Ghosts of St. Vincent's by Tom Eubanks

Author:Tom Eubanks [Eubanks, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

tangible weight

“They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.”

—Tim O’Brien,

The Things They Carried

That winter Dr. Ross and the good people at St. Vincent’s kept Demarol and Dilaudid flowing through my veins as they ran various tests, drew blood daily, performed three endoscopies, and eventually inserted a Port-a-cath just above my heart.

Instead of trying to find the simplest solution to the cause and treatment of the ulcers in my esophagus—as if I were any other patient—Dr. Ross and company saw the H, I, and V on my chart and assumed the worst. A few days before Thanksgiving he diagnosed me with cytomegalovirus (in its inevitable shorthand, CMV), one of the CDC’s Top 26 opportunistic infections.

“CMV is a relatively harmless virus for those with healthy immune systems,” the doctor informed me. “It’s mostly found in the eye and tends to cause blindness. It’s also known to cause damage to the esophagus. In fact, most people in their lifetimes encounter the virus but never suffer complications. We are seeing what it can do when unleashed in an immuno-compromised host.”

They implanted the aforementioned port catheter so I could administer a refrigerated dose of Ganciclovir intravenously every twelve hours. It looked like a small plastic knob stuck to my left upper pectoral.

Ganciclovir was a newly authorized anti-viral medication made expressly to fight CMV. Although being released from the hospital to treat myself seemed scary, it was a series of encouraging steps.

A nurse demonstrated how to keep the open wound in my chest clean every time I peeled away the dressing to give myself the medicine. She showed me how to apply sterile dressing with disposable latex gloves. She warned about infections if I wasn’t diligent or if I got sloppy. She listed adverse reactions I might experience. Without irony, she told me it would inhibit my sperm production, then handed me a palm-sized 20-page accordion of paper to peruse at home.

The drug itself came as a liquid in small latex dispenser balls with needles that plugged into the catheter burrowed into my chest. In the course of about an hour, the drug oozed down into my superior vena cava and spread, still cold, through my bloodstream. The feeling freaked me out at first, but eventually I got used to it.

On the morning I was first released, an early snowfall brought the streets of the Village to a whitewash hush. My friend Kevin took the Jets duffle bag I’d inherited from Stewart. I packed up all the crap visitors had brought into a plastic bag that read: “Belongings of …” with blank lines for a name and an address like a postcard.

Dr. Ross shook my hand and wished me luck. I said goodbye to the nurses. They handed me a prescription for Oxycodone. The pills were meant to manage the pain when I ate, yet they were impossible to swallow.

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