Not so in the claustrophobia canon. Those people haven’t seen shit. They haven’t laughed or texted or touched a blade of grass in years. When we watch these films, we adopt their experience, trying it on like a tight coat. And suddenly it’s as if all the documentaries and romantic comedies and thrillers no longer exist, not for us and not for them. This is the essence of their appeal. We do not so much binge-watch them as purge-watch them, spewing the tapestry of our complicated lives onto their threadbare ones. It’s why, if you are healthy, you walk out of the theater with a newfound appreciation for your life. And if you are unhealthy? It’s as if someone has put horse blinders on you for a couple hours and said, “Here, miss the world a little less.”
*
Then it was six weeks. Everything slowed to a crawl. I’d written nothing. Well, almost nothing. A nameless document on my computer read:
The desire to be healthy is different from the desire not to be sick.
Sheryl @ BlueCross
One assumes those lines are operating on two distinct planes of thought. I don’t think Sheryl @ BlueCross told me that. Though, really, she could have.
*
I made my way back to Dr. Goldfinger, who had me walk up and down his hallway, touching my nose. The only conclusion he drew was that I was definitely sober. I did not tell him that I had also managed to cheat on him with a second ENT, who had unceremoniously shoved a fiber-optic cable up my nostrils and gave me no new information in return. It felt tawdry, leaving my copay on someone else’s nightstand. This woman billed herself as an “ear specialist.” It saddened me to think of Dr. Goldfinger knowing precisely one-third as much about the human ear.
“I think we should send you for an MRI,” Dr. Goldfinger said, as I walked back to him in a straight line. “Just to rule things out.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “let us rule out all the things.”
*
The severity of any medical condition can be measured in paper clothing. If you’re given an open-backed gown, you’re fine. If you’re given an open-backed gown and a giant napkin, you’re fine but you’re at the gynecologist’s office. So that’s not ideal. If you’re given an open-backed gown and paper slippers, you’re in a hospital. If you’re given an open-backed gown, paper slippers, and a hair cap, your organs are about to be harvested because you’re a clone of a wealthier person who needs your parts.
“What’s this for?” I asked, clutching the hair cap.
“Safety,” the technician replied, a catchall for every object ever invented.
Getting one’s hair caught inside the tracks of an MRI machine is just the kind of nightmare scenario that should have made it into the movies by now. Just look what modern cinema has done with the tanning bed—and there’s nothing wrong with those characters aside from their desire to get into a tanning bed.
I knew the trick was to keep my eyes closed so that I didn’t see the proximity of a coffin lid to my face. Just before he slid me in, the technician handed me a button with a cord attached “in case.” In case I had a panic attack and needed to be yanked out. I was also given foam earplugs to dampen the noise. Foam earplugs are the gummy vitamins of soundproofing—you’d have to pour cement in your ears not to hear an MRI. I pretended I was at some kind of art installation, maybe at the Guggenheim, where one floor melds into the next. The first floor sounded like a game-show buzzer. The second, like ducks quacking while someone scrubbed tiles with steel wool. The top floor was a train barreling over the tracks of a small town. Then, suddenly, the noises stopped and the technician’s voice came through a speaker:
“We happy in there?”
“Yes?” I guessed.
Realizing my synapses were on display on the other side of the wall, I began trying to stimulate them. I imagine this is about as effective as running around the block before a physical. I counted backward from 200. I engaged in disturbing thought experiments like: Who would I save in a fire, my cat or the uppity barista at my coffee shop? I tried replicating the feelings of infatuation I felt for ex-boyfriends, taking imaginary tours of their apartments, trying to remember which posters and paintings had gone on which walls. All in the name of having attractive synapses. Which, come to think of it, is just the kind of thinking that ended most of those relationships.
Afterward, I waited for Dr. Goldfinger in his office, studying the medical degrees hanging proudly above the hazardous-waste bin. During my last visit, I had made a point of complimenting his pants. They were brown with blue pinstripes. Very stylish for a doctor. Then it dawned on both of us that the reason I had the chance to study them was because he had just rotated my head parallel with his crotch.
