“Adventist, Baptist, Buddhist, Catholic, Christian, Eastern Orthodox, Episcopalian, Hindu, Jewish, Lutheran, Mormon, Muslim, Presbyterian—” “Presbyterian,” I said. That wasn’t true but for some reason I said it anyway. As a teenager, I’d sung in a Presbyterian church choir. My mother had been raised Presbyterian but we did not belong to the church. Later I would see Presbyterian on my chart and think it must be someone else’s chart. And then I got to the part that always seems like the beginning. The part that somehow remains in the present tense even as the whole incident recedes further into the past. October 27, 2010 4:04 p.m.
7
“How many fingers am I holding up?” the doctor asks. I can answer that. That one’s easy. Still, there are things that I know and things that I don’t. What I know is that I’ve never felt sicker in my life. Moreover, I’ve never felt this kind of sickness. It’s as if my life is draining out of me and pooling at my feet. What I don’t know is the degree to which that is indeed an accurate impression. Technically, I am dying. I don’t know that a normal platelet count is between 150,000 and 400,000 per microliter and that mine has dropped to 15,000 per microliter. I don’t know that my liver and kidneys are seriously compromised and that my bun, or blood urea nitrogen level, is 35 milligrams per deciliter, far above the normal range of 6 to 20 milligrams per deciliter. I don’t know that the doctor is at this moment writing things in my chart such as “scleral icterus,” which means that the whites of my eyes are yellow (which I knew earlier but forgot). Now the doctor is touching my feet and looking at my toes. My toenails are painted a light greenish blue. “Would you call that cerulean?” he asks. “I guess you could say that!” I say, too loudly and at too high a pitch. I can’t modulate my voice. The harder I try to sound normal, the weirder I sound. I tell him that I was recently bitten repeatedly in my sleep by a mosquito that was trapped in a New York City apartment I was staying in and still have several welts on my back. I suggest that maybe I have West Nile virus. The doctor examines my back, peering at the welts like a jeweler peering through a loupe. “Amazing that you managed to get mosquito bites in New York City in October,” he says. People are always saying this kind of thing to me. I try to explain to the doctor that I’m constantly getting bitten by bugs. It’s just something about my body chemistry, not a big deal. I mentioned West Nile more for the purposes of making conversation than out of genuine concern. As a child living in Texas, and even later in New Jersey, I was chronically pocked with mosquito bites that