Dear Diary: Infused
When I left the apartment for today’s Remicade infusion, I was very cross. I had spent too much time on the Daily Office, not only choosing links but writing them up, and by the time I regained track of the time and got dressed, it was too late for any kind of lunch. I was also very hungry. I called the doctor’s office and asked for a slight postponement, but to no avail; and the buffed, unthinking manner in which my request was denied opened the door that connects inconvenience and irritation to self-pitying anger. I gobbled a leftover piece of broiled chicken and decamped, imagining my soaring blood pressure.
That was the last of my troubles, though. I jumped in a taxi and, from the moment that I entered the Hospital for Special Surgery, things began to go well. Initially, my blood pressure was 164 over something, but ten or so minutes later, when the rheumatologist took it again, it was down to 134, and then (he took it again), to 129. When he asked how I was, I answered honestly: angry. But I didn’t say why. I simply said that I had more to do than there was time for doing it, and when he laughed good-naturedly (doctors will be doctors), my thought went black and murderous. He must have made a lightning guess, because he then asked if being busy were a good thing or a bad thing. (We’re in Manhattan, after all.) I said that it was a bad thing. Then he asked what I was reading, and Gail Collins — I’m reading her wonderful history of recent feminism, When Everything Changed — we talked about the huge changes in women’s lives since the 1960s. I was all for it, I said, but what depressed me was the “advance” that has made life a lot easier for stupidity and inattentiveness. The doctor asked me if I meant in men or women. No difference, I said: the problem is common to men and women.
It was Quatorze who had clarified the problem, the day before. Somehow, I had come into possession of a kind of razor, presumably for cutting through paint and the other semi-hard accretions that build up over time. To put it very simply, the tool was fixed in the position of an open straight razor, and there was no way to retract or close the blade. Quatorze said that it was a souvenir of another time, when no one worried that anyone but a child would pick it up without knowing how to use it. One of the reasons why modern life has become so inefficient and sclerotic — only one, mind you — is that we put so much effort and expense into protecting unskilled people from the consequences of entering environments for which they’re not equipped. It is one of the many ways in which we have lost the use of authority.
By the time my pre-infusion exam was over, however, I was in good spirits. It was not quite 1:45, and my infusion wasn’t scheduled to begin until 2:30, but I thought, if the good nurses in the Infusion Therapy Unit would indulge me, I’d drop off my bags and head out for a bite, at McDonald’s most likely (haven’t been in about a year), but it turned out to be slow day in room 709, and I was told to come on in and take a seat right then. As a result, I left the hospital by daylight, at 4:20, and not at dark-dyed 6.
I got a fair amount of reading done during the infusion, but for a good deal of the time I simply gave myself over to the mood of the place, which is only fundamentally that of a hospital. More superficial but also more salient is the atmosphere of a beauty parlor. Now, I have not spent any time in beauty parlors since I was a boy, and had to wait for my mother’s permanent to leave al dente cookery in the dust. I hated being there, not only because it was boring but because the ladies — customers and beauticians alike — didn’t like having me around. The space was very cramped, a quarter of the size of any beauty parlor that I’ve ever seen in the movies, but more than that there was my maleness. The beauty parlor of the 1950s was the one place to which women could escape from the opposite sex. Beneath that, there was the determination that I not be allowed to feel too comfortable, less unsounded twisted tendencies find encouragement. So, when I say that the Infusion Therapy Unit is something like a beauty parlor, I’m talking through my hat. But there was a moment when I was talking to two nurses about Pirate Radio, which both of them wanted to see. I can’t imagine talking about movies at the barber shop. As a rule, I don’t talk in the barber shop at all, not even now that I don’t read, either (because my reading glasses interfere).
Why was I carrying bags to the hospital? Because my next stop, after the infusion, was the storage unit. I was there for the twenty minutes that it took to wrap up half a shelf of glassware and china and stuff it into the two gigantic Bean’s totes. Then I was gone, and, back at my desk, I was soon back to work, writing up more links for the Daily Office. Not a model day by any means, but a good one, and impossible to complain about, no matter how cross I was this morning.