Expiration Dates: A Novel (12 page)

Tae, two years and two months.

Tae and I met my junior year of college, on a boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We had both signed up for this orientation-at-sea thing, where you sailed out to Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California, and spent the day there. It was part of a marine biology prerequisite, which I definitely was not majoring in, but it seemed like a nice excuse to get off campus.

Tae was not impressed. He was premed, barreling toward Stanford medical school, and did not have time for any unfocused hours on the ocean.

When I first encountered him, he was arguing with the TA on the boat. “I thought this was a biology dive. Do you mean to tell me we're sailing to Catalina for
recreation?
” He made the word sound dirty.

The TA, her name was Kensington—I remember because
everyone called her Kenny, like the
South Park
character—told Tae that the trip was educational in nature and necessary to pass the pre-req biology class, which he was taking.

Tae grumbled into a life jacket.

There were maybe twelve students on the boat, all in. While everyone gathered inside and toward the back to add vodka from their book bags into their lemonade, I sat in the front. Boats always make me nauseous—something I'd forgotten.

Tae came up to me and held out a towel. “This seat taken?”

I gestured next to me; he spread the towel, and sat.

“Pinch the spot between your thumb and forefinger,” he said, without looking at me.

“What?”

“You're seasick; it helps.” He gestured to me with his own hand. I tried on mine.

“Here,” he said. He took my hand in his and pressed down on the pad of my thumb. There was a sensation of sharp pain, like a spasm, and then I felt the pressure shift slightly out of my abdomen.

“That actually works.”

“Indeed,” he said, still holding my hand. He kept his thumb pressed on mine, more or less, until we got to the island.

Tae was direct. He'd grown up in a home with immigrant parents, who were both doctors themselves. He didn't have a lot of time for conjecture, or frivolity. He loved science—the cold, hard facts of life. He was passionate about the environment—encouraging me to recycle, refusing to get coffee to go, unless he had his stainless steel cup. I drew the line at composting in my campus apartment—or my roommate did.

“This isn't a commune,” she'd said when Tae brought over a plastic bin and chucked a banana peel inside.

He was witty, too. His exacting nature translated to his thoughts. And he was dazzlingly handsome—tall, lean, with just the right amount of musculature and a face that was so symmetrical I used to joke with him that he came out of a test tube. His physical perfections would have been grating if it weren't offset by his severity, his humor, his beautiful and dogmatic way of looking at the world.

After the Catalina trip we began hanging out, as friends, at the medical school library. Tae lived in a shitty student house that was basically a stone's throw from his classes. If I wanted to find Tae, I knew where to look. He was either at the grad library, or in the lab. And if neither of those were true, he was home, sleeping.

I liked school—I liked the structure of it; I thrived off the predictable rhythm and pace. The energy. I also loved that I could schedule classes only after 11:00 a.m.

The medical school had the best rooms for quiet study—the library was always crowded and too loud, despite the silence rule. There was just too much foot traffic, too many students who came and went frequently. But in the medical school, if you were studying, you were studying for
hours.

It was the following weekend, Friday night. It was sorority and fraternity rush—the week all the houses on campus picked their new recruits for the year. Very few medical students entered the Greek system—there just wasn't enough time—but still, the library was less than at capacity.

I asked Tae a question about our course. I wasn't understanding genetic engineering.

“What is a vector used for?” I whispered to Tae.

He thumbed his notebook and then handed it to me.
A vector is used to transfer genetic material into a host organism.

I copied some notes down, and studied a bullet-pointed infographic at the bottom of the page.

And that's when I felt it. Like a fire, right across my chest.

I remember Tae turning to me, at first annoyed, maybe, that some sudden movement or sound had interrupted his flow. Then his face changed to one of concern and then something else, something I'd rarely if ever seen directed at me, not since I'd fallen off the monkey bars and broke my arm in the second grade. Fear.

The pain didn't move, but it spread, and then it began to feel like I was suffocating, like I could not possibly figure out how to take a next breath. Tae called an ambulance. They gave me CPR in the back. They used a defibrillator. In three minutes, we were at the hospital.

They ran a lot of tests. At some point my parents showed up. I lost consciousness or was put under and then woke, and when I did, there was a team of doctors gathered in my room. I remember thinking it looked like a television show—the mix of color-coded scrubs, my father with his coffee, my mother in her glasses. Tae now somehow caught in our family drama. They couldn't have staged it better.

And that was when they told me. The thing I must now share. The truth I've been avoiding. There is not just one box under my bed, there are two. One measures my life in names and units of time, the other in milligrams.

