A Season in Hell (23 page)

I decided to go to New York for the urological consultation in March, when my friends were celebrating. Esther was holding her Women’s Seder (about which she wrote a book,
The Telling
) on March 26, and there was a birthday party for Gloria (two days late) the next day. I spent the rest of my time in New York in doctors’ offices, but no one seemed to know what was wrong with me.

I had to go to England to do promotion for
Our Father
, and before I flew there, I needed another endoscopy. By April 11, when I left Florida for the season, I felt wonderful. Swimming every day had toned me up, strengthened me a bit, and I carried my hand luggage off the plane. It was a little heavy, perhaps twenty-odd pounds, but it seemed bearable for a while. And when it did not, did I stop, put it down, and look around for a skycap? I did not. I went on with it. The next day, in severe pain, I cursed myself, but it did not occur to me that I had again broken my back. I called in a masseur and packed for London.

I went through the rounds of interviews, lunches, dinners, and the theater, enjoying myself through my agony. I had my pain pills, but I think I never took enough for them to work. Edie tells me that when you are taking painkillers, you should
never
allow pain to creep in—that is, you should take a second pill before the first has completely worn off. I have never done that. It is a strange fact about pain, though, that you don’t necessarily remember it later. I recall this London visit with pleasure.

At the end, I met up with Beatrix Campbell, and together we drove to Essex to visit Germaine Greer. She was as warm and full of sparkle and wit as ever. She went out to the garden of her beautiful old house and cut herbs and made us a delicious pasta dish with tomatoes and herbs for lunch. That night, she took us to dinner at Newnham, the Cambridge college where she teaches.

I wished that evening that Virginia Woolf were still alive to learn that Oxbridge women no longer had to endure terrible food. The dons at Newnham College ate exquisite
poussin
. We had great fun with these women, who are smart and savvy and sophisticated and amiable and friendly—utterly unlike the men at High Table at Oxford I have encountered.

The next day, we set off for Kent, a part of England I had only dipped into earlier. I wanted to see Canterbury Cathedral—which I found disappointing. It was the first church I’d seen in England that was marred by tawdry tourist surroundings—something more common abroad, in places like Mont-Saint-Michel and Saint Peter’s. Bea and I stayed in a strange inn that seemed to be furnished with fun-house remainders but which served elaborate meals. We drove through the beautiful Kent countryside, and again I silently blessed the fates that allowed me to make such a trip despite my physical state.

U
PON RETURNING, I HAD
to move almost immediately from the apartment where I’d lived for fifteen years, which I had sold. Moving, with my aching back, was an ordeal and not as efficiently managed as earlier moves. An additional complication was that my dear assistant, Isabelle de Cordier, had just left me, having after many years of searching found a job in her specialty, architecture. She came after work, though, as usual doing as much as she could to help me.

My Central Park West apartment had always been too large for me—eight rooms and five bathrooms for one person seemed to me a little obscene right from the beginning, but I could not resist its gorgeous view of the park. Worried about buying it, superstitious, I suppose, I had asked my mother’s advice. It’s so big, I said; suppose the day comes when I can’t afford to keep it up. Will I be brokenhearted? No, she said. You’ll be glad to see the end of it. “We fall in love with places, but then we get tired of them,” she said. “There will come a time when you’ll want to leave it.” She was right: the only things I would ever miss were my wonderful dressing room–bathroom and the stall shower, from inside which you could see the park reflected in the bathroom mirror; the working fireplace in my study; the large kitchen; and the doormen, who were so sweet and warm, they always made me feel welcomed home. The problem was finding places to put furnishings, paintings, and, above all, books from a large apartment. I regretted only breaking up my library, but after giving about a third of the books to a Berkshire library, I discovered my own collection was actually rejuvenated.

That spring, I gave readings at Crone’s bookstore in Boston and at Harbourfront in Toronto. On my return, I saw my oncologist, who ordered an MRI; it showed that my back had indeed broken for the second time the previous April. But again there was no cancer. By now, of course, the fracture was less painful, but my range of motion was becoming more and more limited. Edie found a wonderful new therapist for me, Frania Zins, a Feldenkrais practitioner, who over years of treatments has helped me to grow stronger, stand straighter, and move so as not to exacerbate pain. Although I still feel almost constant pain, it is far milder than it was, despite a third compression fracture, which occurred in January 1996.