“Thank you,” Dr. Goldfinger said, clearing his throat. “They’re Banana Republic.”
“Well, they’re great,” I said, addressing his penis. “Do you have them in different colors?”
I could not, for the life of me, stop talking about the pants. I vowed to keep my mouth shut this time. So when he came in sporting a pair of red corduroys, I tried not to smile.
“I have some not-so-hot news,” he announced.
Then I didn’t have to try. Dr. Goldfinger explained that, after ruling out everything else and factoring in my range of symptoms, it was clear I had more than vertigo. The good news: I did not have a brain tumor. The bad news: I do have a funny little disease called Ménière’s, which sounds like a pastry but is the opposite of a pastry.
Dr. Goldfinger explained that, unlike vertigo, Ménière’s disease is relatively rare. There are about 200,000 cases in the United States. Though I will say 200,000 feels like an awful lot when you’re one of them. In addition to the vertigo, the hallmarks of Ménière’s are a feeling of fullness in the ears (as if they need to be popped), relentless dizziness, and spontaneous vomiting. There is no cure and no one can predict the duration of an attack. Some people get it for hours, others for years. Attacks amass over time, damaging the cilia in your inner ear a little more, culminating in deafness.
“Sorry, what?”
Dr. Goldfinger twisted on his rolling stool.
“Van Gogh had Ménière’s,” he offered.
And look how that turned out, I thought.
Naturally, I was upset. The idea of having something so permanent is upsetting. But in the moment, it felt more like a surprise adoption. As if this disease had been living its life somewhere else, with someone else, and due to unforeseen circumstances, I was now its guardian. I could not understand that it was a part of me, but I could understand that it would entail a change of plans. Which might explain why my first reaction was to tell Dr. Goldfinger that I had recently decided to become proficient in a musical instrument, specifically the violin. I felt my life would be greatly enriched if I could learn to play just one piece. Now what was I supposed to do?
“You’re concerned with how this might affect your prospects for playing an instrument you’ve never played?”
“I played it in the third grade,” I corrected him.
“Well, I wouldn’t spend too much time thinking about that. People with severe Ménière’s are on disability. They’re really screwed. You have a low-grade version of the disease.”
“Ménière’s lite?” I asked, hopeful, lifting my head.
“Exactly,” he said, blithely burying the lead. “I’m doubtful you’ll go deaf deaf.”
I didn’t want to go any number of deafs.
“It could be worse,” he said. “It could be cancer.”
This was not the first time Dr. Goldfinger suggested I appreciate my place on the mortality spectrum. I have seen cancer. I’m perfectly aware of the difference between it and everything else. But this is not caveman times. The expression doesn’t go: “At least you have some portion of your health.” Though I suppose we can’t fault our doctors for their skewed view of us. Most of the people with whom they interact have something wrong with them. The patient after me probably came in with his nose in his pocket.
“Okay,” I sighed. “What
’s next?”
“Next we address this empirically.”
“Play it by ear, huh?”
He looked pretty disgusted for a man with a literal Rorschach painting in his waiting room.
“First,” he explained, “we have to correct the fluid imbalance in your inner ear, which is exacerbating the vertigo. Which means no caffeine and very low salt.”
“For how long?”
“For always,” he said, “and you’ll take a diuretic every day. You’ll basically pee all the time.”
“Jesus,” I said, blinking at him, “could this be any less fun?”
“Maybe lay off the alcohol, too.”
