Time on Fire: My Comedy of Terrors (21 page)

At one of the bleakest points during the fever’s sway, after all diagnostic attempts had proven futile by proving nothing at all, I was finally introduced to Dr. Gee.  As in, “Gee, why didn’t anyone think of this before?”

I’d heard about Dr. Gee since I had first arrived at that hospital.  He was known as a “good guy.”  During each stay I made at Sloan-Kettering someone — another patient, a nurse — would ask me, “Do you know Dr. Gee?”  When I’d answer no, they’d say “Oh, too bad.  He’s a really good guy.”  The only reason I hadn’t sought him out as my own physician was that, at the time I was diagnosed, I’d been told he was too busy to take on any more cases.  So when Dr. Melman started fortifying her daily bedside shrugs with a mumbled “Maybe I’ll have Tim Gee stop by to see you,” my ears perked up.  Dr. Melman elaborated over the next few days, adding that Dr. Gee had greater knowledge of leukemia treatment and its complications than anyone else on the staff.  If there was someone who might be able to figure out what was wrong with me, she said, it would be Timothy Gee.

I had become reluctant to have any new doctors examine me.  Besides the fact that they each ordered a series of additional exhausting tests, the examinations themselves were hard to tolerate.  In addition to having the undiagnosed fever, I was also in distress from various more easily identifiable difficulties.  The most painful of these was a severe rectal infection which caused a burning ache to spread out from its fragile epicenter through every nerve in my body.  I didn’t want any more doctors to come see me because, quite simply, it hurt like hell to be touched.

Late one night, in the still hours after the rotting dinner remains had been cleared away, there was a soft knock on my door.  I turned the volume down on the five inch television set that was suspended on a retractable arm over my bed.  If you’ve ever despaired over the lack of watchable television shows being broadcast, you can imagine how that despair deepens into despondency when left alone to pass another feverish night in a hospital room.  Why cable TV stations like Home Box Office haven’t worked out deals with hospitals is a puzzle to me.  I can’t imagine that customers of the medical centers wouldn’t be willing to pay a few dollars more per day to have some additional options when it comes to whiling away long, and often frightening, hours, days, weeks.  And if the cable companies had a drop more foresight, I think they’d find that a donation of their services to hospitals would lead to an increase in subscribers once the patients returned home.

Since the staff member who knocked on a door was an endangered species, and since visiting hours had long since passed, I couldn’t imagine who might be waiting on the other side for my reply .  When an extremely tall Asian man poked his head into the room and asked “Mr. Handler, is it all right if I come in?” I recognized him from the outpatient clinic as Dr. Timothy Gee.  Dr. Gee stood well over six feet tall, although his height was tempered somewhat by a marked stoop in his posture.  With a friendly nod, Dr. Gee walked into the room and around my bed until his physical presence was as deeply committed to the space as was possible.  He pulled up a chair, and he sat down to talk.

Dr. Gee first asked me to tell him what I had been watching on television.  When he heard it was a ballgame, he wanted to know the teams and the score.  Once he knew the score, he was curious as to whom I wanted to win.  Dr. Gee chatted easily with me, in a soothing voice, before moving on to the medical matters at hand.  Even after the transition to business had occurred, I found his demeanor to be exquisitely sensitive to the fact that he had come into the temporary home of another individual.  Dr. Gee explained precisely what type of examination he
hoped
to perform, rather than planned to.  He asked me how I felt about everything he proposed.  Dr. Gee asked me to let him know if there were any areas that I was especially apprehensive about having examined, and he requested that I instruct him as to any ideas that I might have about what was going on inside my body.  In essence, Timothy Gee invited me to participate with him in his investigation.  Not merely to endure it.  Not to make myself scarce while he had a go at my body.  But rather, to allow him to try to help me by joining him in the attempt.  This  cultivated in me an eagerness to reciprocate the level of attention being given to me.  Dr. Gee brought the simple principles of human interaction to his work.  I don’t know if his technique was calculated or intuitive, but he apparently understood that people are more willing to give of themselves to someone with whom they share a relationship, and that the quality of that relationship will determine the level of trust granted to the other.

