After the Stroke

by May Sarton

  Will the time come when I can listen to Mozart again? What keeps me from playing records, like a finger across my mouth? The fear of a complete howling crack-up? Or that poetry would then seize me and shake me to pieces like a wild animal with prey? Who knows?

  Friday, June 20

  I’m entering a new phase. Monday and Tuesday were very hard days. On Monday I simply stayed in bed, feeling too sick to make the effort even of getting up. Nancy, the wise one, persuaded me to call Dr. Petrovich’s office and tell one of the nurses, who said at once, “We’ll find time tomorrow for you to see the doctor,” and it was set for four-thirty. When he saw how upset I was, and close to despair because of never feeling well, he suddenly asked, “How would you like to have the cardioversion tomorrow?” It felt like a reprieve and of course I hummed with hope and said, “Yes, by all means.”

  [Cardioversion is an electric shock which often gets the heart back in sync when it has been fibrillating. Of course I was a little nervous lying on a narrow bed in Intensive Care for a half-hour or so before Dr. Petrovich arrived and the machinery could be set up. Then I was alone again and by now quite tense.

  I decided to invent a game of visualizing, a flower perhaps, but finally I decided on Pierrot’s face and slowly brought it into focus in my mind, thinking, “It looks like a crumpled pansy,” and I smiled because it really does. I felt pleased to have invented a device against nervous tension.

  When the cardioversion finally took place I was anaesthetized for a few seconds and it was over.] Dr. Petrovich said, “It’s fine. It’s done the trick!” Euphoria! I was a prisoner set free. And for an hour I lay there in bliss waiting for a sandwich and a glass of milk—it was near two.

  But then when a nurse brought me the pill, Amiodoroni, the one that makes me ill, I realized I was being asked to go back to hell. It was a traumatic reversal and a storm of tears popped out of me. Late that night, around nine-thirty, after I had gone to sleep, now in a private room with the same lovely view I had had before of a line of trees against the sky, Dr. Petrovich came in. Yes, I have to take the pill or have another stroke. The hardest thing psychologically to take is that he does not believe this drug makes me sick. He insisted it was the fibrillation that did. So I am on the drug, one a day for a week, then one every other day.

  Dr. Gilroy also came in to see me and said if I am still as miserable in two or three weeks to go and see him. This was comforting.

  I woke to nausea and begged for something to help, and they did give me something which unfortunately made me very groggy all day.

  Edythe fetched me at the hospital and it was a help to have her here last night. We had fun making a homey supper together of corned beef hash with a poached egg and a little salad, half a grapefruit for dessert. We watched Pierrot play.

  But that night in the hospital when I lay and tried to face what must be accepted, I realized that a kind of aloneness is with me now. I have to curl up deep down inside myself. For the moment I have no energy even for the telephone. This is a new phase as I wrote at the start today—a phase in which I am more alone than ever before.

  A steady downpour outside this morning matches my mood and I rather like this wild, wet world.

  Monday, June 23

  Again Saturday and Sunday I gave up and stayed in bed. I see clearly that the psychological problem is that I see no change—with an operation one gets better, some hard days, but the movement is there towards healing. If I had terminal cancer I would be on my way elsewhere, movement of another kind. But for five months I have been on a plateau of misery.

  So something has to change and I have made an appointment with Dr. Gilroy for tomorrow.

  York Hospital, Tuesday, June 24

  As agreed I stopped in at Dr. Petrovich’s office yesterday morning for Lucy to give me more pills—Amiodoroni—and to listen to my heart. She was upset to find it was back fibrillating and called Dr. Petrovich at once—he has put me back in the hospital, has put me on three-a-day of the pill and will do another cardioversion of the heart on Saturday. I was happy to be back in shelter again, not responsible for anything—for Sunday evening I had got stupidly exhausted catching Pierrot—it’s his evening game to run in and out of the bushes playing hide-and-seek. Before that I had chased a huge gray squirrel off the big feeders eight times, running out with Tamas behind me, barking—and back again out of breath. I shall be missing the peonies at their height, but the truth is I have been too sick to enjoy the garden or to pick flowers. I can hardly believe it.

  What I have enjoyed is the wonderful silence at night—the steady throb of tree frogs and crickets and far away the long crescendos of gentle surf as the tide rises and ebbs. So it is not silence but a soothing, comfortably peaceful sound.

  But here in the hospital I look out again on the line of trees which were leafless in April and are now rich and dense in their leaves, great green humps against the sky.

  I have been pretty depressed because it looked as though there were no avenue open from this plateau of illness I have lived on for months. But when Dr. Petrovich came in yesterday after lunch, he told me that there is still a last resort for which I would have to go to Massachusetts General for an operation that would readjust the heartbeat and make possible a pacemaker. So I have a new hope. Another few weeks, and maybe.…

  Yesterday I finished Frances Partridge’s last journal, Nothing Left To Lose. I hated so much to finish it and may read it again. A journal like this becomes a whole life one lives with, and in it I saw very well that what makes a good journal so moving is not the big events but tea in the garden or its equivalent.