*
Everyone knows WebMD is a Choose Your Own Adventure book in which all roads lead to death. This did not stop me from doing a “cursory” (hours upon hours) exploration of Ménière’s. Alas, I could find little in the way of long-form testimony about it, which has a kind of knock-knock logic: We’re all too dizzy to type. But since when does the outside world’s lack of interest in medical writing stop people from writing it? Surely I wasn’t the only person with a keyboard to be fascinated by my own ailment. I even went on celebritieswithyourdisease.com, which is in desperate need of an editorial director. Under “Mental Illness” there are a mere six names, and one of them is Jean-Claude Van Damme. It would be like finding out the only other person on the planet who shared your birthday was Mandy Moore and trying to extract meaning from that.
Desperate for comrades in affliction, I decided to delve into the Internet’s answer to open-mic night: chat forums. Alas, uncommon diseases make for disheartening online experiences. There just aren’t enough of us for a quorum. Pleas for assistance are sent up like flares and answered too vaguely (Have you tried Dramamine?) or too specifically (Turns out my TMJ was making it worse, so I got a night guard). Most suggestions are doled out months after the original cry for help. Hope you feel better soon! Soon? What soon? That person has probably fallen off a cliff by now. Then there are the comments with questionable emoji use (I’ve been on the diuretics for a month and now I piss fluorescent ☺), ones whose targets are misplaced (I had to give my dog to my boyfriend, who left me for my former “best friend” and now she has my boyfriend and my dog. Screw Ménière’s!), or ones that have stumbled into the wrong solar system altogether (What brand of dust buster does everybody use?).
The limited promise of comfort was everywhere. It was in the recipes for sodium-free bread (an affront to God’s plan), in the links to studies from 1998, in the clip art of cartoon animals conked out and seeing stars. These were uploaded to Facebook by some guy named Gary, who was forced into early retirement by Ménière’s. Isolated in his affliction, Gary was probably microwaving a plain baked potato in a condominium somewhere. Maybe Gary and I would not be pals in real life, but we shared a common frailty now.
“I’m sorry you’re feeling poorly,” I wrote to him. “Hang in there.”
Gary never replied. Which was okay. I hadn’t given him much to work with. But our lack of correspondence was emblematic of my frustration with the community at large. I’m glad these spaces exist—it’s taxing to spend your life explaining your weird illness on top of coping with it. But the more I read, the more put off I became. What I found was not a dialogue but wallowing masquerading as guidance. People driven to write social media posts about their disease have the tendency to treat it like religion or gender, a fundamental tenet of how they want to be categorized. They hashtag their pain. They howl at it without discussing it, without caring much for the response—behavior that would be considered intolerable if they were talking about absolutely anything else. I found myself shame-reading the words of people sicker than I was, cringing at the sad faces that punctuated their sentences. I wanted to distance myself from them because I couldn’t distance myself from my own body. No club that would have me as a member, no thank you. It is only in retrospect that I can appreciate the heart of what they were saying: This is who we are now. There is no invisible door for us. We will never break character again.
*
That which does not kill us makes us stronger: an idea that started with Nietzsche, got laundered through a century of throw pillows, and came out through the mouth of Kanye West. Suffice to say, Nietzsche didn’t actually mean that adversity is the best thing for you. The world’s most infamous nihilist was not about to encourage self-betterment. And yet this is exactly what we mean when we say it. It’s certainly how Dr. Goldfinger meant it.
He had called to check on my progress (Goldfinger, not Nietzsche). For weeks, I had been eating like a heart patient. I had been sleeping at an angle and hydrating myself into a puddle. I had learned that monitoring one’s salt intake is a glimpse into the time-sucking logistics of having an eating disorder. Your hours are spent either thinking about food or purposefully not thinking about food. There is no safe restaurant in which to let loose and order what you want, no designated low-sodium section of any health food store. Products are scattered willy-nilly. You just have to study the nutritional information of everything you touch, as if buying a box of cookies is the biggest decision of your life.
“You’ll get used to it,” Dr. Goldfinger assured me, as if I had a choice.
This was not some exotic destination that I would one day leave and report back on. This was my home now. But I would adapt the same way one adapts to a new country, to new customs, to new consequences of new laws. Given enough time, the drama drains, the days even out, and life resumes again.
