"What are you so worried about, Scully? It's just a nice little trip to the forest."
- Mulder, The X-Files
For those of you who don't know (any of of the 9 of you reading this blog), I was hospitalized for two weeks - with an ailment the doctors still don't quite understand because... it only half exists? Or doesn't really exist at all? I don't know, they don't know -it's all very reassuring. What I DO know is after almost a month and a half of tests and MRIs and bloodwork up the proverbial wazoo, I'm still being pieced together, much like an episode of House. Or maybe Humpty Dumpty - just without the shell and the wall and the king's horses. At one point, I even accompanied my neurologist to his monthly conference to help present my case, for which my biggest contribution was springing out of my seat and insisting, to a room filled with neurologists, "I promise you I don't have Herpes."
So. Basically, that's the end of the Great Story Of The Crazy Illness. That said, there's a beginning to it as well - and I've been told by my doctors that I should keep a record of everything that happened - from start to finish - you know, "just in case" (always a phrase you wanna hear from people paid thousands of dollars to keep you from dying.) So in an effort to follow medical advice, I'm gonna begin with the beginning and take you guys on a ride from there - a great blog ride. A great big illness blogocoaster, if you will. Kosher?
Okay then.
To start at the beginning would be to start with all the blame placed squarely on Coney Island. Why? Because objects and places are inanimate and thus easy targets who can't argue that the only person to blame is yourself (shut up world! I blame Coney Island!)
But to go back even further, and to spread the blame around in as convoluted a way as possible, especially seeing as I can't blame anyone but myself (see above) or God (already sick of my blaming shit on him) we can also blame this on my love/hate relationship with amusement parks in general. For instance, on the one hand, my love for them is a bit unnatural - as in, I went to college in Orlando mainly for Disney World, where I played Mickey Mouse for two years - both for the joyful absurdity AND the free passes. But on the other hand, I hate them, too - the ticket cost, the commute, the lines, the aimless wandering, the constant odor of stale candy and moldy children, and the inevitable sunburn/stomach ache/brain ache that follows... And here in New York, the freaking commute is the worst part - as in, the subway ride to Coney Island will be long enough to age you at least ten years by the end of it. So ever since moving here, I have always, proudly, been all, 'thanks but no thanks, Coney Island!'
And yet...
(Undoubtedly, "and yet..." will be the quote carved on my headstone - with a skull and crossbones directly beneath it, and another quote: "Forever made of awesome" and then maybe a famous Dana Scully quote, too - although according to my mother, the headstone has to fend for itself as we tattooed Jewish freaks are chosen in life, but not in death: we're banned from all Jewish cemetaries. Which means if I DO eventually die of Meningitis + Mystery illness, it'll just be me and the Gentiles for all eternity. Can you say Interfaith Post-Death Par-tay?? BYOB, undead friends!)
Where was I?
Anyway.
And yet there was my sister, quietly counting down her last few months in the city, still living in the crawl-space behind my sofa, still eager to do NYC shit she'd never done... And of course there was also the boardwalk I'd never seen, the endless Coney Island funnel cakes I'd never tasted, and the Whack a Moles and the brand new Luna Park I'd had yet to try...
SO MUCH STUFF, GUYS!!!
(DAMN IT.)
So finally, the week before July 4th, during one of the worst heat-waves since the great brownout of 03 - when electrical wires under the streets in Queens actually melted - the two of us made it out to the boardwalk - just two Coney Island virgins getting our cherries popped.
(Except you know how some of us lose our virginity and afterwards shamefully gather our clothes and regret losing it to THAT guy?)
(Yeah.)
The first half hour we spent outside the train on the Boardwalk, excitedly snapping photos of the giant hotdog countdown clock like those tourists who take 100 pictures of the Airtrain subway platform like it's the Statue of Liberty.
Then we rode the tallest, oldest Ferris Wheel in the US and joked that I would be the first accident in 100 years. (Oh, irony. I fucking hate your bullshit.)
Afterward, we wandered out to the crowded beach, where we set up camp not far from a couple of drunk chicks slurring over their giant, $14 Cyclone collectors margaritas: "I'msooooooooover himstooooopidbooooyzzz," which of course prompted a few mock drunken slurs of our own: "Imsoooohotwhydoesn'thewanttooohiiiittthiiiiisss...." until, bored, we got up and walked along the shore, where a lovely - if not utterly stoned - older couple took our photos against the backdrop of the beach and ocean. "You guys should check out The Grateful Dead concert," they suggested. "The ampitheater's right behind you."
