Meet Me at Infinity (41 page)

—May 26, 1975

The 1976 letter from Yucatan (actually written in Virginia) was something completely different, an account of Tiptree’s hospitalization in Mexico. I rushed it into print, in
Khatru
5 (April 1976), bumping the 1975 letter from Yucatan in the process. Alii made some slight revisions later, when it was published (as “Painwise in Yucatan”) in an anthology edited by Michael Bishop
(Light Years and Dark,
Berkley 1984).

One beautiful moonlit night when soft clouds chased their shadows over the balmy Caribbean and iguanas rustled in the coco palms, something went wrong with my heart.

This was not its fault, as will appear below; for some days I had had a high fever and found myself unable to hold down food or water and ultimately unable to breathe.

At this point a gringo friend alerted the coco-ranch owner, who luckily had a small plane parked on a rough strip some miles away and a brother-in-law who is a Mexicana pilot with an instrument license. So, by some process which was never very clear to me, I found myself bundled in a truck, and subsequently we all set sail through the moonlight night across the Yucatan Channel to the island of Cozumel. Mexicans are particularly wonderful at organizing eleventh-hour rescue missions, which always save everything except when they don’t. In this case, it all worked great.

It was very beautiful, the flight. Between gasps I verified that blind flying is indeed tricky. While we were in one cloud I became positive that we were banking 180 degrees and about to turn upside-down. Fortunately, the pilot was flying by his instruments rather than my hunches.

We came out of the cloud true and level and proceeded to sit down on the huge blue-lit Cozumel International Airport at midnight. The tower was supposed to be closed, but somebody—perhaps the janitor—had been persuaded to turn the lights on.

At one o’clock we found the Clinico National open for business; I recall chiefly the continuous barking of three small invisible dogs. The doctor was out on housecalls, it being better to have an emergency at 1:00 A.M. in tropical countries than at 1:00 p.m., when everybody disappears. Presently he arrived—Doctor Negron, a three-foot fashion-plate with mustachios and a sharp white suit over a beautiful embroidered shirt. He had a fine old-fashioned authoritative manner. I got my lanky self onto a table for pregnant midgets, and experienced something you don’t find in the U.S.A.—the extraordinary diagnostic skills of a good doctor with almost no instruments. He touched with firm listening hands, looked intently for unknown signs, asked strange questions. Under his hands I realized how great the old skills of Galen and Ostler must have been; here they had never died. It was impressive.

Above the incessant barking, he told my friends what was wrong. I had, it seems, a typhoid-type salmonella infection, I had pneumonia, and I was suffering from congestive heart-failure due to severe dehydration, the heart not being adapted to pump a thin trickle of sludge. Beyond that, I had a peculiar murmur and total arrhythmia of unknown origin—and that is all I’m going to say about my illness, because I want to tell you a couple of things that may be useful to you if you happen to get sick in a foreign land.

The first you know already: have a friend. A devoted friend who
speaks the language.
This point will get even clearer as we go on.

Now for the hospital and the next lesson: Bring your own drugs. The hospital may have none. So, with me playing the role of Frankenstein’s monster before animation, we taxied about the darkened town collecting bottles of I.V. fluids, syringes of antibiotic, flasks of electrolytes, heart stimulants, etc. (Could I have done that alone? Don’t laugh.)

And then we arrived at The Hospital. The new, beautiful beautiful hospital, an architectural delight of glass and tropical plantings, quietly but swiftly corroding in the salty air. The director met us, a young, fuzzy-chinned man, not one of your handsome Latinos but the charming type with sad, gay, all-knowing orangutan eyes.

He led us, laden with bottles and boxes, down great glassy moonlit corridors. We passed an impressive toilet and turned suddenly into a small concrete cubicle with a green terrazzo floor that was a work of art, inlaid with sliced pink conch shells: The Private Room. (There were two.) The Private Room was about eight feet by eight feet, mostly filled with one rusting bed and one enormous baby-cot stuffed with plastic pillows showing dressed-up pigs and chipmunks. One bare light bulb shone on the foot of the bed. I tottered to the lovely window: Air! But alas, the windows do not open; it would spoil the architectural effect. Somewhere a fan creaked, bringing in stale corridor miasmas.