Once the examination began, the obviousness of the differences between Timothy Gee’s capabilities and the other doctors’ expanded galactically.  I was stunned by the disparity.  When Dr. Gee touched me he was gentle.  And yet, “gentle” is insufficient.  Tender.  That was it.  Dr. Gee touched my body as he might handle something that was delicate and that was precious to him.  There was reverence in his touch.  And humility.  Timothy Gee, from the moment he entered the room, made no assumptions of superiority and held no illusions that asserting it might simplify his assignment.  Dr. Gee practiced medicine as if he were attempting to commune with divinity.  He possessed the humbleness of one who wishes to be granted access to a realm in which there are infinite forces at work, most of them wielding powers much more marvelous than his own.  Ultimately, Dr. Gee had no more success in identifying the source of my fever than anyone else.  But he succeeded in setting a standard that very few medical professionals I had met ever approached.

Even at the time I was aware of the idiocy in the fact that his behavior should be such a revelation, but the evidence was substantial.  Such simple, sensible talent had been a colossal rarity during my stays at Sloan-Kettering.  Not unheard of, but glaringly scarce.  And I wondered why this was.  Why for every Timothy Gee were there twelve Zweigs?  How could thirty nurses whose most distinctive feature was their indifference share duties with the few who were truly dedicated?  And what was it that set the devoted ones apart?  Had the bad ones once been good, and, if so, what was it they had lost along the way?  Inevitably, this imbalance results in the greatest battles being forced on those who wish to do the best work.  Because each extra effort they make becomes an affront to the person who refuses to demand as much from him or herself.  Thus, acceptance of mediocrity is quickly transformed into insistence upon it, and the message is clear for both the staff and patients: cooperate rather than excel.  I have seen the same syndrome demonstrated in every arena I’ve encountered, from education to the entertainment industry.  Even so, I was astonished to find that it was prominently practiced when the stakes were as high as life and death.

Karen, the nurse who had stopped by my bed to terrorize me on one of my first nights in the hospital a couple of years before, continued to visit regularly.  I’d rail on to her about the way the doctors had distanced themselves as soon as they started to feel powerless to help me; or how it seemed like the hospital was designed for either quick recoveries or quick deaths, and that my lingering in limbo was more irritating to them than either one of those options would have been.  I told Karen how I would listen to the doctors outside my room, as they laughed and agreed that since they couldn’t find what was wrong with me, I must be pretending to be sick.  I must want to stay in the hospital, because I was afraid to go home.  When I would tell Karen that maybe I never should have checked into this hospital to begin with, she would say, with the same calm, disinterested tone that I’d come to expect from her, “Yes, well, maybe you shouldn’t have.”

I started dreaming, every night, about executing the entire staff of Sloan-Kettering with a machine gun, all lined up along First Avenue.  I originally had that dream late one night, after, earlier in the day, looking up to find that the drug that had been running into my vein for the last twenty minutes was labeled with the name of another patient on the floor.  A few nights later, I woke up in the middle of that same dream to see Karen, my Florence Nightingale from Hell, silhouetted by the light pouring in from the hallway behind her.  When she saw that I was awake, Karen closed the door to the room and stood silently in the total darkness.  I heard her walk toward me and sit down in the chair next to my bed.

“Do you think you’re getting the right care here, Evan?” Karen asked.  “Do you think you’re going to get well in this hospital?”

I had never even thought to answer one of her questions before.  But that night, I heard my voice before I knew that I had decided to speak.  “No.  No, I don’t.”

“Well,” Karen said.  “Then you won’t.”