"Ooh, Grateful Dead," said my sister. "I love them."
"Sure," I said, "Old people in tie dye is always fun."
"You're old, too, Jaime."
"Shut the hell up, Lindsay."
So the two of us stumbled willingly into a tailgating flea market melee - vegan food, tie-dyed dresses, homemade jewelry, giant homemade glass bongs, old stoners and alcohol galore; Party in the USA, man! Here my sister bought herself a sterling silver ring and I bought myself a burritto. Not too bad for a stoner flea market par-tay in the middle of summer.
On our way out, I was given a free, mostly untouched beer - by a girl who I swear was an extra from Dazed and Confused. A few sips later and the sky had opened up; our meteorological alarm clock - time to head back to the city.
Honestly, it was just a totally fun, lazy time, y'all; Nothing special or unexpected happened; the afternoon passed as pleasantly as most summer days pass - slowly and outside of time, like a drive down the Florida Turnpike on a cloudless, sunny morning - until you realize you've been lulled into a daydream, and actually you've just zoned out for sixteen miles and missed your fucking exit - and also, you've lost an entire half hour of your life now; how the fuck did that shit happen? How do you turn this car around? Holy shi -
CRASH!
So the day after Coney Island, I woke up with a sunburn - not unusual for post-beach; admittedly, I knew should not have used my sister's tanning oil - every time I spray that crap on myself I swear to God I end up grilled like hamburger; FYI: for us translucent people, tanning oil is the kiss of death - like that coating you put on charcoal. Fire up the grill, boys! And this is exactly what I attributed the pain to - a weirdass sunburn.
"It's just all over," I told my sister, and proceeded to pace the length of the living room with arms and legs akimbo like a walking gingerbread man. "My feet are pretty fucked up. Is it possible to cook your feet inside your own shoes? And my hands, too. Like I've scraped them across a dozen feet of concrete. Like I fell off my horse something. Is that normal? I don't think that's normal."
"What now? You fell off your horse?" My sister looked up from her computer, pulled out her headphones. "You don't look burned."
I gave my still-pasty skin a cursory glance. "You're right. I don't."
"Maybe you have an invisible sunburn."
"Yeah? Maybe." I examined myself again. "Hold up. Do those actually exist?"
She put her headphones back on, answering, "No."
Fantastic.
Post-Coney-Island, Week Two:
A new sensation blossomed in my legs; a weird ache - as if I'd been on an elliptical machine for a day - and then carried it through miles of desert. For ten straight years. Much like my Jewish ancestors in Egypt with the matzoh. (Which is where the matzoh comes from, yes? No? See - THIS is why I shouldn't be buried in a Jewish cemetary. Not because I have a tattoo, but because I am Jewish-illiterate.)
So July 4th came and went (happy Independence Day!) and I managed to find my way to Brooklyn for a rooftop party - beneath the blazing hot sun, in a second round of heat wave, of course. There I spent most of the afternoon huddled in the shadows created by the four foot ledge, legs crossed awkwardly, drinking, merry-making, and explaining to my friends about my extended sunburn affliction - also apologizing for flashes of my underwear in my teeny skirt.
"It's killing me. It's fucking killing me."
"How long now?" asked my friend Corey.
"I don't know, a week?"
"You've been sunburned for a week?"
"Yeah. I know. That's a thing, right? That's normal?"
"Sure."
"Really?"
He shook his head and threw back a beer. "No."
Fantastic squared.
At this point in Sunburn Land there was really only one thought circling round my head: Clearly I'm going crazy. As in, there is a physical process involved with a Trip To Crazytown and this is the tollbooth to get on that highway.
"Everything hurts now," I told Lindsay - on that lovely July 4th evening - as a pleasant breeze coming in through the opened window hit my skin like a wall of angry glass shards, and I winced. "It's like I have the sunburn of death. It's like I set myself on fire. Except I'm not red at all. Am I going crazy?"
What I needed was validation, just anything from anyone to reassure myself that my brain had not somehow melted into my eyeballs.
"Yes," she said. "You are."
"Helpful. Thanks a lot."
Post-Coney-Island, week three.
