It was probably one of my tutors who got me sick. In hindsight it was probably silly to have assumed that an emotional trauma coupled with flu season would not have adverse health repercussions on a 17-year-old girl with known chronic health issues. And let’s not discount neglect either, because no one was there to see if I was eating or generally functioning as a person. (I was not.)
So just after a week of awkward meetings with my tutors after my mother’s death, I was laying on the couch in the living room in my pajamas struggling to breathe. My asthma inhaler wasn’t helping, and every time I coughed, pain tore through my chest, which escalated my panic and caused me to cry more, which made me cough more. I wheezed through enough tears to convince my father to get me in his truck and take me to the hospital.
I only now give thought to what he must have been thinking, having to drive with his 17-year-old daughter, struggling to breathe, racing to the same hospital where he had been called not a month ago to see his dead wife. It’s hard because I don’t know how sober he was that night. It may have affected him, but I can’t know how deeply or in what way. Maybe it was one of the most traumatic nights of his life. Or maybe he was glad of another sob story to tell.
When I was between pre-school and around 8 years old I would get what I guess would be called a whooping cough several times a year, and it would last for weeks. I sounded like a wounded sea lion barking in distress. I was sent home from school at least once because while I was no longer contagiously sick, the sound of my coughing was so loud it was disrupting class.
Many of my sick days were spent with large sippy cups filled with hot tea and large dollops of honey, sitting in my parents’ bed watching TV shows like The A-Team and Jem. I had a metal Strawberry Shortcake TV tray for when I could eat soup or ice cream. Mom had to miss some days of work because leaving me at home alone with my dad wasn’t always the safest option, as I think I mentioned. One day when I was home sick and my mom ventured to work, Dad couldn’t figure out how to heat a can of soup to feed me.
As I aged out of the whooping cough, I graduated into having asthma. Unlike the majority of asthma sufferers, my asthma did not improve with age. Rescue inhalers, peakflow meters, and almost dying a lot was almost made up for by routinely getting out of gym class activities with doctor’s notes. It quickly progressed to what my latest ER doctor called “severe and life-threatening.”
I was 12 years old when the chronic bronchitis began. By 14, I was missing at least a week a month of school. For years I was given antibiotics to the point that they no longer helped; instead, my body couldn’t fight off anything.
My next memory after crying on the couch in the living room is being on a stretcher in the hospital, still in my pajama pants, vomiting green fluid all over the floor of the ER. They had given me a nebulizer (a machine that turns albuterol or other medicine in liquid form into vapor you breathe in from a tube) to suck on. I guess whatever concoction they had put into the nebulizer was green-tinted and when that and all the mucus loosened up from my throat, some of it must have hit my empty stomach and – wheeee – neon green liquid vomit!
Eventually I was put in a room in the critical care ward. I was critical but stable, pneumonia with asthma complications. I was a little confused because I was being treated like I was very sick, but I felt just as sick as I often felt. I now recognize that I was just deathly ill a lot more than anyone wanted to tell me, but back then I didn’t know.
I was given a private room, my own TV and VCR to watch anime on, and I was allowed to have Chinese food brought in the next day. I was coming to realize that those are things they let people who are dying get away with, not just anyone with a dead teacher’s health insurance. Maybe it also had something to do with the fact that my father had disappeared after dropping me in the emergency room. Maybe they felt bad for me? Who knows.
After a few days I was finally moved out of critical care and into a regular room up a few flights. This meant I was treated a little more like a “normal” patient, but it also meant endless awkward interactions when a nurse would ask me things like “What are you doing for Christmas?” and “Are you expecting any visitors?” My boyfriend came by when he could, although I wasn’t really encouraging it as I hadn’t showered in days and probably looked and smelled as bad as I felt. My dad wasn’t calling or coming to check on me at all. There were days I didn’t see anyone but doctors and nurses who gave me polite smiles and no answers.
And then David started calling.
David worked at the department store with me. He had asked me out when I first started working there, and I had said no. I had told him I had a boyfriend. But I was eager to be liked, and what was wrong with being friends with older guys? I could take care of myself, and I was a cool girl. These were all things I told myself as to why I behaved as I did; honestly, I was yielding and friendly to most men because they were men, and you never want to make men angry at you. I had, in fact, no desire to be friends with him. He was not very smart, or interesting, or nice, or good-looking. But I gave in because it was the safest route at the time.
And so we were “friends”. He was making a point to check up on me when I came back to work after my mom’s death. I was asked by other coworkers on his behalf how I was.
When he got word that I was in the hospital, he decided he had to come visit me. Because he cared. Of course, an adult man cannot just come visit a 17-year-old girl in the hospital. At least, this was the rule we were operating under. I don’t actually remember if anyone could come visit me during visiting hours or not. But I definitely told him he couldn’t. So while I had to field multiple phone calls to my hospital room from him trying to find a way in to see me, I could at least feign my lack of control over the situation.
After a week, I was starting to get antsy. I wanted to go home. I had always had considerable anxiety about not being able to leave somewhere when I wanted, and I was worried about what was happening at home. I wanted to check on the cats. I wanted to be back in my bedroom. I wanted to go back into hiding. I finally had enough energy to worry again. But according to my doctors, my oxygen count was too low.
