Pat Boone Fan Club (18 page)

This isn’t my first
CAT
scan. About two years ago, a routine physical turned up blood in my urine. Three sonograms, one
CAT
scan, and a clean urine sample later, nothing was found to cause the
abnormality. However, the
CAT
scan showed a speck of “something” on the lower tip of my lung. “It’s probably nothing,” the doctor said. “These new machines are overly sensitive.” But just to be sure, the doctor ordered another
CAT
scan.

Nothing was found then.

Nothing is found now.

“The
CAT
scan is negative.” Dr. Jones proudly smiles, as if it’s
his
body. “Everything looks perfect.”

“So what
is
it, then?” I ask.

“Hepatitis A,” he says, with confidence. “You have an elevated
ALT
level, and that’s an indication of hep. A infection.”

The nurse arrives with an
IV
, for fluids.

Dr. Fields’s Office, November 28

“Hepatitis A?” Dr. Fields exclaims. “Where would you have gotten that? Nothing points to that.”

“A slightly elevated . . .” My voice trails off.

I spent Thanksgiving weekend thankful for the hepatitis A diagnosis, the least serious of the hepatitis alphabet—no active recovery regimen, just let it run its course. “In a few weeks, you’ll be fine,” were Dr. Jones’s last words as they rolled me from the emergency room in a wheelchair.

Marc, who has driven me here to Dr. Fields’s office, and I glance at each other and shrug. “I guess I picked it up somewhere,” I say lamely, my euphoria flattening as yeastily as it’d risen only a few days before.

Dr. Fields appears stymied, not the look you want to see on your doctor’s face. “How often have you gone to the bathroom today?” she asks.

“Twice.”

“Well
that’s
good,” she says, wanting to cheer us up—since I probably went about twenty-three times over the endless Thanksgiving weekend.

“
But she’s not eating
,” Marc says—Marc, who is usually shy and mild-mannered. “
That’s
the only reason.”

It’s true: I’ve virtually stopped. I’ve lost over ten pounds since October 30.

“Well, let’s get her on an
IV
, then,” Dr. Fields says. “Maybe now it’s time to call Dr. Bright for a colonoscopy. A
C. diff.
infection or Crohn’s disease wouldn’t show up on a
CAT
scan.”

My dehydrated skin is the texture of leather: black-and-blue bruised leather, from all the
IV
s. The nurse, searching for a vein, is unable to penetrate it with a needle.

After talking to Dr. Bright, the gastroenterologist, Dr. Fields orders me back to County Hospital. Dr. Bright needs more lab tests before he’ll perform the colonoscopy. Besides, maybe a nurse at the hospital will be able to hook me up to an
IV
.

County Hospital, November 28

I’m assigned a room in the main wing, even though I’m not scheduled to stay the night. My roommate is a suicide survivor under a twenty-four-hour watch. It’s not clear why the two of us are paired in a room together, given such dissimilar symptoms. Except that the very randomness itself is symptomatic. But symptomatic of what—like whatever disease I have—is difficult to say.

Now, since Dr. Bright needs more lab-test results, of course I’m unable to provide a stool sample. I’m dried out. Nothing is left. So they feed me anything I want. I realize I’m famished, starving. I devour a chicken-salad sandwich on gooey white bread, an oatmeal cookie, chicken noodle soup, and stewed prunes, which I’ve never eaten before. There’s a good reason. They taste like syrupy dirt. Pond water. Sludge at the bottom of a lake. Initially, all the food stays put in my system. The nurse suggests I walk around in order to speed things along. Up one corridor, down another. Marc accompanies me. Every room we pass is its own stage set or still life of tragedy. I wonder what’s wrong with each patient. They probably wonder the same about me.

Later in the afternoon, Dr. Bright gets his specimen. After about a half-dozen useless attempts, the nurse finally plunges an
IV
into my leathery skin. For four hours I watch the
IV
bag drip.

I sense the suicide patient on the other side of the curtain. She rustles the sheets. Apparently she overdosed. They pumped her stomach. Maybe
this
is the connection: we’ve both evacuated our skin.

Her young children visit later in the evening. The boy, breathless with drama, informs the nurse that
he
found his mother, called 911. The little girl pokes her head around the curtain to look at me. I stare back. I can’t even smile, though I’d like to offer her encouragement, help her survive her mother. But who am I to speak?

