Read Online One Hundred Names for Love: A Memoir by Diane Ackerman - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Diane Ackerman
Ads: Link
out, even if the patient couldn’t speak, write, or read. Food service delivered plastic trays, returning later to collect them. A brawny man or woman pushing a wheelchair, to escort Paul to the imaging department for an X-ray, CAT scan, or echocardiogram. A technician with an ultrasound machine and cold jelly to smear on his chest, before peering at his heart through a cloudy window of flesh. People scrupulously measured everything entering or leaving his body, all food and liquids, urine and bowel movements.
I could tell the randomly arriving citizenry annoyed Paul. He was always a bit of a hermit, who found dinner parties particularly unnerving. “You never know whom you’ll get trapped next to!” he’d protest. Paul enjoyed his students, and whenever he did socialize, he spoke amiably and well with people. He always looked forward to chatting with the handyman, a salty ex-sailor who’d served in Korea and fathered eight children. Some dinner parties he welcomed, like Carl Sagan’s fiftieth birthday party, where we sat across the table from Hans Bethe (pronounced BAY-ta), the physicist who had figured out how the sun shines. Paul delighted in the revelations of science, but novelists have their own brand of physics, in which they re-create the process of life through a whole register of intricate, almost-touchable images and events.
“What are you writing?” Bethe had asked him.
“A novel. At the moment, the main character is constructing a Milky Way in his basement.”
Much to Paul’s amusement, Bethe had mischievously replied, “A working model?”
I still relish the day, at the local airport years later, when Paul and I happened to be in line behind nonagenarian Bethe at the ticket counter, and overheard the clerk say to him, slowly and in a louder voice than needed, as if he were carrying an invisible ear trumpet and must, at his age, be lost in senility:
“Now, Mr. Beth-ee , you’ll be arriving at Gate 21 in Pittsburgh and going to Gate number 27. That’s six gates away.”
A small bemused smile had flitted across Bethe’s creased and age-freckled face. “Oh, I think I can do the math,” he’d said.
Such events seemed eons in the past. Post-stroke, Paul didn’t want to see anyone but me. Being swarmed over in the hospital was a recipe for exhaustion in a person who was feeling well, let alone someone speechless, anxious, and baffled. And there was no relief outside his room, either in the hallways or in group therapy, where, against his will, he was asked to mix with other rehab patients, whose afflictions reminded him of his own.
Just as big cities can deplete you with their noise and crowds and sheer sensory overload, a hospital can exhaust you, as its changing faces and personalities blur and strangers wake you repeatedly. Like all post-stroke patients, Paul really needed rest to recover from the massive injury to his brain. But he also needed to start flexing his mind as soon as possible. So, should he rest his brain or exercise it after the stroke? Both, I figured.
It’s like a knee replacement patient being encouraged to climb out of bed and churn his leg around the day after surgery. Cycling the post-op knee hurts and is fatiguing, as is pushing an inflamed brain. Even a healthy brain is constantly balancing between arousal and rest. If life is too stimulating, it seeks relaxation, if it’s too boring it craves stimuli (skating on a blade-edge between too much excitement and too little). A perfect balance is possible to imagine, but impossible to reach, so one is always trembling along an arc from too excited to too bored and back again. Everything we love most—be it sweetheart or flower—looks majestic because it seems to be trembling out of balance.
While Paul napped, I wandered through the Rehab Unit, which lay on the second floor in the east wing of the hospital. Beyond a head nurse’s office and supply room, an open bay gave nurses and doctors a good overview of the
I could tell the randomly arriving citizenry annoyed Paul. He was always a bit of a hermit, who found dinner parties particularly unnerving. “You never know whom you’ll get trapped next to!” he’d protest. Paul enjoyed his students, and whenever he did socialize, he spoke amiably and well with people. He always looked forward to chatting with the handyman, a salty ex-sailor who’d served in Korea and fathered eight children. Some dinner parties he welcomed, like Carl Sagan’s fiftieth birthday party, where we sat across the table from Hans Bethe (pronounced BAY-ta), the physicist who had figured out how the sun shines. Paul delighted in the revelations of science, but novelists have their own brand of physics, in which they re-create the process of life through a whole register of intricate, almost-touchable images and events.
“What are you writing?” Bethe had asked him.
“A novel. At the moment, the main character is constructing a Milky Way in his basement.”
Much to Paul’s amusement, Bethe had mischievously replied, “A working model?”
I still relish the day, at the local airport years later, when Paul and I happened to be in line behind nonagenarian Bethe at the ticket counter, and overheard the clerk say to him, slowly and in a louder voice than needed, as if he were carrying an invisible ear trumpet and must, at his age, be lost in senility:
“Now, Mr. Beth-ee , you’ll be arriving at Gate 21 in Pittsburgh and going to Gate number 27. That’s six gates away.”
A small bemused smile had flitted across Bethe’s creased and age-freckled face. “Oh, I think I can do the math,” he’d said.
Such events seemed eons in the past. Post-stroke, Paul didn’t want to see anyone but me. Being swarmed over in the hospital was a recipe for exhaustion in a person who was feeling well, let alone someone speechless, anxious, and baffled. And there was no relief outside his room, either in the hallways or in group therapy, where, against his will, he was asked to mix with other rehab patients, whose afflictions reminded him of his own.
Just as big cities can deplete you with their noise and crowds and sheer sensory overload, a hospital can exhaust you, as its changing faces and personalities blur and strangers wake you repeatedly. Like all post-stroke patients, Paul really needed rest to recover from the massive injury to his brain. But he also needed to start flexing his mind as soon as possible. So, should he rest his brain or exercise it after the stroke? Both, I figured.
It’s like a knee replacement patient being encouraged to climb out of bed and churn his leg around the day after surgery. Cycling the post-op knee hurts and is fatiguing, as is pushing an inflamed brain. Even a healthy brain is constantly balancing between arousal and rest. If life is too stimulating, it seeks relaxation, if it’s too boring it craves stimuli (skating on a blade-edge between too much excitement and too little). A perfect balance is possible to imagine, but impossible to reach, so one is always trembling along an arc from too excited to too bored and back again. Everything we love most—be it sweetheart or flower—looks majestic because it seems to be trembling out of balance.
While Paul napped, I wandered through the Rehab Unit, which lay on the second floor in the east wing of the hospital. Beyond a head nurse’s office and supply room, an open bay gave nurses and doctors a good overview of the
Similar Books
