SSC (2012) Adult Onset (14 page)

Then she puts on her pants.

“When’s the third one coming out?”

•

•

Mary Rose leaves Room UL230B and is immediately lost. Did she come up the orange elevators or were they yellow? She peers down a corridor, at the end of which stands a set of double doors, marked PROCEDURE ROOM. She sets out in the opposite direction, wishing she had thought to bring a sack of breadcrumbs, trying not to breathe too deeply. Perfectly clean words become queasy when used in a medical context:
procedure …
the euphemism taking on a quality it was calculated to conceal. She is not a fan of hospitals, but is grateful for the absence in this wing
of the smell of disinfectant and rubbing alcohol; surgical smells that reawaken dread, make her shiver, and bring ghost-story tears to her eyes. The smell of piercing … She reminds herself that in fact the worst smell is that of hospital food; truly the bread—and applesauce and mushy peas—of sorrow. She has never understood why anyone would wish to make a career in a hospital. Her own mother was a Registered Nurse; an O.R. nurse to boot, having had no fear of blood.

She passes Mammography—at least she is to be spared the panini press today. She turns the corner, BONE DENSITY CLINIC. Is that what is behind the capricious pain in her arm? Is it perhaps not phantom at all, but a symptom of osteoporosis? More of “the riches of menopause”? Nothing showed up on the X-ray. Still, that was six months ago …

She feels like Detective Columbo from the old seventies TV series. Rumpled, blind in one eye and with a shambling gait, he was master of the false exit: just when the suspect thought the bumbling detective was leaving empty-handed, Columbo would pause in the doorway, then turn and say, “You know, somethin’s been botherin’ me at the back of my mind …” And nail the perpetrator.

She spots an emergency exit with a stairway symbol and a warning, ALARM WILL SOUND IF OPENED. She opens it.

•

•

In all the years since her last bone surgery at fourteen, apart from the odd histrionic bump Mary Rose has never felt a peep out of her arm until recently. It soldiered on through a summer in the militia, through the rigours of theatre school, through countless drunken escapades and bouts of contact-improv, through two babies. Until last summer.

It was the first summer without Hil’s mum. Patricia had died of complications following minor surgery the previous fall. She was a beautiful woman with crystal blue eyes and a gracious manner—a woman who referred playfully to her husband as “the Doctor” but spoke reverently of their respective “realms”—hers having been at home with the children. Hil was grief-stricken, naturally … although at the funeral reception, Mary Rose had been shocked to hear her state bitterly to a childhood friend, “My mother died of a bad back.”

They had come to the end of their exhausting summer holiday on the east coast. Maggie was about to turn two and Matthew had suddenly gone into reverse, demanding diapers of his own. The shore was gentle, but a child can drown in an inch of water and the woods were full of bears and Lyme disease—

“No they’re not, Mister, not ‘full.’ ”

“
Ixodes scapularis
has been migrating north, it just takes one tick.”

Moreover, the children might wander into the forest and die of exposure. “How?” asked Hilary, who had somehow managed to read an entire novel over the course of two harrowing weeks. They closed
up the old hunting cabin and loaded the car while supervising their toddlers—perhaps her mother was right, Mary Rose was just too old for this game. Finally they were ready to head into Halifax for a last overnight with Hil’s dad and younger sister. Mary Rose went upstairs to lie down on the couch in her father-in-law’s den before supper and could not get up again for sixteen hours.

Everyone thought she was tired, but Mary Rose knew she was gone. She had dropped below some line. It was like the diagram in her high school science textbook of the earth’s crust in cross-section. Some distance down was the “water table.” She had slipped below the water table. Immobilized. Unable to blink, to sleep, she saw herself laid out and suspended in the ground. At some point she heard the family singing “Happy Birthday” downstairs, and remembered: today was Maggie’s second birthday.

Where was the switch? She had not known it was possible one day to lie down and never get up. Was this “hysterical paralysis”? Even if she did get up this time, it would remain possible in the future to be struck still. She had gone there now, there was an event trail carved out. A pathway.

Where was the switch? Daisy came in and face-butted her, mushy wet. Hilary plied her with juice. Hil’s father looked in on her. White-haired and tall, he was both the image of a 1960s television doctor, and a real one—“realish,” he liked to say. A psychiatrist. He pulled up a chair and gently inquired if she was “on something.” She almost answered, “The couch.” “No,” she said, “I’m just tired.” He nodded, then asked if she wanted “something.” Would he have slipped her a Valium on the spot? Hil’s mother had indeed had a bad back. There is a glass of wine, then there is a glass of wine with Percocet …

“That’s so kind, Alisdair,” replied Mary Rose, “but I feel better now.”

She loved her father-in-law, but was grateful not to have been the beneficiary of his modern methods back in the day. She wondered if he had ever administered shock therapy. At least he and Hil’s mother
had never waged a campaign to turn their daughter “straight.” She packed up her hysterical parenthesis and put it behind her.

They got on with the trek west, stopping over in Ottawa as usual, where her parents lived in easy-listening air-conditioned comfort in a condo development called Corrigan’s Keep for reasons as obscure as those behind the various Vales, Heights, Castle Views and Downs that surround every North American city. The pain ambushed her on the second night in the basement guest suite. She woke up, surprised. The numbers on the clock glowed red: 2:00. She rose carefully so as not to disturb Hil—the mattress was like Gyproc on springs. Hil said it merely needed a layer of memory foam. Didn’t we all? She crept between Maggie in the Pack ’n Play and Matthew on the folding IKEA chair-bed.

