Read Online One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir by Diane Ackerman - Free Book Online
Authors: Diane Ackerman
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cricket “whites.” Since cricket was a summer game, players wore white to stay cool in the afternoon sun. Long ago, his mother had knitted him a white cricket sweater, laddered with white cables, to protect her boy from the chill of early morning or evening play.
We existed among a host of pervasive clean smells: stale disinfectant, and heated bleach from the small armada of washing machines and dryers in the basement. Sometimes these were joined by the sweetness of infection; the cheesy smell of men’s sweat, the oniony smell of women’s; or sickbed urine that smelled of must, maple syrup, or rancid bacon. None of these oddities really mattered in the grand scheme of health vs. disease, but they jangled the senses, they didn’t inspire calm.
Strangers in a strange land, we slumbered among unfamiliar constellations. At night, too jittery to sleep but too tired to drive home, I sometimes roamed the empty hallways. Lightning-bug lights flashed from nearly invisible machines, green auroras swirled in the imaging rooms, dull light poured from the sconces of office windows, and in the larger wards, the nursing stations flickered with the St. Elmo’s fire of computer screens, on which I glimpsed parts of bodies parading: a CT scan of the abdomen, an MRI of the brain. I marveled at how computers can be trained to display the body three-dimensionally.
Then, returning to Paul’s room, I’d startle at every noise while I half slept in a reclining chair by his side, on the alert in case he needed help, in a room never quite dark enough to resemble night, with a gust of light from the hallway shining in like a low unmoving moon. Yellow, white, and red eyes blinked among the hanging vines of wires and tubes.
Phantom hospital staff entered the room throughout the night, in what sometimes looked like an alien abduction scene—Paul in bed, being probed by shadowy creatures inordinately interested in body fluids. I chuckled with a wave of black humor. He’d been fascinated by the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors ever since the summer day years ago when he swore he saw a cigar-shaped UFO hovering above him in the swimming pool, hugely present 1,000 feet above. He’d insisted that, with strips of windows visible, it looked nothing like a mirage or apparition, but floated tangible and still for several minutes, then streaked away at an unearthly speed. When he told me later about the sighting, I assumed it was military, experimental. Not he. And now here he was, brain-rattled, and peered at by creatures dressed all in green or white, some wearing oddly shaped hats or coats, inspected in darkness by alien hands.
Each morning, Paul woke up confused, his sense of time and place utterly muddled. Strangers spiraled around him like flies pestering a wound, the standard hospital routine of people barging into a patient’s room at odd hours to check vital signs and inject or remove fluids. They came from everywhere, unannounced, this remedy of aides and nurses, sometimes with a nursing student in tow. As shifts changed, each new nurse breezed in with stethoscope and blood pressure cuff to do a physical exam, take temperature, listen to lungs and heart, attach a snakehead-shaped clamp to one finger to test oxygen level, and prick another finger to test blood sugar. Later to reappear with a syringe to give a jab of insulin. Doctors swept in for consultation, and I was afraid to leave the room for fear of missing them. At least once, a social worker glided in with notebook and questions: “How would you describe your support group?” “How many stairs do you need to climb to get into your house?” “Do you have a house with one or multiple floors?”
At times they seemed to arrive like a long line of leaf-cutter ants, carrying not clipboards but kite-like bits of leaves to use as compost in their fungus gardens. A cacophony of caregivers. Speech therapists. Physical therapists. A dietary specialist brought menus to be filled
We existed among a host of pervasive clean smells: stale disinfectant, and heated bleach from the small armada of washing machines and dryers in the basement. Sometimes these were joined by the sweetness of infection; the cheesy smell of men’s sweat, the oniony smell of women’s; or sickbed urine that smelled of must, maple syrup, or rancid bacon. None of these oddities really mattered in the grand scheme of health vs. disease, but they jangled the senses, they didn’t inspire calm.
Strangers in a strange land, we slumbered among unfamiliar constellations. At night, too jittery to sleep but too tired to drive home, I sometimes roamed the empty hallways. Lightning-bug lights flashed from nearly invisible machines, green auroras swirled in the imaging rooms, dull light poured from the sconces of office windows, and in the larger wards, the nursing stations flickered with the St. Elmo’s fire of computer screens, on which I glimpsed parts of bodies parading: a CT scan of the abdomen, an MRI of the brain. I marveled at how computers can be trained to display the body three-dimensionally.
Then, returning to Paul’s room, I’d startle at every noise while I half slept in a reclining chair by his side, on the alert in case he needed help, in a room never quite dark enough to resemble night, with a gust of light from the hallway shining in like a low unmoving moon. Yellow, white, and red eyes blinked among the hanging vines of wires and tubes.
Phantom hospital staff entered the room throughout the night, in what sometimes looked like an alien abduction scene—Paul in bed, being probed by shadowy creatures inordinately interested in body fluids. I chuckled with a wave of black humor. He’d been fascinated by the possibility of extraterrestrial visitors ever since the summer day years ago when he swore he saw a cigar-shaped UFO hovering above him in the swimming pool, hugely present 1,000 feet above. He’d insisted that, with strips of windows visible, it looked nothing like a mirage or apparition, but floated tangible and still for several minutes, then streaked away at an unearthly speed. When he told me later about the sighting, I assumed it was military, experimental. Not he. And now here he was, brain-rattled, and peered at by creatures dressed all in green or white, some wearing oddly shaped hats or coats, inspected in darkness by alien hands.
Each morning, Paul woke up confused, his sense of time and place utterly muddled. Strangers spiraled around him like flies pestering a wound, the standard hospital routine of people barging into a patient’s room at odd hours to check vital signs and inject or remove fluids. They came from everywhere, unannounced, this remedy of aides and nurses, sometimes with a nursing student in tow. As shifts changed, each new nurse breezed in with stethoscope and blood pressure cuff to do a physical exam, take temperature, listen to lungs and heart, attach a snakehead-shaped clamp to one finger to test oxygen level, and prick another finger to test blood sugar. Later to reappear with a syringe to give a jab of insulin. Doctors swept in for consultation, and I was afraid to leave the room for fear of missing them. At least once, a social worker glided in with notebook and questions: “How would you describe your support group?” “How many stairs do you need to climb to get into your house?” “Do you have a house with one or multiple floors?”
At times they seemed to arrive like a long line of leaf-cutter ants, carrying not clipboards but kite-like bits of leaves to use as compost in their fungus gardens. A cacophony of caregivers. Speech therapists. Physical therapists. A dietary specialist brought menus to be filled
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