Carrie Cook
You didn’t even know that it was happening. In hindsight, the first indication was your sit-ups. You had done seventy in two minutes once, in the beginning of your army career, but it was after you took your semi-annual PT test and you don’t want to take it again. Seventy might have gotten you your PT patch, the award for people who score in the ninetieth percentile. Shortly after you get to your first duty station, you take a PT test and only do forty three sit-ups. You need forty five to pass. You work on them for a month and rally with forty seven, so you are not flagged, so you can still get promoted. Six months later, you do twenty seven. Then sixteen. Then none. You can’t even sit up in bed. You are 29 years old.
“What is wrong with me?” you ask, and you decide that you are lazy. You have eaten that pile of shit your sergeant gave you, without any salt. So you go to the gym, because remedial PT requires you to go twice a day, and you try. For an extra hour every day, you work on nothing but sit-ups, and in the end, you are rewarded with one. You can do one sit-up and it hurts to do it, your neck and your legs and your shoulders straining with the effort, and you decide again that you are lazy, and you stop trying. Embracing the laziness, you spend that extra hour in the gym walking on the treadmill and watching Oprah with the sound off.
When you are 30, your thumb stops working – you know this because you can’t open up your scissors. This, more than the sit-ups, so much more than the sit-ups, terrifies you, and you call your mom and ask her if you might have that thing that Michael J. Fox has. “You don’t,” she assures you. “Just go to the doctor, you probably have carpal tunnel.” You think about this statement and you accept it, because you want to believe it, even though you know you don’t type too much, you don’t do any repetitive motions with your hand and carpal tunnel is supposed to hurt.
So you go to the doctor, and he sends you to another doctor, who sends you to another doctor, and another, ad nauseum, because no doctor can figure out why your thumb doesn’t work. You are a genuine medical mystery. They poke you with needles, shine bright lights in your eyes, put you in an electromagnetic coffin, shock you with electricity, parade you in front of interns, but provide no answers. “There’s definitely something wrong,” the doctors tell you, you want to scream, “OF COURSE THERE IS BUT WHAT IS IT?” and they give you plenty of options to choose from. A tumor in your shoulder, a slipped disc in your neck that presses on your spinal cord, ALS.
You look up all of these on the Internet.
“This is not a good idea,” that little voice in the back of your mind warns, but you can’t stop yourself from researching how neck surgery will result in living in a metal halo for 6 months, how ALS will slowly destroy all your motor nerves, leaving your mind trapped in your useless, rag doll body. While they are busy sending you to other doctors, you find that you can no longer give others the middle finger. Your wrist starts slacking off too, and you can’t hold that gallon of milk or that two liter of soda in one hand anymore.
You decide that you are okay with tumors and neck surgery, but not ALS, because you can’t do anything about ALS. You can fight the other ones. There’s even a disease that requires infusions that cost $12,000 per treatment, but it works and you will get your hand back. You decide that this is what you have, because not knowing what you have is scarier than this disease you picked. Please God, anything but ALS.
You are 31 and your latest specialist says you have it; you have that which you asked God not to have. There is nothing to do, nothing but shake your fist at God. Doctors have nothing for you, no cure, no magic pill. Nothing to do except to go home and wait to die. Fifty percent of patients will die after five years; eighty percent will die after ten years. In ten years you will be 41, middle age for most, but for you, if you live that long, it will be your old age, and you will be fed through a hole in your stomach and a machine will breathe for you because you will be too weak to draw in your own life. It would be okay if you would lose your mind too, so you wouldn’t know what you were becoming, but you won’t.
Your mind will stay crystal clear, but everything that made you a person will be a distant memory. Other people will change your diaper and wipe the drool off your chin, and talk about you like you are not in the room.
After this you are acutely aware at all times that your disease is fatal and you are dying. You surf the Internet and you are dying. You play games on the Xbox and you are dying. You lie in bed next to your spouse and you are dying. You cannot talk about it because you can’t say the words—they get caught on the way up, trapped in the lump in your throat, dissipating into nothingness before they reach your tongue. No one would listen anyway, you think, because they don’t want to believe you are dying. You look fine. How could you be dying?
Because you can’t talk about it, you start retracting the silken threads of your life’s web, detaching them from your friends and family, winding them around you, trying to insulate yourself. You detach from your spouse, your mother, your siblings, and become the undead. Hell must be full, because when that happens the dead will walk the earth, and here you are, walking. How long will you get to walk? You pretend that you are alive.
The army does not want you anymore because you are diseased, a drag on their resources. They process you out and give you less than they give all the malingerers around you. These fakers pretend to have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when all they did in the war zone was play video games, just like you did. Maybe they didn’t even go to the war zone. But you’re a faker too, pretending to live and to be okay. You are not okay. You are not okay and you are dying.
But everyone is dying, and you are still alive. It just takes you a few years to realize it.
You are 34 and you decide that you will live. You aren’t quite sure when this decision took place, but somehow, pretending to live has just become living. You still walk, eat and your lungs still draw in your own life; you are still your own person. Doctors are often wrong, and your arm is tired from shaking your fist at God. Hopelessness and death is tiring. You laugh with friends and you are living. You plant a garden and you are living. You lay with your spouse and you are alive.
You are still alive.
© Copyright 2009 Carrie Cook