On November 29, I receive the following e-mail from Dr. Bright’s nurse:

I must be spotless in order for Dr. Bright to perform the colonoscopy the next day. The phospho-soda tastes, I’m sure, like nuclear waste. I gag with each swallow. My skin shivers sweat. Every ten minutes, or less, I am in the bathroom. By two in the morning, the black-and-white tiles on the bathroom floor seem
to strobe. I don’t feel the ground beneath my feet. I don’t see my chest rise and fall with breath. I am all fluid, floating the nineteen steps between bedroom and bath. By six in the morning, I am polished stainless steel, scrubbed porcelain. Each cell of my body feels rinsed with astringent. My insides are scoured clean.

I am also desert-thirsty, pristine, parched. I feel light enough to float above the bed. The canary-yellow sheets waver like a flying carpet. Emptiness itself is a balm. It asks nothing of me, of my body.

I fantasize about lime popsicles.

Community Hospital, December 1

I curl up under the covers of yet another hospital bed, now in the gastroenterology wing. My thin, freezing body is cocooned in a heated blanket, just as with previous visits to this hospital. All their blankets are baked in ovens with glass windows. I ask for a new one whenever the warmth ebbs. Finally, I’m wheeled in to the procedure area, where Dr. Bright waits for me. Yesterday I typed a two-page, single-spaced outline of the entire saga to read to him: so I won’t forget anything; so he’ll have a full history, all possible relevant information. Patiently, he waits for me to finish the document. “This time, we’ll find out what it is,” he promises.

“It’s a
C. diff.
infection,” he confirms, after I awake from the procedure with full-fledged, blesséd amnesia. I remember nothing since the nurse initiated the anesthetic drip. He prescribes Vancocin, a
good
antibiotic, to try once again to counteract the effects of the bad one, clindamycin. A ten-day supply of Vancocin, twenty-eight pills, 125 mg each, costs $370. One every four
hours, a rigid schedule. Who knows what chaos will erupt if I miss a dose? 6:00 p.m. 10:00 p.m. 2:00 a.m. 6:00 a.m. 10:00 a.m. 2:00 p.m. I set the alarm. I stay on schedule.

On December 2, the day after the colonoscopy, Marc buys a copy of the
New York Times
that has an Associated Press article headlined, “Deadly Germ Is Becoming Wider Threat.” The item, datelined Atlanta, the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control, warns of
Clostridium difficile
, commonly seen in people taking antibiotics. The previous year, I learn, it caused one hundred deaths in eighteen months in a hospital in Quebec. Now, according to the
CDC
, four states (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, and New Hampshire) show the same bacteria in healthy people who have
not
been admitted to hospitals, or even taken antibiotics. The bacteria, now resistant to certain antibiotics, work against colon bacteria. Therefore, when patients take certain antibiotics, particularly clindamycin, “competing bacteria die off and
C. difficile
multiplies exponentially.” The
CDC
report focuses on thirty-three cases reported since 2003. Of these cases, one woman, fourteen weeks pregnant with twins, lost the fetuses and also died. The woman had been treated three months earlier with trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, for a urinary tract infection. Ten others among the thirty-three had taken clindamycin. However, eight of the thirty-three cases had not taken antibiotics within three months of the onset of symptoms. According to Dr. L. Clifford McDonald, an epidemiologist at the
CDC
, it’s unclear what has caused this outbreak of
C. diff.
“In general,” he cautioned, “if you have severe diarrhea, seek attention from a physician.”

Marc buys a package of natural-fruit popsicles. I lie in bed, under the quilt, sucking on one. The winter night is still. The house, after the fluorescent lights and jangling equipment in the hospital, is quiet, dimly lit. The lime-green ice slowly melts on my tongue like an unleavened wafer, transubstantiated.

Hours remain seamless, one dissolving into another, one Turner Classic Movie into the next. Days revolve around black-and-white images, popsicles, and the Vancocin cycle. Is this purgatory? Will the popsicles cleanse or purge me? Severe symptoms subside, though my insides feel chafed. When I wash my face, for example, it hurts to lean against the sink. Rather than constant physical pain, however, I experience discomfort; or, more than discomfort, I fear my body will never again be normal. My skin feels dry, transparent. Not enough moisture even to sweat. My hair hangs brittle, bone dry. My lips and knuckles are raw, chapped. Or maybe it is my soul that is raw, transparent, chapped . . . my soul, waiting to be released.

If so, maybe the illness itself is purgatory. My past is catching up with me after all these years. This interior spiritual desert of a soul never blossomed into a lush, leafy oasis—instead, only miraged another new husband, another new location, another new identity—salvation always just around the next bend.

Maybe it took this loud bodily raucousness to stop me in my tracks. To get my attention. To clamor at me, telling me I’ve been looking for something beyond myself—rather than looking within myself. Now, must I prepare to accept that
this is
me? That whoever this sack of skin is,
is
me. Like it or not. Or, no, erase the “not.” Just like it. I must just like
me
.

