A History of Present Illness by Anna DeForest

Author:Anna DeForest
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: None
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

Extraordinary Measures

A mystery writer—I am trying to remember her name. Someone did a study after she died, a study of the books she had written. She had dementia, Alzheimer’s, maybe, and the study showed that far before she was demented outright, her books began to contain less specificity. Words like things began appearing everywhere; settings grew more and more vague, like a world fogged over with cataracts, like pages soaked with bleach. A teacher I once had was not fond of similes. She said nothing really is like anything else, described a church as being as quiet as a church. What would a hospital be? Not sterile, no, not remotely clean. It is safer to jump off a cliff than to be hospitalized. With a parachute on, I mean.

Churches are quiet, true enough. Old and cold and safe. There was one hidden in the hospital that I had never noticed until Esteban showed me. It was easy to miss. Newer additions had been built up all around it, swallowing its outline completely. It was round with old wood and dark bricks, stained-glass windows with boards behind them so light could not shine through. I didn’t know what happened there, but signs said everyone was welcome. FIND COMFORT HERE, said a paper taped to the wall, BUT DO NOT SLEEP OR EAT!

In the emergency department, the notes wrote themselves. All you did on the screen was click some boxes. The output, for example, for a patient intubated after an overdose read:

This is a new problem.

The current episode started two hours ago.

The problem occurs rarely.

The problem has not changed since onset.

Nothing aggravates the symptoms.

Nothing relieves the symptoms.

She has tried nothing.

Esteban said we don’t do things because of what we believe in, but we come to believe in what we are doing. He was glowing in a stoned way, just having come from a service where the churchgoers lined up and he and a priest, a woman priest in a plain white robe, used warm water and soft cloths and washed and dried, one by one, everybody’s feet. He floated around like that for weeks after, with a glow in his eyes and a glow that you could almost see coming off his hands. He would walk around my little room blessing the books and the furnishings.

He was teaching me to pray, in a joking way: Give me good digestion, Lord, and something to digest. He told me a story about a missionary in a jungle who found a flipped truck by the dirt road with a man inside, crushed almost to death. He ran to pray with him before the man’s last breath, and the man became quite angry. He yelled at the missionary. I imagined his voice muffled in the wetness of the jungle air, imagined the blood on his body, his face. Don’t try to save my soul, he said to the missionary. Please, just save my life.

Ada. I didn’t tell you she had a daughter. She was that age between childhood and teenage that it is almost rude to look at directly.

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