Page 53 - WTP Vol. X #7

After three days, the Chief Resident came by for a “discharge interview.” He pulled up a chair next to my bed and told me my sodium levels had returned to the normal range, my fever had not returned, I seemed alert, and he was sending me home. I had two questions for him. The first—“What happened to me?”—he answered with a shrug, alarming because I hoped to prevent whatever happened from happen- ing again. “Probably a virus, some kind of bug,” he sighed. Shrugs and sighs, I’ve discovered, are a large part of the discourse about viruses.
My second question was a little harder to articulate. I wanted to talk with him about my experience of this illness. I wasn’t trying to spin a yarn about it or cre- ate an intimacy with him; I was trying to understand what had just happened to me; me, not my blood levels, not my vitals. I said that it felt like I was over- come by a powerful entity that I’d had to struggle against. I said I felt seized by something more power- ful than I, taken up, shaken, and put back down after three days. He frowned and looked at his watch. The hospital was filling with patients, several of them probably with Covid-19, and he had no time to talk with me. I felt a little guilty for being obtuse about that. I thanked him and he left. But I am still wonder- ing at the strange and powerful encounter I had with the unseen, which reached into dimensions of self, areas of my psyche, that seemed at once fearfully strange and strangely familiar.
The uncanny experience, which recurred several times during my illness, began as a taste. I can- not describe it, I can only say that somehow I was remembering it. I felt as if I were someplace in my emotional landscape, someplace that felt, smelled, and tasted familiar, but I could not connect it to a specific memory. Maybe it was a pre-verbal, in- fantile memory. As that taste flattened itself into
a pervasive dread, adrenaline flushed hot through me, my heart raced, and I felt as if I were falling
from a deadly height.
What was terrifying was the feeling that I was not the one doing this remembering but my body, my earthly body, my brain and nervous system, an animal that didn’t need some pathetic self hanging around ask- ing dumb questions all the time. It was happening
to me, but it had absolutely nothing to do with me. I felt something like déjà vu conjoined with panic. I thought I might be dying, that maybe my body was readying itself for death.
Or maybe it was somehow the taste of entering some next phase of my life, the taste of the gap between this biological moment and the next, something like puberty or menopause, however such transitions are measured, a change I wanted desperately to understand and which, because I could not, produced panic.
The Chief Resident’s shrug was just not good enough for me; I had to try to understand what felt like
a profound psychic event. Although I often felt I
was contending with something implacable, other times I perceived myself caught in the middle of
an angry argument between two entities I vaguely remembered, as if I was listening to them from behind a closed door. I couldn’t identify them, not quite: both experiences were familiar to me from sometime in the past but I could not place them. Maybe they were preverbal memories, if they were memories at all.
Certainly it was the argument of my immune system with whatever agent had called it into action. I tried to talk with my doctor about this during my follow- up appointment. Like the hospital physician, he shrugged. But his shrug seemed a gesture of humility. And wonder: ‘The body is a continual miracle of self- regulation,” he said. I liked his shrug better.
I felt I had been visited by a terrifying angel. I be- gan to describe it to friends as being seized and bound and shaken, hard, before whatever entity had taken me into custody finally let me go. One friend rolled his eyes and said, “Oh Christ, don’t go priest on us now!” Another, on the phone, quipped, “Yeah, well, I hear there’s a website now where you can order Lourdes water.” And I laughed, glad to have such friends.
Don’t get me wrong, I am glad, so far as things unseen go, that doctors think more about viruses than angels. And I am even gladder that they admit they know
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