“I guess the Almighty doesn’t bargain,” I said one day to Elizabeth, who lived down the hall. By small increments, my sense of humor and ability to cope were coming back, along with a new interest in the God who had not answered my prayers. An alchemical process was taking place that I didn’t quite understand. I stopped going to all the parties I didn’t really care about. Since the big things were enough trouble, I began to let the small things slide. Being eighteen and fortunate, it was a struggle to realize that this was not the end of everything. Twilight began to look bleak, the precursor of dark empty hours without sleep. Assignments that once took a few hours to complete now took days walking from campus to my dorm left me exhausted. Doctors told me to sit tight-the Depo injection was effective for three months, and it might take another several months after that for my body to rebalance itself. By the time I was in my late teens I had adopted the anemic mantra “spiritual but not religious.” I couldn’t have told you what it meant. In high school a fatuous brand of neopaganism was popular, thanks to movies like The Craft this gave my heretical impulses a temporary outlet. I learned to hide, deny, or dress up all experiences I could not explain. Addressing a God I had never spoken to in my life, I promised that if I recovered in three days, I would become a Muslim. By chance, the three people who watched over me most diligently during the first days of my illness-a classmate, his mother, and a nurse-were all Iranian. And having always been the kind of person who could catnap at will, I wasn’t very good with sleep deprivation, either. At seventeen I was immortal at eighteen I was a short and arbitrary series of events. Later I would learn that I was also losing bone mass. In a blow to my vanity, I was losing hair. Landing in the hospital because of legal medication seemed like a violation of the way things were supposed to work.įor days I was in and out of doctors’ offices with the mostly untreatable symptoms of adrenal distress: heart palpitations, sudden attacks of sweating and dizziness, and insomnia so severe that no amount of tranquilizer could keep me asleep for more than four or five hours. At the turn of the millennium, even rebellion was fairly sanitary.
The most dangerous things I’d ever done were take the Chinatown-to-Chinatown bus from Boston to New York, walk home alone late at night once or twice, and get my lower lip pierced at a dimly lit shop in some basement off Commonwealth Avenue. Up until then I’d been lucky enough never to see the inside of an emergency room. Five months into my sophomore year of college at Boston University I was hospitalized, in the middle of the night, for a rare and acute reaction to a Depo Provera injection I’d received several days earlier.
In a way, I was in the market for a philosophy. Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu
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