I never again hear from Dr. Fields. She never calls to ask how I’m doing. I’m not surprised. I find a new doctor, who orders my files from Dr. Fields’s office. He tells me that the original lab tests came back normal: I never had a vaginal infection in the first place.

I write to Dr. Fields. I must be sure she knows about her erroneous diagnosis as well as about the potentially deadly prescription. “I want to make sure that you never prescribe this antibiotic to any of your other patients. After spending about ten minutes on the Internet it was clear, even to me, that clindamycin should
only be prescribed in a severe medical emergency
.”

Health insurance covers most of the costs, but the final tally tops $11,000.

Six months after the first symptoms, I still have periodic discomfort and have regained only five pounds of the twenty I lost.

Four years later, Fleet Phospho-Soda, the prescribed medication I ingested in preparation for the colonoscopy, is recalled by the
FDA
, for possibly causing phosphate nephropathy, or acute kidney injury.

And while I never discover the origin of that ghostly fluttering pain in my abdomen—the cause for my initial appointment with Dr. Fields—it never returns. If it does, I will not attempt to shoo it away. Perhaps I will even welcome and bless it as a signal from beyond, a sign of my heightened appreciation for my body, or at least as a reminder that things could be worse.

The
New
Pat Boone Show

In one week I must feel well enough to attend a Pat Boone concert.

I spent this past month in bed, recovering from that
C. diff.
infection, leaving home only for trips to the doctor and the emergency room. Now, I hope, by December 9, I will be able to shower, wash my hair, dress in clothes other than sweats and pajamas.

I must look my best for Pat Boone.

Nevertheless, one way or another, Marc, my partner,
will
pack me up in the car for the three-hour drive to the Macomb Center for the Performing Arts in Clinton Township to see him. More than a year has passed since I barged backstage, unannounced, after his concert in that megachurch in Holland, Michigan.

Now, however, Pat Boone has invited me backstage to meet with him after the concert. He invited me, along with Marc, to have “private time” with him.

I’ve barely eaten this past month because of the illness. I lost twenty pounds and look wasted. I
am
wasted. Even the sun shining through the window plunges me into sensory overload. Ditto
when the phone rings. When I turn on a light. When the furnace kicks on. When the snowplow rumbles down the street. I can’t read, either; even words are risky, exhausting.

My body is consumed only with itself, even as it also seems to be consuming itself. Every molecule not sloughed off as a result of the infection is in overdrive, keeping me—this organism known as “me”—breathing. Consequently, everything outside my body—light, noise, movement, words—is a distraction. Overwhelming.

My sole activity since falling ill is watching the Turner Classic Movie television channel. I’m able to tolerate only black-and-white films since, well, they don’t make movies like they used to, back when smoking was good for you, alcohol even better. What a comfort to watch film noir death scenes, or at least actors trying their best to kill themselves the old-fashioned way. To say nothing of all the dead minks draped over socialites’ shoulders (back when wearing dead animals was fashionable) in movies such as
A Night to Remember
, depicting the sinking of the
Titanic
. Which, by the way, struck the fatal iceberg on April 14, my birth date.

I mean, technically, I’m not dying, but since I feel as if I am, I’m oddly satisfied, almost comforted, watching film noir lovers blow smoke rings into each other’s faces.

Night and day the old films spool, the action slow enough for my dull senses, my dehydrated eyes, to comprehend. Forties gangster movies aren’t too strenuous, the high-speed chase scenes probably not careening over fifty miles an hour. Besides, they don’t make gangsters like they used to, either, unambiguously dressed in black, uncomplicated, not a shred of motivation, no harking back to unhappy childhoods (brought to you in living color). Likewise, they don’t make death like they used to, victims melodramatically writhing before swooning into a pool of gray blood. I can relate.
I
feel melodramatic, myself: seeing Pat Boone one more time is
my
last, dying wish. Even though, as I say, I’m not dying—at least not yet—and should fully recover.

Hour by hour I watch
Angels with Dirty Faces
;
Beware, My Lovely
;
Nobody Lives Forever
;
Dark Victory
;
All This, and Heaven, Too
. I barely distinguish the end of one film from the beginning of another. All the hours this past month blur. I eat a few spoonfuls of applesauce for breakfast. A few grains of rice for lunch, a few more for dinner. One-eighth of a piece of toast, dry. An anorexic fantasy come true, my stomach rejecting the tiniest onslaught of food. My skin feels transparent. Not enough moisture even to sweat.