  York Hospital, Wednesday, June 25

  I feel drugged and exhausted today, but if it is the effect of the tranquilizer I am now taking three times a day with Amiodoroni, it is at least better than the previous nausea and pain.

  Outside I look out happily on the green mounds of the trees moving slowly in the wind—and a sky full of lovely wind clouds. The hospital is heaven, I am so tired. But I have nothing as good as Partridge to read. Helen Waddell is too long, and a newly translated South American novel Joan Palevsky sent a bit too much for me in my present mood.

  Thursday, June 26

  Difficulty in breathing, so I have oxygen now but the heartbeat is still 110–120—and am very glad to be in the safe cocoon of the hospital again.

  York Hospital, Sunday, June 29

  The second heart conversion was done about eight-thirty yesterday morning—again a success, and feeling so well all day, able to breathe and think of what life can be like again, if this time the conversion sticks. Heartbeat 84 this morning (it reached 130 after I got to the hospital).

  Yesterday I finished the biography of Helen Waddell—and am glad I had it with me. How she grew and “enlarged the place of her tent” yet remained always centered in a demanding and illuminating faith in an order in the universe, in a reason for what seemed often in her private life like deprivation. She says it often:

  The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilizing of it. No human soul can for long ignore “the giant agony of the world” and live except indeed the mollusc life, like a barricade upon eternity. (p. 297)

  And later in a letter to her sister Meg:

  Because if one loves, one really isn’t lonely; it is the unloving heart that is always cold, and has no fire to warm itself at. “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and he that loveth is born of God and knoweth God”. Don’t tell me there are theological explanations of it—that the love must be “in Christ.” He that loveth—knoweth God. Which means when the heart goes out to anything, it is, in that moment, close to God.

  York Hospital, Monday, June 30

  A bad night, about three hours sleep because one hour after I was in deep sleep I was wrenched awake by a male nurse to take my blood pressure, etc. It was then eleven (a nurse had done it at nine-thirty). At one-fifteen I asked for another pill, maybe sl
ept by three, and meanwhile went into a tail-spin of depression. To manage such a passive waiting life for so many months I have had to bury my real self—and now realize that bringing that real self back is going to be even more difficult than it was to bury it. The fact is that in this state of accidie there is nothing I look forward to, no one I long to see or be with—Bramble haunted me and her loss came back with great poignance. With her death some secret wild place in me has gone. Shall I ever find it again?

  The counterpoint for this time of negation and nothingness has been the curious combination of an almost daily call from Pat Keen in Los Angeles with news of Nicholas Nickleby, which is having a great and deserved triumph there, and my call to Juliette Huxley. Juliette had the courage at eighty-nine to fly to Crete alone for two weeks. She came home to a heat wave in London! But the reviews of her splendid autobiography are good and she sounded very much on a wave of relief when I called her yesterday morning.

  The contrast between these two friends, so much alike in the struggle, and my snail-like existence is ridiculous. I want to be well.

  I note a typical hospital day which begins at:

  7:00 A.M.

  —

  male night nurse brings Metamucil and orange juice

  7:30 A.M.

  —

  brush teeth, nurse comes with pills and to take my temperature, etc.

  8:00 A.M.

  —

  breakfast

  8:25 A.M.

  —

  nurse to do a rhythm test of my heart

  8:30 A.M.

  —

  Edythe with the mail. Pat calls from L. A. while she is here, and when she leaves for a moment I let all the frustrations and grief out

  8:45 A.M.

  —

  a wheel chair to take me to Cardiology for an “echo” test

  9:15 A.M.

  —

  longing to get a snooze but it’s time for a shower and the nurse makes my bed while I’m having it

  9:30–

  10:30 A.M.

  —

  read the mail and papers

  11:30 A.M.

  —

  Nancy comes

  12 Noon

  —

  lunch

  12:30 P.M.

  —

  Dr. Petrovich

  1:00 P.M.

  —

  maid to clean room, nurse for vital signs and pills

  Finally from 1:30 to 3:00 go fast asleep and have a vivid dream of Louise Bogan

  3:00 P.M.

  —

  Gail, nurse, comes in to take vital signs

  4:00 P.M.

  —

  Edythe with wonderful ice cream and we have a little walk

  Tuesday, July 1

  Home again. I feel disoriented, without an identity. What a strange time this is, all told. Watering the flowers helped. I think one trouble is that I feel disassociated from the garden. Karen is doing such a good job, but it’s not my garden these days. I look and admire but am not connected.

  I cooked the salmon for our supper. Edythe will stay over this first night “at home.” Salmon, mayonnaise, boiled potatoes, peas, and hot fudge sauce on vanilla ice cream. A feast, as at the end I could not swallow the hospital food.

  Wednesday, July 2

  Heavy persistent rain—and it is good to resume my old pattern and routine—to make a small start at least at living my real life again. Pierrot slept beside me, stretched out full length and purring very loudly, and that was a help last night. Now I look at the piles and piles of letters—and wonder—it’s an insoluble problem at this point, so maybe just pull one or two out by chance.

