The following day I was thrilled to wake up in the morning having slept for a full night and no emergency room trip. I felt rested, the itching and the pain were things of the past now, and I was already getting used to the numbness in my left arm.
My mother and I returned to the Milton Hospital for the fourth time in three days. We checked in for my appointment with my mother’s neurologist and sat down in the waiting room. The room had a television hung from the ceiling tuned to a news channel. As we sat down, we heard “Milton Hospital” from the TV. My first thought was that maybe it was some internal channel delivering hospital information, but then I recognized the local anchors. The story was about a Milton Hospital doctor who, during a recent operation, had left a surgical sponge inside their patient and stitched her back up. The mistake was not discovered until a week later when the patient was not recovering “as quickly as hoped.” A sponge in your abdomen can do that. I pictured a bright yellow Cell-O sponge, green scrubber side and all, showing up on the x-ray. The story continued to explore, branching out into gross exaggeration, as most news stories do, about the general quality of all small suburban hospitals. Apparently the size of the hospital and the number of Volvo station wagons in the parking lot has a direct correlation to your physician’s likelihood of leaving a sponge in your stomach. It was definitely odd sitting in the waiting room of the aforementioned facility waiting for your own appointment. Everyone in the room was looking around to see if the news would prompt anyone to get up and leave. No one did.
I was called and the doctor first greeted my Mom, as they were well acquainted, and then introduced himself to me. He continued small talk with my Mom as we went down the hallway and into his office. “Please have a seat,” he said. We sat in the two chairs in front of his desk, my Mom on the right and me on the left. The doctor sat and opened a very thin manila folder, looked straight at me, and said “You have MS.” And then he looked at my Mom.
“What?” I said. With absolutely nothing else going through my head.
“What?” my Mom said, in quick succession.
And there was a good long silence during which the doctor just donned his best reassuring, but concerned, doctor smile, glancing back and forth between the two of us.
I had nothing to add to the “What?”
Finally, the doctor said, “This comes as as much of a surprise to me as it does to you.” I doubt that. “We were looking for something along the lines of a pinched nerve, as we told you. The MRI clearly indicates MS.”
“What?” I said again. I never even considered anything of any more magnitude than a pinched nerve. I never considered MS. I should not have considered MS. I know MS. My mother has MS. She has never had intense shoulder pain. I wanted the pinched nerve that I came in for. Was he insane? Maybe he was the guy who left the sponge.
I can only suppose that the doctor kept talking. It would have been delinquent of him to have not given me some additional information or words of solace. He, of course, knew my mother had MS and that she and I knew the details and implications of the disease. But clearly not enough to have both walked into this so completely blindly. If he was speaking, I don’t remember a thing. I had stopped stared at the doctor and was staring at my mom. I could tell her shock was genuine as well. Even with the family history, this had never crossed our minds. She wanted the pinched nerve, too.
Eventually, I recall the doctor saying to us a rhetorical, “So, what’s next?,” and answering himself, ”I would like to start you on intensive IV steroid treatment right away. I can bring you downstairs and get you set up for the first dose immediately. You will then come in tomorrow and the next day, each time for a 90-minute treatment. Okay? I will follow up with you a few days after the treatment ends. Sound good?”
“What?”
I’m sure that he said more and I am sure that my mother was now speaking to him with nervous energy. But I felt frozen in time. I had lost all context and seemed to belong no more to the world I came from before I had entered his office than I did to the world as it appeared as I exited.
I ended up somehow in a large ER triage type hospital/warehouse space with lots of beds and lots of nurses and many patients. There was more activity in the room than I had ever seen in a real hospital, much more like a television ER, although no gurneys rushed by with doctors straddling patients or thumping on chests. As some semblance of consciousness started to return to me, I began to take in that I was on a hospital bed myself, the first one at the start of the long line of beds in the big room, and an IV line had already been attached to the topside of my right hand, and secured with white medical tape. The IV stand and a bag of clear liquid stood to my right, slow bubbles rising up in the bag. There were several other people in predicaments similar looking to my own, but they all seemed to have come to their awareness of their surroundings much earlier. Some were reading, some were talking to friends or family seated next to them. A few others were asleep in their beds on the far right side of the room. Or they were dead.
I suddenly was aware that my right hand was throbbing at the site of the needle. I winced. I can’t explain how, but I knew that I had been in this pain all along and was only just now letting it register. A nurse off to the side saw me wince and came over quickly. She was talking about the IV needle and was placing a heating pad on top of my hand to help ease the pain. She was very nice and concerned and smiley, all good qualities in a nurse.
