The Two Kinds of Decay

Signs

I still had the cold over spring break. I woke up on Sunday morning and my feet were asleep. I was at my parents’ house, and I’d stayed out late.

I walked down the hall to the bathroom and my feet stayed asleep.

When I splashed water on my face, I couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t seem to hold it long enough. How long does it take to wash a face — two seconds?

My hands were tingling a little.

Still tingling, I finished packing, brought my bags downstairs, put them in the car, and sat in the passenger seat while my father drove the ten miles back to my college dorm.

The dorm’s elevator went to the even floors only, so I rode to the eighth floor and slid the bags down a flight to my room, G-73.

I phoned my parents the next night, and the one after that, and told them I’d come down with some kind of bug that was making me feel tired. I walked stiff-legged and slowly, and I was still nearly drowning every time I washed my face. My feet were numb, and my hands were getting numb, too.

I was concerned I’d caught a strange illness, but I was more concerned that I looked drunk. I was staggering around, even to and from breakfast, and I felt people looking at me and thinking it might be time for an intervention.

On my fourth day back at school, I fell down in the courtyard. Then I went upstairs and called my mother and asked her if she’d pick me up at school and take me to the hospital near their house, the hospital where I’d been born.

She drove me home first. She said my father would meet us there, would drive back early from his office on the South Shore, and the three of us would go to the hospital together.

That’s when I understood something might really be wrong with me.

I remember walking from the back door of the house to the driveway, with my mother clutching my right arm so I wouldn’t stumble on the brick path, and asking, What’s wrong with me?

My father said, very calmly, I don’t know, Sar, but at the hospital they will.

His calmness is the reason I didn’t cry until almost twelve hours later, once I was in Intensive Care, my blood already churning through a machine, when a nurse explained to me that if the strength of my diaphragm weakened five more pounds per square inch of air pressure, I’d be intubated through a hole in my neck.