“Or, well,” he said, “not tomorrow, since tomorrow is Fourth of July. We’ll have results back from the lab on Tuesday.”
Okay, I said, and stumbled home. I tried to sleep. My head felt very hot. The voices were still there. I felt vaguely nauseous and couldn’t stop sweating. I was hardly coherent, but I could fake coherency for brief moments. Maybe I’ll feel better tomorrow, I told myself.
My then-girlfriend had been invited to a Fourth of July party, I no longer remember where, with people who were more her friends than mine. I was invited as well, but I didn’t feel up to going. But was it okay if she went? she wanted to know. I didn’t see much point in her staying, and she clearly was eager to go, so I said yes, even encouraged her.
An hour later, I started vomiting. On one level I felt as sick as I’ve ever felt. On another level, I was so sick, so incoherent, so receded from the surface of my body, that it was as if this was happening to someone else. I did not call my girlfriend, though in retrospect it seems that would have been the best thing to do. At least I don’t think I called her—if I did, she didn’t answer. Instead, I lay there, in the bathroom, vomiting, shivering, with a soaring fever. Sometimes I would manage to make it back to the bed for a few minutes, sometimes not. When she came home, I told her I needed to go to the emergency room—or maybe she was the one to make that decision. My memory of it, the way I tell the story to myself now that we are broken up and haven’t spoken in several years, is that it was the first thing I said to her when she walked through the door.
At the emergency room, things sped up in some ways, slowed down in others. If you are not in danger of bleeding out or flatlining, a good part of your time in an emergency room involves waiting in a curtained-off semi-room as things happen around you. The pain in my side was fairly intense now. I was given some sort of painkiller, I no longer remember what. I was given an ultrasound, but at some point was taken away for a CT scan as well. My heart was now beating much faster than it normally did, laboring, and it would not slow down.
I had, I would eventually be told, a serious infection that had led to a collapsed lung. I had had my appendix out at the same hospital eight months earlier and the doctor’s best guess was that a small fragment of infected appendiceal tissue had not been removed from my body. It had floated through my tissues for months before finally attaching to the top of my liver where it had formed an abscess, which had led to a fistula forming in my thoracic cavity and the cavity filling with fluid, which in turn had collapsed the lung.
Early Tuesday morning they sent me off to have the fluid drained. A man with a thick Rhode Island accent and what, because of some cartoon I watched as a kid, I think of as a sanitation worker’s mustache, pushed a needle deep into my back. The needle was connected by a tube to a large jar which rapidly began filling with pus-like fluid. He filled two jars.
I felt better momentarily, until abruptly I didn’t again. Soon I had trouble breathing. By 10:00 am Tuesday morning, they determined that the cavity had filled with fluid again. They sent me off to have an CT scan so that they could better determine what was happening and how to treat it, telling my then-girlfriend I would be away for fifteen or twenty minutes.
My last memory was of lying on a board as a nurse and a technician tried to position me for the scan. A board? Could I really have been on a board? I started shaking and couldn’t stop. And then I became unresponsive and blacked out.
I woke up surrounded by the concerned faces of half a dozen nurses. I was not in the room I had been in, and did not know how I had gotten to where I was. “There you are,” one of them said, which struck me as a strange thing to say. As I began to come conscious and proved myself capable of responding to questions, several of the nurses visibly relaxed. Soon, all but two of them had moved off to other tasks.
Four hours had passed.
Eventually, I was wheeled back to my room. I had to, or rather felt I had to, calm down my distraught girlfriend, who had been told little during my absence, and so I downplayed what had happened. That had, generally, been my role in the relationship—to be the calm one—and I had learned the role well enough to do it almost by rote, even when I was heavily drugged and it was absurd.
I had only been back in the room a few minutes when my cell phone rang. In an effort to prove that I was perfectly fine, that I had not just almost died, I took the call. It was the PA from the clinic.
“Mr. Evenson?” he said.
“Yes?” I said.
“I have the results of your blood test,” he said. “You have a serious infection. You need to go to the hospital immediately.”
“I’m already at the hospital,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “Thank God.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond to this. When he didn’t continue, I didn’t know what else to do but hang up.
A day or two later, a doctor with no bedside manner would make an incision in my side, drive a hard plastic spike through my ribs, and then thread a tube in, connecting it to a machine that would actively draw the fluid from me. When the spike went in, the fluid rushed out and soaked the doctor’s shoes, and my lung suddenly inflated. It was the single most painful thing I’ve ever experienced, and the remainder of my time in the hospital I spent dreading that they would have to drive another spike in. Months later, I was still having nightmares about it.
I was in the hospital for two weeks in all, during which time I lost 22 percent of my body weight. During the first week, I was sick enough and sufficiently sedated to not be focused on what was going on around me. I could not walk to the end of the hall and back without needing to rest. In the second week, though, I gradually became aware that something else was wrong. My girlfriend seemed to be acting strangely. She struck me as reluctant to be there, fidgeted, seemed eager to be gone. Thinking back, I realized she had been like this even before, on the night she went off on her own to the Fourth of July party, probably even before I left for Portugal. When I finally left the hospital on July 18th, I would discover that she had started searching for an apartment and was planning to move out. We tried to patch things back together, but a few weeks later we would break up for good.
All of that contributed to my frame of mind: the most serious illness of my life to date, an impending breakup, a sense of physical frailty, an inability to focus mentally. My girlfriend came to pick me up at the hospital and then seemed angry that they hadn’t released me by the time she arrived. We only lived a few blocks away from the hospital and I remember—I think this is an accurate memory and not instead a memory from when I had my appendix removed (the two illnesses are linked in my mind since one caused the other)—walking back to the house exceptionally slowly, stopping three or four times each block to catch my breath. But perhaps I only walked to the car.1
Once home, I moved slowly, like an old man, to our hallway, and regarded myself in the full-length mirror. I had looked at myself in the mirror in the hospital sometimes, but here, at home, looking into a mirror I had looked into often, I could not help but see how much I had changed. So much so that I had difficulty recognizing myself.
•
Looking at myself in the mirror, I found myself thinking of Raymond Carver’s “The Father,” from his 1976 story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? I hadn’t read that story in probably two decades. And yet, looking over it just a few months ago as I began to work on this book, I discovered that despite the time that had passed, I remembered it almost perfectly.
It’s a short piece, just two pages, more of an anecdote than a story. In it, a family sits around a new baby, engaged in the familiar ritual of attributing parts of the baby to the family member they most resemble. But each time one of them says the baby has someone’s toes, or lips or eyes, the others remain unsatisfied, feeling what has been said isn’t quite right. Until the baby’s sister says, “I know! I know! He looks like Daddy!”
“But