She slipped into the bathroom and switched on the light. The mirror leapt into surgical view and there she was, crazy hair, sheet-wrinkled cheek. On her arm, the scars, the vein, no bruise.

Mary Rose was accustomed to the thousand cuts that maternal flesh is heir to. She had nicks on her fingers that took months to heal because she was always rinsing something at the sink; discovered bumps on her head while washing her hair, bruises on her legs while shaving, all in a day’s work—who has time to feel the bite of a coffee table on the shin when they’re breaking a toddler’s fall? It was unsatisfying, however, to endure pain without a mark to show for it.

The pain dogged her all the way home to Toronto and persisted into the fall. She was about to google it when Hil caught her and laid down the law, “Call Dr. Judy.” So Mary Rose dutifully made an appointment with the family physician. Then, as though the very act of seeking bona fide medical attention had dislodged a suspicion, something began “bothering her at the back of her mind …”

Old memories took on fresh meaning. She recalled Dr. Ferry scolding her mother out in the front hall when she was ten and on her third
sling,
“…  you know what can happen? … what it could be?!”
She heard again her mother telling and retelling it as though it were a funny story
—
“
He really gave me what-for
!”—a sure sign, even then, that something was amiss. She saw once more her father’s sealed profile as he walked her down the halls of Radiology, replayed his jaunty tone, “They’re going to snap pictures of your entire skeleton just to make sure there’s no holes anywhere else,” and it dawned on her now: he had been terrified.

Four years after the first operation, she stood with her parents in the surgeon’s consulting room, and saw something else in her mother’s face when the doctor said, “They’ve come back.”

They were living in Ottawa by then, but had driven the two hours to Kingston General Hospital for her twice-yearly checkup—they always went for pizza afterwards and it was nice having her parents to herself. Big Dr. Sorokin stood before the X-ray that was mounted in the light box and tapped with his pencil at the fresh shadows in her humerus. “Here, here and here.”

Her father nodded and compressed his lips. Mary Rose and her mother, in rare emotional unison, turned to face the window—across the way stood the hospital smokestack, drab bricks against the November sky. She saw tears in her mother’s eyes and was shocked to find herself on the verge too, explaining it away inwardly with fourteen-year-old detachment, “I’m not crying, but my body is because it remembers the pain.”

She could not recall ever having seen her mother cry. This was sobering in itself, but there was something else in her mother’s face as she stared out the window. Something grave. Something dignified. Grief.

There was a silver lining to the surgeries: they were the best times with her mother. Dolly was in her element on a hospital ward, the only person who made Mary Rose feel safe—her face, her voice,
made even the pain fresh and sane. Especially the last time when, at fourteen, Mary Rose knew enough to worry the surgeon might make a mistake.

“It’s the left arm, the one with the scar already,” she told them as they shifted her from the gurney to the operating table. They appeared not to have heard. They were wearing masks. A big light was suspended over her. Everything was clattery and steel, the doctor’s forearms were hairy but his hands were chalky white. She could not move, but she could talk. They had given her a needle out in the hallway where she’d been parked among the other gurneys like aircraft lined up on the tarmac. A nurse had come along and jabbed it into her thigh without warning. The drug splintered painfully into her bloodstream. Mary Rose asked, “What is that?” “It’ll calm you down,” answered the nurse. She had already been calm, but now she became anxious as her limbs filled up with wet concrete. Time blinked and blanked and jumped, then it was her turn to take off. They wheeled her into the O.R. under the interrogation lights and slipped the point of a finer needle into the back of her hand—its syringe-body rested against her skin like a patient insect. Before the anaesthetic doused her with black, she said, “Don’t cut it off.” She may have heard a laugh.

She had also known enough to realize she might not wake up. “That’s a virtual impossibility,” her father had reassured her with his incredulous chuckle. At fourteen, however, Mary Rose did not like the “virtual.”

As she lay recovering, Dolly would breeze in, all Broadway in her leopard print tam and matching coat. Everyone else, even her father, made Mary Rose very tired. She would smile and make it okay, but Mum would sweep in, call the nurses by name and get fresh sheets under her. Dolly found the bedsores forming on Mary Rose’s heels and elbows and got her to sit up. “That’s it, now rotate your feet around your ankles, open and close your fists, that’s right, keep moving.” It
was possible to get gangrene from lying still. Dolly got her to breathe deeply so she wouldn’t get pneumonia. “That’s it, take a big drink of air. Now let it all out again.” It was possible to die of lying down.

The nurses loved Dolly, she was one of them, and they were nicer to Mary Rose as a result. Except for the night nurse, who hadn’t met her mother.

Last fall when the pain in her arm failed to go away, the thing that was bothering her at the back of her mind came to the fore: she began to wonder if her parents had known something about her arm that they had never told her. What if they had not been
benign
pediatric bone cysts? What if she had actually had pediatric bone cancer and her parents kept it from her because everything had turned out fine? She needed to know, because what if it recurred? She needed to know, because … it was her story, and if it was being held hostage by her parents, she had to get it back. So no sooner had she made the appointment with Dr. Judy, than she redialled and asked the receptionist to requisition her medical records from Kingston General Hospital, where she had undergone both bone grafts.

It was a Tuesday morning, just like today, a child-care morning early last fall, when she sat in Dr. Judy Farber’s examination room, averting her gaze from anything too clinical such as swabs and hypodermics, focusing on the cheery oven mitts bedecking the stirrups. Still, her stomach went cold as she watched Judy open the large brown envelope and scan the few photocopied pages before reading aloud, “ ‘Benign pediatric bone cysts.’ ”