By now the Sunburn of All Things Weird had turned into The Sunburn of Death. So I finally did what anyone would do about two and a half weeks prior to when I actually did it (shut up, world! It's not my fault! Coney Island, I SHAKE MY ANGRY FIST AT YOU!); I finally went to the doctor.
At least I'll have some answers, at least I'll find out I'm not crazy, I thought, as I sat in the waiting room - valiantly trying not to touch my own skin - for fear of screaming out in white-hot pain like a prisoner being beaten in a shower stall with a wrench.
"The good news is there's nothing wrong with you," said the doctor.
I cocked my head to one side and perched on the edge of the exam table; my organs were cooking themselves inside my skin like marinated Shishkebob, like the cartoon chicken from the Cluckin Chicken sketch on SNL, roasting itself. There were tears in my eyes and I suddenly had a precious, fantastic vision of bashing my doctor's head into the blood pressure reader.
"How can there be nothing wrong?" I snapped. "I feel like burnt hair. I feel like when my best friend pushed me into a cactus in the 9th grade. Something's got to be wrong!"
"Well," said the doctor absently, as he typed information onto my online chart, "Muscle ailments are rare but not uncommon. Have you been exercising excessively?"
"No."
"Lifting anything heavy?"
"Seriously? With my entire body including the bottoms of my feet?"
"Well, it could be something like Lupus."
"Lupus!" My eyes went wide. "What the hell is Lupus?"
"A degenerative disease of the skin. Forget I said it."
"What?" Now my brain hurt, too. "Why the hell would you say it if you wanted me to immediately forget that you said it?"
"You wanted ideas."
I blinked in disbelief.
He cheerfully handed me a printed presciption and said, "Naproxen. Once every four hours. It's just like Aleve."
My teeth were grinding. "If it's just like Aleve why do I need a prescription? Can't I just buy some goddamn Aleve?"
"Sure you could," he said, as if talking to a small, stupid child, "But you wanted prescriptions."
Fantastic cubed.
Later that night, as I lay on the couch with my feet perched at a level above my head, painfully munching on a Naproxen cocktail and desperately telling myself that I was fine, perfectly fine, that I just needed some Aloe, that I should listen to the advice of the idiot doctor, I somehow lost the functioning of most everything below the waist. And I realized I needed not just one idiot doctor but a whole slew of idiot doctors, namely an idiot hospital - right as my lower half just shut down altogether, which in English language form I imagine would roughly translate to: "Fuck you, Jaime - fuck you and all your asshole vital organs. Fuck you in your stupid faces and/or nucleotides. Why the hell didn't you go to the ER two weeks ago?"
(CONEY ISLAND'S FAULT!)
Moving on.
The ER was a flurry of doctors and nurses and wide-eyed, frightened, wandering triage patients. As I had come in via ambulance and in howling, obnoxious pain, I had been given top priority, although not everyone moved through the system as fast. Occasionally, waiting patients would be given a bed or a room, although mostly they just wandered around like battered soldiers, stopping only to pester doctors and/or cough hysterically into the faces of other patients, until a nurse would finally come up and beg them: "Please sit, sir. Please cough into your hands, sir. Please, I'm begging you, stay away from the computers, sir." It was unsanitary, but in an ironic way; the Alanis Morrisette of Hospitals.
The beds were parked side by side, like the Citifield parking lot, and seperated by curtain. They faced flatscreen TVs bolted into the ceiling, and mostly, the flatscreens played snow - unless they played silent, snow-covered sports and news. Here is where I channeled all my nervous energy - into a fuzzy screen playing MLB scores over and over - and where I spent most of my Saturday afternoon's focus when I wasn't being rolled into one test or another; chained to the bed by IV, hooked up to a Foley, doped up on something magical called 'Dilaudin,' and desperately trying to read Keith Hernandez' lips through TV snow to see if the Mets had won.
"So when do I get to leave?" I asked the nurse.
"You have a lowgrade fever and an elevated white blood cell count,"she said. "We're not sure what's going on. We have to keep you here awhile. Run some tests."
"Well, it better not be AIDS," I joked. (Trying as I often do to allieviate seriousness with ill-timed and completely awful quips.)
"I'm sorry?"
"AIDS," I repeated.
"Do you want us to run an AIDS test, ma'am?"