The only words I am able to read right now are Pat Boone’s, the autographed copy of
The Miracle of Prayer
, which he sent me. And even though they
also
don’t make religion like they used to—back when Christ was Christ and not Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson or Mel Gibson or even, well, Pat Boone—I figure:
What the hell?
It’s a way for time, for the illness, to pass more quickly while I wait to see Pat Boone. So I read page after page, chapter after chapter. I also pray—just in case—in order to be on the safe side. I follow Pat Boone’s instructions, wanting to believe in miracles, the miracle of prayer: sudden wealth, cure from disease, a job promotion—you name it. “I’m telling you—and I’ll amply prove it—that the power of genuine prayer can result in incredible, miraculous happenings that can only be explained in supernatural terms,” Pat Boone writes in his book. “I just want you to understand that approaching an interested and loving Creator/God can be your best option, not your last resort.”

God makes all good things happen, if you believe.

Yes,
if
I believe I’m getting well—
if
only I believe God will make me well—I
will
get better. I will. I will.

About a year after I handed Pat Boone that letter backstage, he responded. We’ve since exchanged several e-mails and letters. In one, he quotes from the Bible: “God works everything together for our good, to those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.” The letter goes on to reassure me: “He picks up the pieces and fashions something good out of . . . horrific occurrences.” I know Pat Boone refers to my childhood, but I want to believe that God (or Pat Boone) knows I need help
now
to recover from this illness.

In this weakened state, I want prayer, God, icons . . . the touch of Pat Boone’s hand to make me better.

I grasp a marble in my atheistic fist while reading
The Miracle of Prayer
. It will anchor me to the ground so I won’t float away, given my thinness, given the slenderness of my new, tender (unbelieving) beliefs. Or perhaps I hold the marble as a totem: a rosary bead, a sign of existence, a medallion powerful enough to keep me alive until I see Pat Boone.
Please, God, let me get better. Please let me see Pat Boone after the concert.
The marble will help me! Its bluish-green surface resembles the earth in photographs from outer space. Where God lives!

Or is it all voodoo? Superstition? If I hold the marble in my left fist, I’ll get better; if I hold it in my right, I’ll be switched at birth and be Pat Boone’s daughter.

“We’ll get there soon,” a woman nicknamed Mom says to Marc and me.

The last note of the “Pat Boone Christmas Concert” fades into the frigid Michigan night. Mom, in a blue sweat suit, slowly taps her three-pronged cane along a sterile linoleum floor backstage at the Macomb Center. Her cropped gray hair frames her wizened face, her moist mouth. Despite her name, I more envision
her with crystals and tarot cards (or even shopping a blue-light special at K-Mart) than in a kitchen baking an apple pie. She glances up at me sideways, a glimpse from the corner of her eye. She knows I’m rushing her along, trying to hurry her, my footsteps almost in front of hers, even though I don’t know the way to the green room. My main objective is simply to see Pat Boone before I collapse.

And while I wish I could say the weakness in my limbs is from the thought of seeing him, this is only partially true. Today, after all, is virtually the first time in five weeks I’ve been out of bed. So, alternatively, I want to grab Mom’s cane for
me
to lean upon, as much as I want to kick the cane out from under her, take her down, trample her as I race along the passageways to find Pat Boone on my own.
Now.
I am anxious to see him. And even though he invited me backstage (via his assistant, via e-mail) after the concert, still, I worry he might slip from the theater before I find him.

We wander down one seemingly endless corridor after another. Photographs of entertainers who performed here over the years hang from walls, but no echo of past shows remains. No stomping feet. No clapping. No whistles. The photographed smiles are glassy, static, still. I pass rows of faces—some familiar, most not—following the white noise of fluorescent light, the dull tapping of Mom’s rubber-tipped cane, lost in a maze of hallways through the underworld, much like the ones in the hospital.

Marc lags behind. He probably hopes to be lost in this maze, make a wrong turn, and end up, say, at a John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers concert, a group that recently performed here. Earlier this evening, during the show, Marc cringed as Pat Boone chided members of the audience to use the Christian greeting “Merry Christmas,” as opposed to the religiously neutral “Happy Holidays.” Later, when Pat Boone sang “Santa Claus Is Praying to Jesus,” Marc slid down in his seat. Marc, a liberal Democrat like myself, would rather be almost anywhere else than here. Yet, while Marc is nominally here only to accompany me, surely
even he knows that, although Pat Boone is a right-wing Christian, he’s also, well,
Pat Boone
 . . . and they don’t make pop stars like they used to, either.