I heard drilling on the other end of the line.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Oh,” Dr. Goldfinger said, “there’s construction in the hallway. I don’t even hear it anymore.”
Then it was two months.
One afternoon, I felt brave enough to take a walk. As I bent down to tie my shoes, I froze. Something was different. Something had gone dormant. I stood up gradually, feeling the joy of stillness shoot through my nerves, afraid to scare it off. Then I went on a bending rampage. I picked things up and put them back down. I sat on all the furniture, marking my territory. I lay on my bed with my head hanging over the edge and flailed around like someone being exorcised. I moved to my desk chair and pretended someone behind me had just called my name. And here, I surprised myself. I did not take it for granted. I did not forget. I stood up and twirled around the living room like they do in the movies, and when I stopped, the world stopped with me.
Wolf
First, I blame my phone. My e-mail is coming in but not going out and such glitches can generally be attributed to one’s phone. And to the vaguely mystical forces that exist in order to show us how terrible it is to check e-mail in bed first thing in the morning. But after minutes of pawing at settings, I notice my website isn’t working either. So I call up GoDaddy, to see what the trouble is. Like most people, I have limited interaction with my domain host. They are like the DMV or real estate brokers, who become, for brief and tedious moments, a part of your life. But as much as I have not felt compelled to check in with them, they have felt compelled to check in with me. For weeks, they have been trying to reach me via a Hotmail account that I let go to seed years ago. Unable to bill a canceled credit card, they emailed again and again, each time expecting a different result—which is the colloquial definition of insanity but okay. Now my name itself, my license plate since the inconvenient days of childhood, has been put up for auction.
“No problem,” I tell the customer service representative, demonstrating a staggering mix of denial and ease, “just take it down.”
This strikes me as a no-brainer. Perhaps this belies a lack of self-confidence, but how many people are lined up for sloanecrosley.com? I’ve always thought of personal domain names as sentimental objects, of value to precisely one person.
“We don’t have it anymore,” says the customer service rep.
“Well, who does?”
“That depends.”
Am I supposed to guess? What am I, a w
izard?
It turns out a person or entity, a noun of some kind, has already purchased the site. No small part of me is amused by the idea of anyone acquiring my website. Apparently, I am the kind of person who would see getting burglarized as a reflection of the quality of her belongings first and as an invasion second. But my comprehension of the situation is still loading. I ask the same question—Wait, what happened?—over and over, thinking this guy is withholding the solution. Now who’s colloquially insane?
Unsure of how to further assist me, he transfers me to GoDaddy’s domain brokerage department, where a fellow named Adam gives it to me straight. Right now, my domain is being reassigned to the new owner and, while said owner’s information should be readily available, it isn’t. The Internet is still churning. I inform Adam that I’ve intermittently been able to crack into my e-mail, which shocks him as much as it does not shock me. My identity doesn’t want to let go of me any more than I want to let go of it.
“This is how it will work,” Adam continues. “I will make contact with the new owner and negotiate the best price possible. Usually it’s a few hundred dollars but it varies. You would pay that plus a twenty percent commission.”
I have questions. Setting aside the eye twitching I experience at alien terminology like “make contact,” how is Adam incentivized to negotiate on my behalf if he’s getting a commission?
“If it makes you feel any better,” he says, “I’m not getting the money.”
It does not make me feel better. Adam I like. If I could fix this by putting two hundred bucks in a paper bag and shipping it to a sympathetic man in a call center in Iowa, I would. It’s the corporate overlords I have a problem with. GoDaddy is not the only company ever invented. If you miss a payment with Verizon, they hunt you down like an animal. They don’t wait it out, tapping SOS into a tin can. And whatever happened to robocalls? And how dare he back me into defending Verizon.
Adam tells me these are solid points (into the suggestion box they go!) but none of them are libelous. My domain has been acquired by a third party through legitimate means. There is nothing GoDaddy can do except help me get it back.
Look Alive Out There Page 14