She pulled a chart out from somewhere behind me and started making a few notes. She asked “When is your birthday?”
“11-7-68,” I said in monotone.
“November 7th … today? Today is your birthday?” and her smile turned from comforting to unqualified disbelief and then unabashed sympathy.
And with that I burst into tears. The tears came a split second before the full meaning of the day hit me. The tears poured down my face and onto my chest. My breath began coming out in stilted bursts. Today was my birthday, and I had MS.
The thoughts that began to stream were furious and irrational and yet the most real that any thoughts had ever felt, for they struck out from my very core, where I rarely cared to look. They struck without filter of reason or knowledge or propriety. They were raw and base.
I will be alone forever. No one will love me now, no one will fall in love with me ever again. I felt right then, with a certainty that was for all time, the emptiness of never being married, never having children, never writing a book, or growing old. I felt the terror of being over.
The one thing that slowly brought me back out of myself was the look on the kind nurse’s face. I could suddenly see that she felt a great deal of responsibility for my flood of tears, being that she was, after all, the one who had asked me for my date of birth. I thought it might be a while before she asked that so nonchalantly again, and I made myself grin through the tears. I pulled myself out from somewhere inside, and I gave her a reassuring smile. Not much, but enough to let her, and me, know that I was not lost yet.
Going home that evening with my Mom was routine, considering. We drove home from the hospital discussing the usual manner of daily fluff: dinner plans, my brother’s exploits, my grandmother’s gossip, my grandfather’s latest witticisms. Everything but.
We made dinner together and my father came home at 6:25 as he did. He greeted us each, made some snide, joking comment about my cooking ability, left his briefcase on the dining room table, and hung his overcoat in the closet. I didn’t even have to see the last two steps. It was what he had done, always. I heard his footsteps up the stairs, down the hall to my parents’ bedroom, then quiet (as he undressed), and then footsteps back down the hall and the sound of the shower starting up directly above the kitchen. As we were setting the table my father returned to the kitchen wearing his casual after-work clothes. A short-sleeve polo type shirt in slightly too bright a color for him and some casual men’s pants in that indeterminate “neutral” color, khaki/beige/tan.
He pulled the Ritz crackers from the cabinet and some extra-sharp Cracker Barrel cheddar cheese from the fridge and started to munch before he spoke. “Hi, girls.” And after his third cracker for himself, he handed me a cheese and cracker and gave me a peck on the cheek, “Hi, sweetie. How are you feeling?”
“Fine.”
Mom and I finished putting dinner on the table and we all sat down. For years, at the small square table in our kitchen by the bay window, my father sat at the left end, my mother at the right, and my brother and I side by side facing the window. I still remember a period of several months, some years ago, when the table was moved to the center of the room, with no explanation. For almost a year, we ate in that new arrangement, totally unsure why, and were at the same time suddenly allowed to watch television during dinner, as my brother and I now faced the kitchen counter with the tiny TV on it. We were allowed to watch “Laverne and Shirley” or “Sha-na-na” only. That was actually my father’s rule. Except, of course, if the Olympics were on, or some news show that my father deemed “critical,” or some non-news show that my father deemed “critical”, which one time was “Benny Hill.” At some point, just as mysteriously, the table returned to it’s wall-window position, and the no TV during dinner policy returned as well.
“Kate had her doctor’s appointment today.” Thanks, Mom.
“Yeah? How’d it go?” my father asked.
I just said it. “I have MS.” My lips quivered a bit as I did. It was the first time I’d said it out loud. I had thought perhaps that my mother had told him already. She always relayed information to my father, whether you wanted her to or not, like when I first got my period and I came down to the living room where my father was and he said to me “Hi, sweetie,” in such a goofy and sickly-sweet way that I knew instantly that he knew.
But I could tell from his reaction this time that he did not know. And I felt sorry for him. I knew what a shock it was out of the blue like this. I remember his exact words. “You’re kidding.” That described it best. It did sound like a joke. I mean, my shoulder did really hurt, it “killed wicked bad” as we say in Boston. But MS? “Really?” he said. And we discussed the details of the visit and the fact that I had to go back to the hospital for two more days of IV steroid drips. And throughout the conversation, an occasional “I don’t believe it” would pop out. Disbelief would prevail for a while for us all.