"No. I was mostly kidding. I don't think I've slept with enough assholes yet to really get AIDS. But if you think it's AIDS, run the test. Just add it to my queue. Like a line at a theme park? Get it? Say, that'd be fun news to deliver to the last asshole I slept with, right? Hey, douchebag, guess what - I have AIDS! Except I don't. But we covered that already. Have you slept with many assholes? You know how it is with them. Shit, do you really think I could have AIDS?"
"What?"
"AIDS," I repeated louder, realizing I had only managed to sucessfully scare the shit out of myself.
"Ma'am, I just need to change your IV."
"But now I can't get AIDS out of my head. What if I have that? Why do I joke about these goddamn things?" She pushed the new IV into my arm and I sighed. "Jesus Christ, Diludad is amazing."
"It's Dilaudin, Ma'am."
"Whatever." I picked at my new IV. "It better not be AIDS."
About a thousand tests later and my sister finally returned to the hospital to check on me. She stood over me for the final test, a spinal tap, and afterwards, gave me her own diagnosis via text message: "Coney Island Fever Virus."
My (new) doctor's only slightly more informed diagnosis: "Meningitis." Except she had a look - kind of like the befuddled expression my dog gets when we sit together on the couch and I rant about Fox News. "It's Meningitis for sure, just... we don't understand the burning, and we can't tell where you got it from. And you've got something else, too. Or you must. Your symptoms are too weird otherwise. And if not, then we don't know what it is." And then: "Don't worry, you're not dying." Then a tiny laugh - as if terrifying me with vagueness was the joke. Ha ha? Suddenly I wished for Shannon, my improv teacher, to leap up and yell, "No! Where's the justification? Do it again, but this time don't be an asshole with your scene partner."
"Meningitis?" I said, "Are you fucking kidding me?"
"Don't worry, ma'am, it's viral, not bacterial."
"Meningitis?" I repeated. "Are you fucking kidding me?"
"No, Ma'am."
"Meningitis?! What the shit? Motherfucker. Shit. Shit shit. I need to call work. I won't be in on Monday. What else? Is it possible to get some dinner soon? I'm fucking starving." Then, hocked up on drugs, I promptly passed out. This was two am on July 10th. I would not see the outside world again until the 22nd.
The next day, my sister sat beside me in my isolation (sorry- PRIVATE) room wearing the blue decontamination gown my doctors had ordered her to wear - as if she had entered the underground medical bay in Independence Day ("there can be no peace between us! nooooo peeeeeeaaaaaaace!" Man I love that movie) - although I was reassured that I was not contagious. Even though my room had several specialty anti-bacterial scrub-down stations. Even though it practically had an airlock. Not contagious! Nonetheless. I was now an anomaly. A medical mystery. Someone you'd see on Gray's Anatomy, just without the deep dark secret from my past and Katherine Heigl being annoying and Dr. Bailey shooting witty insults at me. And as a result, I had a team of doctors working on me - all with no ideas.
My sister offered up more of her own theories - although hers hadn't changed much since the less fun version of Spinal Tap had offered me Meningitis instead of pithy 70s rock music:
"Who knows what was wandering around that Grateful Dead concert, Jaime. I bet you that chick with the beer was just passing shit out, just handing people beers and drugs and Meningitis. That'll teach you - never accept a beer from a stranger. Now you have Coney Island Meningitis."
(SEE?? IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT, CONEY ISLAND!)
Which brought to mind an image of - not rollercoasters or Luna Park - but the adorable monkey from Outbreak, who, with one accidental scratch, killed his nameless poacher and then 3/4ths of an entire California town. What if my desperate need to never be left out of the theme park fun had finally KILLED ME?
Fantastic to the fourth power.
One nice little trip and now I was that bikini clad idiot who'd poached a beer and as a result was the first to be afflicted with a mystery condition - and thus I wouldn't even get an awesome death scene like Kevin Spacey - I'd just get some gruesome cut-away before they incinerated my body and brought in Renee Russo. Fucking great. Thanks for the memories, Meningitis Island! See if I ever come back and ride your hundred year old roller coaster!
Le Sigh.
This we'll just call ground zero: the beginning: an innocent little trip to Coney Island that ended in HORROR. (So head on over to Coney Island, kids: where Meningitis will infect you and kill you. You hear me? IT WILL INFECT YOU AND KILL YOU.
Insert cheerful commercial for Coney Island.)
More Meningitis fun to come in Part Two...
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