  I have nothing exhilarating to read at the moment. How impoverished a town York is without a single bookstore! There were two when I first came here. I’m feeling the emptiness of six months with almost no outside stimulation. I haven’t been in a shop or bookstore all that time, or out to dinner except once, and have seen only my entourage of Nancy, Edythe and Janice—and Pat the two weeks she was here, in which I was, I’m afraid, mostly in a kind of trance—just trying to keep things going in the house. I do look back with joy on our good long talks at tea time.

  Edith Kennedy, the most brilliant conversationalist I have known, used to talk about “the frame of reference.” With most of my friends here, dear as they are, the frame of reference is very small in scope. When it suddenly widens what a joy it is! And I think back to such a moment when I had supper in New York with Marguerite and Jacques Barzun and we were talking of the Mozart film—and he and I leapt together remembering Yvonne Printemps in Sacha Guitry’s delicious “Mozart” perhaps fifty years ago in Paris! What a bond to be with someone who remembered it and Printemps’ aria:

  Si tu m’écris

  Dis-moi toujours que tu t’ennuies

  horriblement

  Mozart sang it in farewell to three court ladies, each of whom might have been his mistress. But which one? That was the piquancy of the scene.

  Pat is dear to me partly because the frame of reference between us is very wide. She has read enormously—and there is the theater, too—and Jung—and all that a European woman has in her blood.

  Thursday, July 3

  It’s still gray, cold and miserable after yesterday’s deluge and I feel tired and cross—bored by this half-life, and not quite ready, perhaps, for a full one.

  Pierrot is proving to be a problem—using my bathroom mat at night although he has a pan in my bedroom close by So I again threw the bath mat in the washer—and we shall see. This time I forced him to smell it and spanked him. Meanwhile Tamas, who is always so good, had had diarrhea in the night and there were three rugs to clean up downstairs!

  But I’m determined to get something done at my desk, for morale’s sake.

  Friday, July 4

  Statue of Liberty day! It has been quite a celebration and I feel proud this time of the media who really made an effort to talk about the hell Ellis Island was. We, my mother and I, came that way and she would never talk about it, she had been so terribly humiliated. The miracle is that the great waves of “foreigners”—Irish, Italians, Greeks, Jews—really have been assimilated. I must say, too, that in spite of my nostalgia for Europe I am glad to be an American. Among other good things, to write in English. But for World War I, I should have been a Belgian poet in a tiny country divided between two languages.

  It’s been a lovely quiet day; the only sound, the sea gulls crying and the murmur of ocean. I felt rather sick after lunch—dreading the return of that awful feeling from the drug, but maybe it will grow less—and maybe Dr. Petrovich will reduce the dose to one every other day. I think I can handle that.

  I’m really getting ready for the fall trips—hoping against hope I shall be able to do them. Rather dismayed to find how far Burlington, Vermont, is—where I’m due September twenty-fourth for a reading. I had imagined Edythe might drive me there. But it looks as though I would have to take a plane from Boston.

  Pierrot has been very affectionate all day and last night behaved himself, thank goodness. The great adventure was going for a walk. He bounds or rather tears after or ahead of us, then gets frightened and wails until I call him. When a motorcar passed us very slowly he was terrified and disappeared entirely. I called and called, heard no mews—and was quite anxious, but there he was waiting for us when we got home, Tamas and I.

  I found a tick under my knee. They have been the worst ever this year, but had seemed to be over lately. How repulsive they are!

  Saturday, July 5

  An in and out day—but there’s no doubt that having to pull oneself together is a help. Heidi had agreed to meet me at Barnacle Billy’s for lunch, so I had an incentive to get things done and did a laundry, swept the kitchen, took rubbish down cellar (luckily Raymond was here when I got back from lunch so it was all ready for him to take).

  Sunday, July 6

  Horbible muggy gray day. I got up full of determination at five-thirt
y, let Tamas out, made bacon for Sunday breakfast for Tamas and me. Pierrot was out bird watching. After breakfast, put fresh sheets on my bed and washed and folded the dirty ones—and meanwhile had decided to make ratatouille before the ingredients Edythe got for me rotted. It took nearly an hour to cut everything up and get it started—so I can finish the cooking tonight now the work is done. All very well, but now it is nine forty-five and I am thinking of taking a nap instead of writing letters!

  I had such a good talk with Carol on the phone just before six—she thinks I am right to go out and do poetry readings whatever the risk. That gave me a boost. I think she understands my slow starvation these past months and reading the poems will help give me back the person I have lost.

  Carol was interesting about Frances Partridge—saying she was never the central person to herself—and that I have been that and am that. Yes, if I can write poetry again—ever again. For to be the central person for oneself implies that one is somehow the servant of something greater than oneself.

  Wednesday, July 9

  Well, the old heart is out of sync, fibrillating and running about 140 a minute—so I’m back to square one and determined to get Dr. Petrovich to agree on the operation at Massachusetts General which would free me, I hope, from the long struggle.

  We are having a heat wave, although today there is less humidity and it is quite bearable.