THE CAREGIVER

"Health," said Dr. Tate, "had once been my great pursuit. But lately my legs have fallen in on themselves, like so many of the floors in this hospital. It's not just the offices," he continued, pointing toward the chipped plaster ceilings and stained floors that have begun to fade away after years of overbooking. Day after day, he said, he felt that his mind itself was shifting and weakening beneath the weight his leg brace placed on him. Of course, the medical field had once been intended to treat the uncomprehending masses, and had for years, by virtue of its determination and sheer excess, provided bottled pills and wheelchairs throughout this doctor's illness; it still did, despite its ethical doubts, prescribing him so much that he had amassed entire mahogany cabinets of prescription curiosities, which notwithstanding had grown increasingly potent.

Being shown down the once-sparkling linoleum floors one evening to his own bed did have its compensation, said Dr. Tate, because the people who still worked there, whom he had overseen or reported to more or less conscientiously, retained a compassion that he found especially genuine. He watched Jeopardy between visits from nurses carrying the trays of apple sauce that were delivered on the hour—dish after dish of uneatable food, and then a small bouquet of flowers, on which there was a cluster of red and yellow blossoms. The nurse placed a bunch of these bright tulips, which really did look better than any streaked window in the hospital, on the ledge by the next bed, and gave them to a graying redhead, telling her that the delivery was apparently sent from home.
*
Three years prior, shortly before I began my tenure at Pomona College, I sought treatment from Dr. Tate for what my wife called "the episodes," which I had been experiencing for several unbearable and unthinkable months. On entering the facility, I noticed some machinery humming near moveable cots, and an information desk on the ground floor, stowed underneath graying sheets. At last the receptionist turned a corner, her white and tapered hand quietly beckoning me inside the doctor's office. The tiny room, spare and filled with stacks of patient's charts, looked abandoned, though it did not take me long to discover the doctor bent over his work behind a pile of papers.

Almost completely hidden, he sat in a tiny swivel chair, leg-braced and bandaged, tucked into the corner of his office. His demeanor was overly-formal, his small blue eyes hidden beneath glasses with thick black frames. We talked about my symptoms: the nights I would read Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire to finish scholarly articles and suddenly fall, light headed and nauseated, beneath my cluttered mahogany desk; the terrible headaches. And we talked about my wife, who'd left to live with her mother, Edith.

"Partial complex seizures, of course," answered the doctor, neatly and laboriously printing the diagnosis on the carbon paper clipped into my folder. I had expected him to say migraines, or perhaps the blood pressure episodes which I had heard so much about when describing my illness to friends. "The treatment," he said, "is simple." He asked me to return at the end of the week with my work, so that he might reproduce my symptoms in a controlled environment, probably documenting each twitch and sneeze in painstakingly neat capital letters on my chart through a tiny glass window in the exam room.

My latest article had yet to be so much as peer-reviewed, so for the sake of my work, I agreed and, carrying prescriptions pills for nerves and preventative tablets through the hollow belly of the hospital, I thought about my wife, Isabel. When I knew her, she was a well-reputed Proust scholar with shaggy blonde hair and a very slight but charming lisp. We had been married six months when the episodes began, and she suspected that I had kept something dire from her—even from myself—that caused these fits of unconsciousness. There was no convincing her of my ignorance, so when she packed up her leather-bound Norton Anthology and the rose-scented balm that she rubs in her hair, I felt relieved and desperate. I remembered her dramatic exit—the long procession of suitcases and belongings, and her high-heeled shoes—and knew that I had no choice but to be well again. When I left the hospital, the evening was dim and slightly humid. Walking to my car, I realized I had never noticed the way birds love to nest on telephone wires, their small feathered bodies sleeping and waking above endless currents of electricity.
*
When I arrived for the consultation before the procedure, the hospital was nearly empty. Until that morning I had never been bothered by the way glossy, beige paint seemed to chip and peel from red-brick walls; or by the beds that the nurses pushed, creaking and moaning as they were wheeled through echoing hallways. The place seemed desolate, even shabby, as I opened the door to Dr. Tate's plain, unimposing suite and sat down with a novel. The waiting room was, as per usual, empty. His receptionist had apparently called in sick, so this time the physician opened the door and beckoned me inside, his leg brace clanking as he limped toward the door before standing unusually straight in an attempt to make his steps appear more even and relaxed.

"Come right in," he said, gesturing toward a sofa near his cluttered desk. Sitting down, I looked for the usual type of prints that hang from the walls in doctor's offices, emblazoned with inspirational quotes and sunsets, but saw only large cracks running down the porous walls. As I took a drink from the bottled water I had purchased in the lobby, he described the procedure, stating plainly, "I'm going to hook you up to several monitors. These do not give off electricity, but rather they measure electricity coming from you. You will work as usual until you experience a partial, complex seizure, at which point I will observe you from behind this glass wall, which is not soundproof," he said. "Holler if anything goes wrong," he continued, his voice trailing off.

And as he spoke, his small radio played on, Journey lyrics resounding in the empty little room, and he pushed a stack of papers toward me, simply stating, "The Agreement." Until I had seen Dr. Tate eating applesauce in his pristine white hospital bed, it never occurred to me that physicians become ill and work haphazardly, their heads throbbing with pills and shots, each day wearing on like bad opera. Initialing on the dotted line and signing my name with a flourish, I handed the pen back to him and gathered my things, the papers becoming disheveled as I walked out of his office, dazed.
*
A few years after leaving Dr. Tate's care, I often visited my very kind but aging mother on Sundays at the same hospital. On leaving one of these visits with Isabel, I passed by his room. I had switched to another physician's care after becoming sick from Tate's pills and shots, but eventually grew well enough to begin my job at Pomona. The hospital, even more dilapidated and run-down than before, seemed to groan with each step that I took, until I heard a voice resounding from an open doorway, telling a nurse, "The morning I left for med school, the whole world seemed to sing." It was Dr. Tate, waving his frail, knotted hand and telling her that more and more, the hospital seemed to speak to him of its glory days—the mornings and afternoons of frantic residents and double-booked physicians. And, as he said, he could almost hear the moaning floors and crumbling walls whispering about the height off his career: the days he gave lectures at Stanford and rushed from appointment to consultation to yet another appointment; the hours of the day in the end failing him.

I remembered the empty waiting rooms in Dr. Tate's suite, the arduous tests, and the pills that made me either nauseous or deathly ill, wondering what placed him at the top of the heap. As I stood in the hallway, I knew that I had never thought of doctors as anything other than caregivers, not once thinking of those white-coated gods in pristine white cots awaiting pills or orange juice. When I walked through the revolving doors at the front entrance of the hospital, the walls seemed ready to give in, dust from their old water-stained plaster being carried away by a cold autumn wind.

Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, where she is currently pursuing a master's degree. She is the author of five chapbooks of poetry and nonfiction. Her prose has appeared or will appear in The Mid-American Review, CutBank, Rain Taxi, The Pedestal, Redactions, and other journals. Recent awards include residencies from the Centrum Foundation and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.

Return