The Two Kinds of Decay

The Chair

On June 9, 1995, my mother helped me onto my father’s antique wooden desk chair and pushed me to the bathroom.

I was a dead weight in the heavy chair. My mother, bigger and taller than I am, pushed as hard as she could. The chair’s casters caught in our beige wall-to-wall carpet. Push, back up a few inches, rest. Push, back up, rest. When it was time to get up and onto the toilet, my mother held my upper arms very tightly, then lowered me down.

By afternoon my legs were completely paralyzed. My breathing had started to go. My mother phoned my neurologist and told him I was doing worse.

It was a bump in the road, he said. He believed my immune system would burn itself out, that it would stop producing antibodies and that I’d start to heal. It might happen today, even.

Then my mother phoned my hematologist.

The hematologist said we should hang up and call 911.

I heard sirens. An ambulance arrived, and a fire truck, and two police cruisers.

My mother answered the door and led the trauma guys upstairs, where I lay on the bed, still but able to chat. I can’t move my legs, I told them.

The trauma guys, those Norse gods, strapped me into a firerescue chair, carried me down the thirteen steps to the first floor, lay me on a gurney, and rolled me into the back of the ambulance.

It was so green outside! Massachusetts was a green jungle. I could smell the trees.

Since it was rush hour, the driver turned on the siren.