed volunteering opportunities for Harvard students. A charity called Little Brothers–Friends of the Elderly needed volunteers to spend time with low-income elders. I scribbled down the name and contact number of the person who managed the volunteering program and called her later that day. I had always liked old people, and better still, most of the old people I had known throughout my life had seemed to like me too. My happiest childhood memories involved my grandmother. After she died I befriended an elderly neighbor who was bedridden with asthma. I used to drop by after school and sit with her and hold her hand while she wheezed. She loved to listen to my stories about school—stories I embellished because my school life was so dull. When she died I found another elderly neighbor to visit. I may have been a terrible candidate for a Harkness Fellowship, but I was the perfect volunteer for the elderly.

  I contacted Little Brothers, and after attending an interview and submitting to a police check, I was matched with three very poor elderly women. I set up meetings with them almost immediately. Liz put me in touch with a couple of other research students who were working with her, and I slowly began to learn about the issues confronting the poor elderly population in Massachusetts.

  All of Liz’s students raved about how lovely and supportive she was, and all the glowing tributes turned out to be true. Thanks largely to Liz, I was enthusiastic about my time at Harvard and my research project, even though I had still not chosen a topic. It was liberating to be able to study something unrelated to my PhD. I knew that if I kept my research topic simple, I would be able to deliver something that would be acceptable both to Liz and to the Commonwealth Fund. My job in aged care turned out to have been a blessing. I had already spent around eighteen months writing research papers.

  From one of Liz’s students, I learned about a foster care program, through which the government of Massachusetts paid a weekly stipend to people who offered a room in their house to poor elders. The idea struck me as extraordinary. Few things seemed worse than being consigned to a nursing home, but the idea of moving into a house with strangers and being dependent upon them for care and food seemed fraught with danger. I decided that my research topic would be to determine the effectiveness of this rather odd program. Liz seemed to like the idea, so I set up a series of meetings with the people who established the program and the people who oversaw it, and they put me in touch with a number of families who “fostered” an old person through the program and agreed to let me visit them. Out of curiosity, I asked the three women I volunteered with how they would feel about moving into a stranger’s home. They reacted with horror. “I’d rather die now,” one of them said.

  I formed a close friendship with one of the elderly women whom Little Brothers had matched me with. Constance Bailey was an eighty-eight-year-old African American woman with no friends or family. Once we got to know each other, I visited her almost daily and soon came to think of her as family, the family I wished I had had. Connie’s life had been tragic, yet somehow she had emerged from all the trauma with the ability to laugh. She was funny and kind, and she loved animals more than people. She told me she had never had a friendship like ours before, and I felt the same. I loved Connie in a way I had never loved anyone but my father, and I saw myself in her. When it would finally come time to return home, she would be the person I missed most, the indisputable highlight of my time at Harvard, and my fondest memory of my year in America.

  Worried I had wasted the first six weeks of the fellowship, I had started my research as soon as Liz agreed to my new topic. I worked hard, doing everything I could to finish the interviews and allow myself a lot of time to write up my findings. Flying by the seat of my pants might have worked for me when my brain was healthy, but I knew it wasn’t going to work this time. The other fellows were not only considerably smarter than me but also a lot more ambitious. I told myself I would have to work around one hundred times harder than they did to pull off a reasonable piece of research.

  The second half of my year at Harvard took an unfortunate turn when I was taken to the hospital in Cambridge early one morning with chest pains. After a night in intensive care and a day of tests, my results came back: borderline positive for tuberculosis. The doctor ordered a lung X-ray and noticed calcification on my left lung; I was sure it was a result of a bad case of pneumonia I had had in my late twenties, but he was having none of it. He thought I may have picked up TB during a visit to the Philippines.

  “The law in Massachusetts requires every person who tests positive to undergo a course of medication that ensures the disease does not return,” he said. “If it comes back, there’s a ninety percent chance it will kill you.”

  “Can’t we wait till then?” I asked.

  I visited a TB clinic around the corner from our home in Somerville and left with an armful of pills. A lovely nurse from Haiti told me I had to take the medication each day for one year.

  “You aren’t infectious, so no need to worry about spreading it around, but during the year, you can’t drink alcohol,” she said.

  “No alcohol for a year?”

  “That’s right.”

  I did not want to even contemplate the prospect of a year without alcohol.

  Isoniazid is a highly powerful drug that can lead, in a tiny number of cases, to chemically induced hepatitis. Within weeks on the medication, I fell ill, and blood tests revealed I was one of the tiny number of cases. It seemed to me that I was one of the unluckiest people on earth. Not only was I still struggling with the aftereffects of a brain injury, I had been struck down by hepatitis. Physically, I felt terrible. Emotionally, I felt almost as bad.

  By the time I got sick, I had managed to conduct most of my interviews and to consult all the relevant publications for my research paper. The interviews had gone well, and I had been able to concentrate for the allotted time and to ask most of the relevant follow-up questions. I had also managed to improve my note-taking and c
ould, for the most part, decipher my own handwriting. None of the people I interviewed would have imagined that I had suffered a traumatic brain injury three or so years earlier. I hoped not, anyway.

  As soon as I felt stronger, I started to write up my research. My conclusion was the concern I had had from the start: that paying people to open up their homes to elderly people was fraught with risk. Without thorough screening of families and frequent follow-up checks, the opportunity for abuse seemed to outweigh the benefits. I managed to cobble together a draft of my paper to send to Liz. She made some suggestions, and after a couple of follow-up calls, I was able to finalize my presentation.

  Somehow, I managed to present my research paper to the panel of professors assembled by the Commonwealth Fund and the other research fellows. I can say with absolute certainty that mine was the lamest presentation by a country mile. But thanks to Liz, who stepped up to help answer questions from the audience, and a beta-blocker that helped control my anxiety, the presentation passed without humiliation.

  Lying in bed one morning, I heard a letter drop through the slit in our front door. The envelope was from the University of Sydney, and I opened it eagerly. My eyes scanned the page and stopped at a sentence that said I needed to rewrite a chapter of my dissertation in order to graduate. The examiners actually had read my second case study, after all. I crawled back into bed and pulled the covers up over my head.

  9

  ANGER IS A (NOT SO) SHORT MADNESS HORACE (EPISTLES BOOK 1) (WITH A SLIGHT MODIFICATION)

  After more than a year in America, Laura and I returned to Sydney in September 1998. We loved America, and Laura wanted to stay forever. But while the time away from home had given me fleeting moments of joy and freedom, I had spent the majority of my time in America peering over the giant chip on my shoulder, waiting for someone to expose me for the idiot I was. The facade of trying to appear something other than moronic had exhausted me.