The Two Kinds of Decay

Steroids

It’s hard not to speak in clichés about corticosteroids.

They are powerful and make you feel better than it is possible to feel without them, and the more of them you take, the better you feel.

They are poison if you take them at a high dose for too long, and too long is generally considered more than six weeks. I took them for four and a half years.

In August 1995, when I couldn’t stand up, I sat in a wheelchair in my new neurologist’s office as he wrote me my first prescription for steroids, and I took 60 mg of prednisone the next morning, and 60 mg the morning after that, and that was the morning I got up and walked all the way from one end of my parents’ house to the other and never needed a walker again.

I was finally able to eat a whole meal and no longer needed to drink two protein drinks per day. Not only that, but my parents and I were able to go out to restaurants, and I could walk to the table using just a cane.

And every meal, no matter how simple or cheap, tasted better than any other meal I’d ever eaten, and every piece of music I heard was more beautiful than any other piece of music I’d ever heard. This sounds like trite shorthand, but it is not.

I remember feeling well after having begun to take steroids, and how happy my mother was to cook a hamburger for me. I remember eating it. The ketchup, the mustard — I can taste the condiments.

I’m not talking about the way ketchup and mustard taste in general. I mean I can taste the particular condiments that were on that particular hamburger I ate in 1995.

I started staying up until four in the morning with a pile of books and magazines, and sleeping until seven, when I’d climb downstairs and make myself breakfast.

Sometimes I woke up screaming. Or, to be more precise, I’d waken from a dream of being in a death camp or a bad fire, so frightened that when I opened my eyes, I thought screaming might distract me from my fright. So I was always wide awake before I screamed.

And since my diaphragm muscles were quite strong by then, I could scream loud enough to wake my parents.

My father sometimes came to see if I were all right, if I had torn out my catheter as I’d slept, but only one of the stitches ever got torn out.

The catheter never got torn out in my sleep because I’d learned how to roll over slowly, even in deep sleep, while cradling the catheter in my left hand.

And I rolled over like that for a long time after the tube was pulled.