I remembered her first words to me two years before:  “Do you think you’re going to die of leukemia, Evan?”   And I realized what Karen had been trying to tell me all along.  In fact, I was able to see that night that Karen, who initially seemed to be the most vicious of all the sadists in the pain palace, was the true life-saver, the guardian angel, of that hospital.  She wasn’t interested in reassurance or inspiration.  Karen’s mission was to get the patient prepared to confront the realities of his or her predicament.  Then she found the patients whom she thought might be saved.  The ones who could look beyond one particular institution for their salvation.  She hunted them down and provoked them.  When they were ready to hear her message, she came to them, secretly, and told them, as she told me that night, “You’re right, Evan.  You’re not going to get what you need here.  Get out.  Get out before it’s too late.”

When the doctors’ faces started to look too much like hungry vultures to me, when they seemed a little too eager to get to that autopsy so they could find out what had been wrong with me all along, I checked myself out of the hospital to live or die on my own.

Well, not completely on my own.  Jackie was there to take care of me.  And when she had to leave the house, other friends would come over to baby-sit.  For me.  I was helpless and couldn’t be left alone.  But slowly, over the third month of its smoldering reign, with a halting regression, the fever began to fade.  Now, my temperature wouldn’t rise above 102 over the course of the day.  That was like a vacation.  I started to consider myself well, and I would load up on Tylenol and go out and try to participate in life.  I could now be left alone at home, and I would relish my privacy, looking forward to Jackie’s departure for an appointment or to see a movie with a friend.  When the daily highs dropped below 101, I started taking my temperature every hour, trying to will the fever out of my system before the leukemia that was chasing me caught up and ended the race for good.

It was well acknowledged, by now, that while Jackie loved me dearly, and wanted my recovery more than anything, my illness had become a severe burden to her.  Her devotion had become tempered, and she had developed a hardness to my suffering, out of deference to her own, which she had never seemed to notice before.  As I prowled around the house one afternoon, while Jackie was out, I poked into the room where she had been spending hours of each day banging on an old typewriter.  There were stacks of pages piled on the desk, but I didn’t need to pry very far to get the gist of what was being written.

On the top of the largest pile of papers was a typed monologue, to be spoken by a woman in her late twenties, who is the lead character in a play.  The monologue was a beautifully written, heart-wrenching explanation by the woman of why she has decided to travel in the west after her boyfriend has died of cancer.  The trip is one that they planned to take together, she relates to a man whom she  meets on the trip, and after her boyfriend’s death all the maps and camping equipment began to arrive in the mail.  The woman in the play goes on to explain his illness, and how it affected their love for each other, with snippets of the life that Jackie and I had been living together for the past two and a half years.

I was discovering two things at once that afternoon.  One was the devastating realization that Jackie had, for some time, been preparing for the possibility of my death.  As I dug further into her fantasies, as represented by the play that she was writing, I could see how deeply she had been exploring her feelings of my loss already — while I had been fighting to remain alive in the next room.  This felt more threatening to me than if I had discovered her having an affair with another man.  That would have been something that I could have perceived as a temporary substitute for my presence.  This felt to me like someone who had already replaced me.  Someone who had come to terms with saying good-bye.

The other thing that was revealed was that Jackie had become one hell of a writer.  Her writing was not only skillful and filled with emotion, but it gave the impression of coming from a writer who possessed a personal power, a strength of spirit, that I hadn’t recognized in Jackie before.  She had undergone a transformation of her own that I had been too preoccupied to notice until now, or that had been purposely hidden from me and revealed only in those pages.  I got my first glimpse of it, in person, when I confronted her about the play.

I told Jackie that I completely understood her need to write it.  I told her that it looked like it would turn out to be a great play.  My only complaint was that I thought it inappropriate for her to be writing it in the home that we shared, where I was still struggling to survive the very illness that she had already sacrificed me to in her fiction.  I explained my discomfort over hearing the typewriter in the next room, knowing that it was her imagined life without me that was being crafted and perfected.

Jackie didn’t bat an eyelash.  Her purpose had become as clear to her as mine had been for me over the last three months.  “Then I’ll have to move out,” she said.

And then she went on, “That’s what I’m doing now.  That’s what I do.  I’m writing that play.  If you want me here, then you’ll have to live with it.  If you can’t stand it, then I’ll have to leave.”