I collapsed on the bed, and the director and the night nurse went to work on what became known as the great vein game. (The problem was that while I pride myself on having as many veins as anybody, they are all too crooked to put needles in; over the next three days it became very exciting to hunt for a new one when the I.V. needle fell out.) The night nurse was a severe, stylish young lady called Rosario, who wore a white turban on her head in increasingly chic folds as the night wore on. By morning she had added gold glasses and looked like something out of a Bonwit Teller ad. But she was all brains and heart.

Rosario and a Doctor Jose took turns puncturing me until they hit one that hurt like hell but worked. Then my friends left, Rosario showed me the call-bell, which didn’t work, turned off the light bulb, and left too.

As the door closed, the most appalling noise I have ever heard broke loose and grew in volume until the beds rattled. It was the yelling of infants, about ten feet away, amplified to madness by the great glassy walls. It became apparent that I was in the only functioning ward, the one for maternities and sick babies, of which there are, alas, too many by far.

Now, an occasional infant cry is bearable, but this was not occasional; it lasted, that first time, twelve hours. And it was not ordinary; I quickly identified the leader as an infant vocal genius. Never do I expect to hear again such crescendo rage, such pure peals of aggression, varied with eerie train-whistle hoots, crow-chuckles, the yelps of slaughtered swine, the ravings of total paranoia. As the hours wore on I comforted myself with this: at least I was being subjected to what must be near the best of its kind. (I afterwards discovered that the poor little devil had had a hernia operation and was, like me, on intravenous support. But unlike me he didn’t appreciate it. By the third day, when they let him off the needle, his version of the affair must have been, Jesus, I had to yell like hell to get them to stop
that;
terrible job, almost didn’t make it.)

Now, I’m not going to bore you with a play-by-play account, but only give you a few items from my blood-soaked notebook that might be of use to you someday.

First, the thing to remember is that hospitals in small foreign towns are for
treating your disease,
not for frivolous purposes like keeping you clean, comfortable, or even fed. For instance:

There is no food. As in jails, your family or friends are expected to feed you. This is hard on the nurses and doctors, too: They go downtown for long lunches. As one doctor sighed to me, “We have a kitchen with an icebox and stove, but we have no cook.” Luckily, in my case, the I.V. contained glucose, and my friend brought me some juices and sour milk.

Bedding is a luxury. I had one (1) sheet, under me. When it got soaked with water and blood, I still got to keep it. Along about the end of Day 2 a lady called Esperanza offered to change it, but by that time I was attached to it—in more ways than one. There was, however, a blanket for one cold night, and a kind of bed cover made of something like dimity, which I wore like a poncho.

You get plenty of long, compassionate, doe-eyed gazes, soft touch-ings of delicate hands to your fevered brow, but no nursing care as we know it. You are not, for example, washed. In my case that meant lying in an increasing incrustation of sweat, leaked blood, etc., etc., not uncomfortable but somewhat hazardous as the exudates were still pretty infectious. There was of course no way of brushing my teeth, no toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, or so on. There was no soap, until on Day 3 Rosario stole me a cake from somewhere. There was, however, one (1) towel, which I became quite adept at washing with my teeth, my hands being occupied holding up the I.V.

Plumbing is a proud luxury. You get a toilet, but you do not get a toilet seat, and there is no guarantee that the water will flow
out
of anything, as I discovered while trying to repair a sanitary accident.

There are no hospital gowns. Somewhere in the madness I had latched on to an extra pair of shorts, but on account of the unremitting dysentery both soon became casualties. While waiting for them to dry (I finally gave this up), 1 managed to surround myself with the dimity thing, it being my strong feeling that beautiful young ladies, or young ladies, beautiful or otherwise, should not be subjected to my grizzled, uh, nudity. The result was something like those bad copies of Michelangelo where Saint Somebody is surrounded by a limp billow of cloud, the ultimate corner of which floats across his crotch. As I became wilder and bloodier-looking, the resemblance to the walking dead out of a medieval pest-house increased. About Day 3 a tiny girl named Carmita, taking pity on me, brought me a blue nylon nurse’s dress for size 1; I got one arm into it, and it came nicely down to my navel, increasing the general hilarity, re: which see below.