I was 7 or 8 when I was given one of those allergy tests where they pin prick you with a smattering of allergens and sit you in a room to see which parts of you react. I don’t think there was one thing I didn’t react to. Dust. Mold. Horses. I was allergic to animals, plants, and what pretty much came to just, the air. I spent a lot of my time either sneezing or being groggy from medication.
By 5th grade I had a huge, round air purifier in my room, plastic pillow cases, and all the carpet ripped up in my room. I was supposedly allergic to all animals, but we had always had cats (and hamsters, and guinea pigs). They just weren’t supposed to be in my room anymore.
And then came the allergy shots. I would have to go to the doctor’s office every 2 weeks, have a nurse stab my arm with an enormous needle that would make my bicep swell with a giant, beanbag-sized welt, and then sit there for an hour to make sure my body didn’t have a bad reaction. This went on for over a year or so before I convinced my mother to let me stop because we had seen zero improvement.
There wasn’t a week I wasn’t on an antibiotics or steroids, coupled with loads of antihistamines and cough syrup. My asthma was (is) triggered multiple times a day. It was not only sensitive to any perceived allergen, but could also be set off by physical exertion, laughing, humidity changes or just cold air.
I was not what anyone would call “healthy” at any point.
No one in my house had a healthy relationship with food, and yet for the thousands of doctor’s visits we went on, no one talked about what I ate. My family wasn’t food insecure. There was always a can or two of Chef Boyardee or a box of Kraft mac and cheese in the cupboard. But my diet up until my teenage years was canned or boxed pasta, candy, soda, hot dogs and pizza, and I don’t know what came first – my strange eating habits or my food options.
Mom sustained herself on plain pasta, sometimes with fake butter (my dad and I got real butter), and salads while counting Weight Watcher points and going to weigh-ins. I wouldn’t eat fast food, but sometimes she would get a McDonald’s Happy Meal so I could have the toy and she could have the food, and get a tiny Diet Coke (with “extra ice” so she could chew on the ice, which was a compulsion she had that’s similar to pica). Dad ate whatever and had his own personal glass salt shaker that was almost the size of a 40 with an avocado green top that didn’t so much shake salt onto his food as it did pour it out of ten large holes. Piles of salt on steaks, pizza, grapefruit – anything. I’ve never met anyone else with their own special salt shaker.
I inherited my dad’s metabolism and body type, which meant I could eat bags of candy and chug soda with no implications to my weight, and so that’s what I was allowed to do. (Unfortunately I also got my dad’s teeth and no amount of brushing can combat tooth enamel that acts like drywall.) I can’t imagine my diet did any good for my actual health, but no one really thought that far into it. No one cooked. My breakfast was a Tastycake, my lunch was a thermos of Spaghetti-Os, then when I got home it was candy and whatever I could microwave. Sometimes there was a breakfast with eggs, which I liked because I could share it with one of my cats who really liked eggs. No one ever made a pancake or waffle in my house, not even the frozen kind. That’s weird, right? Kids on TV are always eating stacks of pancakes.
So while I wasn’t nearly as picky of an eater at 17 years old than I did was at 8, I wasn’t able to eat much at the hospital on top of being sick and depressed anyway. I hadn’t eaten and was so stressed to the point where I didn’t use the bathroom except to pee for the entire time I was there. It took a lot of explaining but eventually I got them to believe me that I just didn’t eat much and I’d eat more when I got home. I didn’t mention not going to the bathroom, for fear they’d keep me longer and make me eat more hospital food.
Finally my oxygen count was high enough that I was given permission to go home, and somehow my father was summoned. He didn’t come in to get me. Instead I was given all of the medication instructions, allowed to change, and wheeled out to the door where my dad pulled up in his truck.
It was afternoon when we got home. Dad pulled in the driveway but didn’t park. Instead, he told me he had to run some errands and he’d be back. I remember just being tired and desperate to be back home so I crawled out of the truck, in the same pajama bottoms I had left in, and he peeled backwards into the street and pulled away. I pet one of the cats on the way in the door and I headed straight up the stairs to my room.
I unlatched the door (it was just a flimsy attic door made of a couple planks of wood and a hook-in-eye latch) to find my room in shambles. Ramshackle would be a proper description. Shades on the windows hanging crooked. A poster ripped partially from the wall. Drawers open with clothing exploding out, a couple of drawers completely uncoupled from the dresser. I stumbled around the room trying to figure out what had happened, and was confounded for a few minutes until I found my green, plastic Sanrio Keroppi wallet laying empty on top of my dresser.
I grabbed some clean pajamas and went downstairs to the bathroom. I still remember the smell of the hospital that had seeped into my clothes and my skin. It smelled like old chemicals and sick sweat. I have never been someone that enjoys showering much, mostly because hot water often aggravates my asthma and it’s hard to relax when you can’t breathe. But when you’re pumped full of breathing treatments and steroids and you haven’t bathed in 8 or 9 days, a shower feels great.
I spent a good, long time in the bathroom that afternoon. My bedroom and the bathroom were the two rooms in the house I felt safe and my bedroom had just gotten knocked off that list.
Dad, of course, had taken off the minute I was out of the truck so he wouldn’t have to deal with me finding my room looking like a werewolf had transformed inside of it. When he came home hours later, the explanation I got was that he needed money for his “prescriptions,” and that the rest of my complaints were exaggerated. I was used to the gaslighting and having just got home from nearly dying in the hospital, I didn’t have the energy to fight it. I told him to pay me back and went back up to my room, pulling my dresser in front of the door once I was inside.