For the most part that spring, I relaxed in the beauty of the Berkshire countryside. The coven came up for a weekend. But the day they arrived, I began to bleed rather copiously, which frightened me. After much difficulty—it was the Fourth of July weekend—I reached both a doctor (albeit a stranger to me)
and
an available pharmacist; Gloria and Carol went to pick up a prescription. I also called Harold Greenberg, Barbara’s husband, who calmed my anxiety—seeing a lot of blood is terrifying, when there seems to be no reason for it. I would have to go to New York for treatment, but still unable to drive myself that far, I put it off.

The following weekend, I had a large family party (the kids did most of the cooking and cleanup), after which my sister and Fred Baron drove me back to New York. A CT scan next day confirmed that there was no cancer in kidney or bladder. (Once you have had cancer, it is the first thing doctors check for.) The day after, my urologist removed the stent, for it was that which was causing the bleeding. He wanted to insert a fresh one, but I demurred. The stent was as much trouble as the kidney, I thought: I would take my chances without one. This was a bad decision.

Charlotte drove me back up to the Berkshires, where I planned to spend the rest of the summer. Having finished revising the history book, I could start a new work, and I picked up the novel I had begun in the hospital during the last months of chemotherapy. I started this novel, called
My Summer with George
, with the idea that I would try to write something light for a change. At the time, my life was full of blank dread, and I wanted to be—I wondered if I
could
be—comical, satirical. To write the novel I had in mind would require entirely different talents from
Our Father
: not intensity but a light touch; not intellectual argument but mocking glances at serious ideas; not profound emotional conflict but absurd emotions couched in everyday language. Not only was I not sure I could do it; I was not sure I wanted to. But I persisted.

I had guests all week from August 8 to August 14. The last set was Linsey Abrams and Ann Volks, who came for a weekend, at the end of which I was stricken. I prepared meals but could not eat them, and I was doubled over in pain. But the pain was not like the last kidney infection, and I did not know what to make of it. The day after they left, I felt so sick that I had to call an ambulance and ask to be taken to the local hospital, Fairview. This charming place, with a mere fourteen rooms, has an excellent if limited staff, with few specialists. They fed me antibiotics, diagnosed a kidney infection, and told me I was fortunate, because the visiting urologist would be there the next day. Arriving, he insisted that I have myself moved up to Pittsfield, where he could insert a tube into my kidney that would empty into a bag outside my body. This would have the great benefit, he added enthusiastically, of allowing him to inject iodine (which he could not do internally, since it might kill me—although he didn’t tell me that, I knew it), thus allowing them to see what was going on inside me. Hearing this, I called the (excellent) local internist and demanded to be taken to New York.

Arranging the ride to the city took forever. The internist wanted to be sure that I would be safe during the long trip, so he wanted medical personnel aboard the ambulance with me. Their presence raised the price charged by the local ambulance service for this jaunt to over $1,500. The trip was indeed long and very uncomfortable—for all the doctor’s concern, I would have been less miserable in the back seat of, say, a Lincoln Town Car. When I asked the pleasant young paramedic accompanying me for a Tylenol—I was feeling feverish—he told me he did not have even an aspirin. By the time I reached St. Luke’s–Roosevelt, my temperature was 105 degrees.

I spent nine days in the hospital, developing pneumonia while I was there. I also had a pain in my arm and chest; when I told the nurse I might have had a heart attack, she ignored me. I allowed the urologist to reinsert a new stent; clearly I could not manage without one. Immediately on my release, Rob and Barbara drove me back to the Berkshires for what remained of the summer. Weak, downhearted, weary of the whole situation, I tried once more to frame my mind toward acceptance and serenity. Edie advised me to find a doctor in the Berkshires, in case of emergencies. The fine internist who had cared for me at Fairview was not accepting new patients, and I was sent to his young associate, who lectured me for over an hour but did not recall who I was when I called him in need the next day.