Self-help is encouraged. In addition to being hooked into the I.V., I was sternly forbidden to get up; in short, I was to use the bedpan, which was pointed out to me. (It was a beautiful turquoise.) I used it—once. No one, you see, took it away or cleaned it. So as the dysentery bore down I got pretty expert at unhooking the I.V. bottle, carrying it over my head on a dead run into the bathroom, where I held it up with one hand, held the other hand down so it wouldn’t clot, supported my improvised raiment with the third hand, q ~d attended to the necessaries with the fourth. This was stimulating and prevented apathy.

Certain problems are beneath the medical staff. During the first night, it was discovered that the bed was wrong-way-round in the room, and broken besides, so that my legs were on the raised head-end. Every doctor who came in pointed out that heart patients’ heads should be higher, not lower, than their feet. They then investigated the bed, ascertained that it was wrong-end to, and stood back, concluding triumphantly, “That can be moved.” No one, however, moved it—until I nailed the last of the procession, leapt up, unhooked the I.V. bottle, and said, “You pull that end.” Nothing loath, young Doctor Reyes grabbed his end, and told me to pull
my
end. I let the cloud go and, gasping and panting, managed to twist the rusted monster around.

Doctor Reyes solicitously rehooked me, warning me that it was extremely dangerous to
molestar
myself. We all regarded the new arrangement with great satisfaction, he cranking up my head several times. It also had the great advantage of placing the light bulb over my head, and the unbearable sunlight from the closed window on my feet instead of my eyes. I felt tremendous joy. Sometimes later I led an expedition to bring the night table out of the hallway and place it by my bed, so that my water glass would not be on the floor. (I was told to drink fluid continuously but given no water bottle.) It was in fact much more comfortable being able to breathe, and I date my renewed health to the successful Battle of the Bed.

Next: It is essential to learn names. Learn
everybody’s
name, and quickly. I used my trusty little notebook. You see, you cannot count on any means of summoning help beyond the Human voice, and it makes a great deal of difference if you can call by name. I still start drowsily from sleep, howling, “ROSARIO!… CONSTANTIA!… DOCTOR MESQUITA!”

Be prepared for a
social
experience. Sickness, even dying, is not regarded as terribly unusual or interesting. You have to contribute, to inquire about everybody’s children, miscarriages, losses, marital prospects, and status in the Oaxaca National Dance Festival. It also helps if you have something of value; for example, by a miracle I had grabbed my Collins phrasebook during the departure. (English phrase-books are much better than American ones.) The result was that I often had as many as three doctors roaming my tiny room at once, trying their tongues on “Li-ver,” “Kit-nays,” “El-boo,” and so on. They always scrupulously returned it to me, perhaps because I never let my eyes off it. (This may or may not be unfair, but another word of caution is to keep anything precious attached to you, whether in bed or elsewhere.) But sociability, joy, hilarity—it breaks out every instant. The young director, demonstrating how badly my heart was doing, broke into a beautiful dance step to illustrate the rhythm, and exited dancing and singing, like a music-hall turn. The pictures I scribbled were lavishly praised and earned me some pineapple juice.

Most hilarious of all was the Medical History. On Day 2, the Director decided to start a file on me and regularize my status. This involved a three-hour inquisition, covering all illnesses of all known parents, in addition to the sixty years of my own mishaps. While doing it, he insisted on improving his English, and I believe to this day that my father is credited with a hysterectomy. By the time we got to my scars a whole roomful of people was in delighted attendance, roaring like mad. “Nineteen forty-four?” the Director shouted, pointing to my appendectomy, “nineteen sixty-six?” at the ulcer scar. “Forty-four!” we all chorused affirmatively. “Sixty-six!” This went on through my miscellaneous assortment of souvenirs, me trying in vain to control my poncho, my I.V., and my bellows of laughter. Everyone admired the Director’s English, his memory, his acumen, my scars, one another, and everything else in sight; and the whole performance finished with a triumphant dancing sashay by the line of interns. I was left alone to chuckle until about midnight, when I was startled by a fantastic metal monster advancing into the room.