This is a box filled with prescription notes, with complex words like
nitroglycerin
and
captopril
scrawled underneath a
hospital insignia. There are bottles of aspirin, cholesterol medication, and diuretics, which help rid the body of sodium and water. There are lifestyle recommendations, the limits of my physical activity, no salt. There are logs of hospital stays and procedures. I even have a different name, here. In this box I am the Patient.

The truth is hard. It's complicated. It does not always follow a simple structure. It is not always convenient. That's why sometimes we do our best to leave it out of the story for as long as possible. We choose to let it linger in the corners, we don't spotlight it. But eventually, it catches up to us. Of course it does.

You can run but you can't hide.

The doctors use complicated medical jargon, words and phrases it will take me weeks to properly understand or pronounce. They tell me I have what's called congenital heart disease, which I learn is really a catch-all for
something is seriously wrong with your heart.
It's been there since birth but undetected until now. They tell me I had an SCA or a sudden cardiac arrest. They tell me it's not a heart attack—it's actually much worse. My heart stopped beating. It's a miracle I survived, few ever do.

Then they get around to it—after the caveats and the complicated phrasing—they tell me my heart is failing.

“
Why?
” my mother asks.

I am a runner, I'm twenty-one years old. I have a full social life. I party a lot and I sleep little. How can my heart be failing? It's barely even begun.

A genetic defect. No one knows why or how it happened. Neither of my parents have it, they test them.

“An anomaly,” the doctors say. Unexplainable.

From in my bed, the machines beeping, I let out a laugh. Because of course. What, did I think there was no reason? Did I think the universe didn't want something from me in return?

I have information you don't
, I thought often. From that hospital room I could almost hear the cosmic whisper:
So do I.

They told me they'd categorize my whole situation as stage two. They did not immediately tell me how many numbers there were. It will get worse, maybe even quickly, no one knows when, but it can move in only one direction. If you get to four (the final, I found out) sometimes patients need a heart transplant—but that was no picnic and these doctors, they wanted me to know that. Patients didn't always make the list, the older and sicker they got, the harder it was, sometimes their bodies rejected the hearts, the anti-rejection medications could cause cancer—the problems went on.

My mother began to cry, my father looked like he could not remember where he'd left his keys.

Their words sounded like an avalanche—they just kept falling, burying the life I had known, had thought I knew, was maybe even planning. Limited activity, lifestyle modifications, medications, surgeries. Likely no pregnancy. The lists of all the ways in which my life would not look like everyone else's. All the ways I now had to hold my breath, to prepare, to inhale and inhale and inhale only.

From twenty-one to twenty-three I was in and out of the hospital. I began a cocktail of medications—trial and error and error again. There were procedures, surgeries. I had an ICD pacemaker inserted. I stopped playing soccer.

Tae stayed with me through it all—until we found some stability, some combination of milligrams and devices that worked, that has worked, up until now. We didn't break up because of my failing heart or the fact that I had to graduate remotely or the reality that Tae was in medical school in San Francisco. No, we broke up because of shitty cell service.

When I was in the hospital, Tae would come and study. He was concerned for me, but I also think he liked being in the trenches, so to speak. While other medical students were reading stories like mine in textbooks, Tae was in the hospital, getting to know the doctors, seeing things firsthand. He'd read my test results, sit in on meetings with the team. I was his lived education.

“You didn't call me,” he said. It was a Friday. I'd been home for three weeks. We were in my bedroom, and Tae was spending the weekend with me. I remember thinking it felt almost normal. Just a twentysomething boyfriend and girlfriend trying to figure out how they were going to spend Saturday. At her parents' house, but still.

These last few months had been better. I was even thinking about getting an internship for the summer—trying to salvage what might remain of my postgraduate life, two years later. While my friends had moved on to shitty entry-level jobs climbing the corporate ladder, or grad school, or traveling the world, I'd been locked in a time warp that had brought me directly back to childhood—but with none of the play and all of the rules. At a moment where I was supposed to be experiencing so much independence—
congratulations, graduates
—I was now more reliant on my parents than I'd been since I was five years old. After surgery my mother fed me and often bathed me, my father ran
my errands—the pharmacy, Macy's for a new neck pillow, battery replacements, ice cream. They tucked me in at night, sometimes my father would even read.

There had been so much going on the past two years that I had forgotten our end was coming, Tae's and mine. It was time for the universe to come collect.

“I called you,” I said. “It was totally fine. Eisner said he doesn't even want to see me until next month.”