“‘What a crazy world we’re living in . . . ’” Marc whispered during the concert, quoting Pat Boone’s e-mail greeting to me.

“
Huh?
” I whispered back, adding the last word of Pat Boone’s sentence—a tag line that’s now a running gag between us. Well, it’s a joke to Marc, but I myself am uncertain whether to take it ironically or not. Huh? Huh! Yes, the word that seemingly sums it all up, though I’m not altogether sure why. What exactly does the “huh?” reveal about Pat Boone?

These lines begin Pat Boone’s first e-mail to me. Literally, he must mean it
is
a crazy world in that, after all these years, I finally meet him only twenty minutes away from my house. He also invites me to write back to him, asks me to stay in touch. He signs his e-mail, “Warmly, Pat Boone.”

But what is the subtext to the “crazy world”? What is the subtext to the “huh”?

Pat Boone sang his oldies during tonight’s concert, even though it’s a Christmas show: “Bernadine,” “Moody River,” “Love Letters in the Sand.” He reprised “April Love,” accompanied by his routine of finding a young girl to join him onstage. Just as during his concert in Holland, Michigan, he asked her for a kiss (a peck) on the cheek. Pat Boone also handed the girl a bouquet of flowers. She awkwardly held them, unsure what to do, caught with a stranger in the spotlight.

“I hope you understand why I checked to make sure you were really invited backstage,” Mom says as we continue our trek. “We can’t just take anyone’s word.”

Earlier, in the lobby, I underwent an elaborate screening process, asked by the lobby manager, in her red jacket, to produce a copy of the e-mail from Pat Boone’s assistant inviting me backstage. But because the lobby manager thought, perhaps, I faked the e-mail, she double-checked by cell phone with Pat Boone’s travel manager. Marc and I finally got the “go ahead.” Word came back via walkie-talkie informing us which door off the lobby Mom would unlock. This door—granting backstage access to heaven—or at least Pat Boone.

“You know,” our guide to the green room adds, “if we didn’t check credentials, everyone would try to get backstage to meet him.”

In reality, Marc and I hovered by the backstage door alone. The sedate crowd peacefully filed from the auditorium out to the parking lots. So when Mom finally unlocked the door, Marc and I didn’t push through crowds. Mom didn’t shake her cane at throngs of fans. Only Marc and I waited, me squinting through the hairline crack between the double doors. So before Mom unlocked it, I spied her shuffling toward us.

“Have you met him yet?” I ask Mom.

She nods, her head hunched over her curved shoulders. “He’s very nice. You’ll like him.”

Then, just as we round another corner, I catch a glimpse of him. He still wears his white-fringed sequined jacket, white pants, white boots, white silky shirt. White: Pat Boone’s signature color. Back in junior high school, I found this unambiguous, good-guy white reassuring. Now, before I call a greeting, Marc and I are quickly ushered into the green room. “He’ll be in to see you shortly,” Mom says, shutting the door behind her, leaving Marc and me alone. I collapse on the couch.

Marc and I ate dinner at Ernie’s Restaurant, about a mile away, before the concert. I, however, only tentatively forked a few mouthfuls of salmon, three swallows of baked potato. An elderly couple, in a booth behind us, settled in for dinner as well. We eavesdropped on their conversation with the waitress.

“We just came from the Pat Boone concert,” the man says, referring to the matinee.

“Who’s Pat Boone?” the teenage waitress asks.

“He was a singer before you were born,” the man explains.

Marc leans forward in the booth. “‘What a crazy world . . . ’”

“
Huh?
” I say on cue.

Pat Boone enters the green room, aglow in yellow corduroy slacks, a yellow shirt, an orange cashmere sweater. He wears a gold pinkie ring, a wedding band, a gold necklace. During the concert I was overwhelmed—after being in isolation for a month—by his white-white image, as well as by the scent of so many people, the band, the music, the applause. I closed my eyes. Leaned my head in my palm. Had trouble breathing. And now, as Pat Boone glides through the door, I am once again breathless. This is the most color I’ve absorbed all month. Gold. Yellow. Orange. A sunrise.

Marc and I stand up from the couch.

“Can I hug you?” Pat Boone asks, smiling.

When he enfolds my frail, ailing body, it feels like a laying on of hands.

Pat Boone
will cure me.

“Would you like to sit here?” Marc nods toward the couch, beside me, where he’d been sitting.

Pat Boone shakes his head, pulling a chair directly in front of me. “This way I can see her better.” Meaning me. As he settles onto the chair, he adds, “I hope you liked the concert.” He explains he arrived in Michigan late last night from a previous show in North Carolina. “I was tired.”