Sick Girl by Amy Silverstein

Author:Amy Silverstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2007-12-04T16:00:00+00:00

16

I WILL NOT LIVE SCARED.

It was one thing to jot down an intention like this one in tiny blue letters while sitting comfortably in the medically supervised safety of my hospital room. It was quite another to live it on the streets of New York City, where I would have to move through time and space with a heart that was new to my body and didn’t feel at all like mine.

With my wedding date set for the following June, I had less than a year’s time to shake myself loose from post-transplant fears. I had only eleven months, to be exact: summer to fall, winter to spring, and then Scott and I would marry at the Pierre. The following September, I would return to law school, finish my third year of studies, and sit for the bar exam. But today, a little more than a week after my discharge from the hospital, I would have to take one of those terrifying self-imposed walks—alone—out the door of my apartment building, past the mailbox on the corner, and then around half a block to the bakery. I would buy a quarter pound of assorted cookies there and return home. In previous days I had covered three other stores closer in distance (Korean market, wine store, newsstand). If I could do the bakery, I would surpass yesterday’s yardage and meet my goal for the new day. And then I’d immediately have to set a more daunting objective for tomorrow: walk across Sixth Avenue and into the grocery store.

It would mean having to wear one of the masks a nurse had given me before I left the hospital. She had warned me about the dangers of being a newly transplanted, immunosuppressed patient caught in a crowd of germy New Yorkers. At the movies or in any closed-in space with a potentially germ-carrying population, I was supposed to tie a surgical-type mask across my nose and mouth so I might avoid “serious complications.”

“Like what?” I’d asked her.

“Like a cold—even that would be dangerous for you right now. Something as simple as a stomach virus could be very bad. When you’re out and about, you’ll definitely want to put on that mask.”

But I didn’t want to at all. The mask only reminded me that there was yet another hovering health risk that called out for my fear; the most ordinary of activities (food shopping) might land me in the hospital. And wearing a surgical mask in public, among chatty New Yorkers who thought nothing of commenting on such anomalies with a rude sense of entitlement, would make me feel like an even bigger freak than my puffy prednisone face already did.

The next day, I put on the mask and passed through the sliding doors of the neighborhood A&P, thankful they’d opened in front of me automatically without my having to touch them with my hands.

I’m not a germ phobe! I wanted to shout. I have to wear this mask because I had a heart transplant ten days ago.

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