Tae had asked me to call him from the hospital, like I always did.

“It didn't ring.”

“My cell reception sucks there,” I told him. “You know that.”

It was true, too. It was true except for the fact that he was right: I hadn't called. I did not want to be sick that weekend. I wanted to be twenty-three. I wanted to call my boyfriend about whether he wanted mushrooms on his pizza, not what my echocardiogram said.

“What about Wi-Fi?” he asked.

I sat up. I was feeling good. I was wearing jeans.

“What's up with you tonight?”

From our first kiss—the week after my diagnosis, no less, Tae was now an intricate, central part of this unfolding new story—I'd relied on him. In ways that were obvious, in ways that were unfair. He'd held me sobbing on the bathroom floor, and my hand before surgery. He'd slept in hospital chairs, respectfully looked away when catheters and IV lines were inserted. He'd picked up my parents, bleary-eyed, at 2:00 a.m. from the emergency room entryway. He'd been there.

In the past two months, though, I'd begun to stand on my own two feet. The medications were working. Things were stabilizing.
I felt good, or as good as I could ever remember feeling. I'd lost two years of my life, and I was ready to rejoin the world.

I knew it would never be normal. I knew at some point my heart would give out on me again. I knew there would be inflection points, if I was lucky enough to survive them. I knew I'd always need to be tethered to something—a device, a hospital, a scan, a machine. I knew there were no outs. But I wanted this thing with my heart to be happening in the other room. I did not want it to be in the same bed with me anymore.

“I was worried about you,” Tae said. “You can't just not fucking call me.”

“I'm fine,” I said. “You have to get that. I'm better.”

“You're not better,” he said. He was practically screaming. “You can't get better.”

I looked at him, incredulous. “That's a fucked-up thing to say to me.”

“No, it's not, it's the truth.”

“It's not the truth anymore.”

“Daphne, be reasonable. We know this. I know this.”

I got up and stood a few feet from him with my arms crossed. I felt the anger pulsing through my veins. I felt voracious, wild. I felt powerful.

“I'm not your fucking patient; I'm your girlfriend,” I said.

Tae narrowed his eyes at me. They flashed. I honestly thought he might punch the wall, that's how focused in rage he looked. And then he started to cry. I had never seen him break down. Not in any of our hospital stays, not in the cafeteria, not after visiting hours, when the nurses who snuck him in finally told him it was time to go. He put a hand over his face. He was
standing in the doorway to my childhood bedroom, backlit by the afternoon sun.

“God damn it,” he said.

I just stood there, anger and sadness washing over me in twin waves.

“Daphne,” he said. His voice was devoid of its prior intensity. “I don't want you to be sick. But I don't know how to do this anymore. I'm not sure we can. You want to be free, and I can't help but be here. Be worried. I don't know how to do it differently. I don't know how to not make love and worry the same thing.”

And then I remembered: our sheet of paper.

Tae, two years and two months.

I closed the space between us. I wrapped my arms around him. I stood on my tiptoes and hugged him, clutching on to his neck. We'd been physically intimate so much less than we should have been, I thought. So much less than we deserved to be.

“Thank you,” I said.

He seemed confused, and then he wasn't; he couldn't be. He had seen me through what he needed to. He had been there for the impossible unfolding of it all, he had held the walls up when everything inside them was falling and breaking and crashing.
I don't know what I would have done without you
is such an overused phrase.

There was so much I didn't know. How long this hovering reality would last, whether I had anything to offer the world outside this home anymore. How I could possibly be with someone who didn't know—or maybe worse, who did. But I knew our time, Tae's and mine, was up. I was heartbroken, but I was also certain. What we had in common was my illness. And I could feel us both
resenting that simple and constraining truth. I had fallen in love with the man who was there when my heart stopped. Now it was beating again, however cautiously, and we were reminders to each other of the worst of it. We always would be.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you, too.”

When I did eventually get a new piece of paper—six months later—it felt like a promise. Like someone on the other end was seeing me, was seeing all of this, and still not counting me out. Every time after, I knew when I saw a name, when I saw that mark in days, weeks, months—that I would have that time, that it was now promised to me. I'd be alive. I'd get to live it.

I have a deal with the universe. I take my time in increments, and I get to stay here. For the time written, I get to keep my heart.

But now—

Now, I do not know anymore. A blank piece of paper should mean forever, right? But what if it just means I do not get to know? What if it now means anything could happen at any time? How do I reckon with an unknown that dangerous?