That need occurred over Labor Day weekend. The kids were visiting and we had planned some pleasant doings, including attending a Sunday party given by a local couple, artists with a beautiful old house on a large property, who had invited the entire neighborhood. I looked forward to meeting some of my neighbors. Saturday morning, I sat down on the window seat in the kitchen with my morning tea and opened my newspaper. Suddenly, I felt a
ping
in my esophagus. I was still on antibiotics for the infection and had to take a pill first thing each morning before eating. I thought perhaps it had become stuck, as sometimes happened with large pills, causing an ulcer to open up immediately, making me sick for two or three days. But I did not feel sick now, just terribly enervated.

I told the kids something was wrong but I didn’t know what, except I felt horribly weak. Going back to bed, I slept on and off that day and the next; the kids refused to go to the party without me and spent the entire weekend hanging around the house, worrying. On Monday, an old pal from college days, Moe Schneider, stopped in to visit. I hadn’t seen him in over twenty years; he was one of the friends my husband took (friends as well as possessions get divvied up in divorces) when we separated. In bathrobe and slippers, I sat up in a chair; luckily, Moe is talkative, and I did not have to say much.

After several days of trying to talk by phone to local doctors, who did not know me well enough to understand that I would not complain if something was not wrong (I can’t really blame them; I was terribly vague), I finally reached Edie, who told me to go down to New York and check into St. Luke’s. I packed up in despair: I had been out of that hospital for only
eleven
days. The kids drove me there, by now used to this drill too, and sat with me in the emergency room. Since I could not explain what was wrong with me, I thought I might have trouble being admitted, but they let me in swiftly because my blood pressure was so low I was about to go into shock.

Edie and Lucy at first assumed I had another kidney infection; Dr. Lowe, the urologist, insisted I did not. I didn’t enter this argument. I caught pneumonia almost immediately after being admitted, and because I had a pleural effusion, Edie and Lucy suspected a pulmonary embolus and tested mainly for that, and for cancer. They gave me a chest CT scan first, then a VQ scan (a ventilation profusion scan, in which, after an injection of radioactive dye, your breathing is tested). They did a pulmonary angiogram, which involves inserting a tube into a spot near where the leg meets the torso, working it up to the heart-lung area, and then doing tests. One is conscious during this: it is not painful, but it feels creepy. They did a thoracentesis, which involves pushing a long needle through the back, into the lining of the lung, and extracting fluid. The doctor swore it would not hurt, but it did, and I cried. I kept crying, and the poor young doctor worried that he had done me serious damage, had perhaps punctured my lung, which can happen in this test. He returned several times later that day and finally, with great relief, announced that he had not punctured my lung. I apologized for crying, for being a baby. I said I’d been too sick for too long, and now my body was like a baby’s: it cried when it was hurt and I couldn’t control it. I told him the spot still hurt where the needle had been inserted.

“The body remembers pain,” I explained.

“So does the person inflicting it.” He smiled ruefully.

None of these tests showed pulmonary emboli or cancer, so they ordered an echocardiogram. It showed that I had had a heart attack. I was in heart failure, with pleural effusion. No one had seriously thought of a heart attack because it had been “silent”: I had felt only a
ping
, and it had caused no major visible event.

This hospitalization forced me to cancel a promotional tour in France, important because I had not done promo there for some years; and a side trip to Sligo, to visit my friend Lois Gould in Bertolt Brecht’s old house on the Irish coast, which she had recently refurbished beautifully. I missed seeing Lois, but the cancellation of the French trip did me serious damage.

I was released from the hospital as soon as the pneumonia was gone, and Edie and Lucy put their heads together with another doctor (the sweet guy who’d done the thoracentesis, I think) to come up with the name of a cardiologist who was first-rate but whom they thought I might be able to tolerate. Apparently, cardiologists are among the least amiable members of the medical profession, known for indifference, superiority, and arrogance. My friends had difficulty reaching unanimity on anyone, and once they made a choice, I had to wait for an appointment until mid-October.