silence

so i am compelled to silence for a few days. doctor's orders. i have laryngitis. and some sort of viral infection in my throat. and maybe strep. i have three separate medications one of which needs to be breathed in via a nebulizer twice a day. and i am not meant to speak at all. apparently there is some risk of doing permanent damage to my vocal cords. so, silence. it’s actually an interesting prospect – a marked breath from my usual highly articulated, overly verbose life. i see this as an opportunity for stillness and introspection.*

although perhaps i ought to also see this as implying i’d best reconsider my policy of simply ignoring it when i am sick.** (i have had a cold or something like it for basically two weeks. but i, as per usual, just kept on keeping on until i couldn’t speak – literally.) then again, the laryngitis may have nothing to do with said policy. i somehow never seem to manage to just catch a common cold, but always end up with some highly bizarre illness or injury. i was always the kid in p.e. class who would somehow manage to get hit on the head with a basketball. (this was not an uncommon occurrence.) i have also managed to get sick after being stabbed with the fin of a dead catfish while walking on the beach in bali and digging at something shiny in the sand with my foot. (dead catfish’s fins are full of toxins and best avoided, just fyi.) in college i endured a puncture wound on a big toe inflicted by deadly stilettos at a tito puente concert. (i was so lost in the music i didn’t even notice until i realized i was living bloody footprints. (and we couldn’t afford to drink so i was literally drunk on jazz. i love that feeling!) while shopping at a luxury food market in DC in preparation for a 30th birthday celebration weekend some friends were throwing me at a wonderful farm in maryland, i managed to somehow get a thick, rusty nail embedded into my heel.*** i have also managed to tear a cornea after a bug fly into my eye and needed to have my upper jaw worked back into place after a fall. i suppose, in comparison, laryngitis is nothing to be coughed at (pun intended).

i do think that i am partially to blame for this current ailment. i didn’t slow down while sick (see, supra, my policy of ignoring illness) and had a very fun weekend. though not as fun as everyone assumes – when my voice started becoming hoarse on saturday, multiple people asked me whether i was out until 6 am singing karaoke on friday. i was not. i went to a very mellow dinner and then hung out a friend’s courtyard. i did, however, hold a fish (gently). so maybe that had something to do with it. i was out rather late on saturday – by then i had mistaken the hoarseness for a chance to sound like a husky, silky jazz singer for a day. but it was still all fairly tame. writing this recalls my perhaps most bizarre injury back from my days of riding my wild horses in shanghai.

i remember when found myself sitting in a doctor’s office in shanghai with what can only be called a nightlife injury. “the red line moving up your leg is not a good sign,” the shanghainese doctor said, frowning. “it is either a simple spread of the infection in your foot or blood poisoning. this is not something to mess around with.” i nodded gravely; nothing about his manner was messing around. he explained that if it were blood poisoning, I would be dead by the time that charming little red line reached my heart. the doctor called for the nurse and informed me i needed to be put on intravenous antibiotics immediately. yowsa, I thought to myself, drugs straight into my bloodstream all as the result of a blister on my toe and too much dancing.

then i looked down at my infected foot. the offending toe was now the size of my fist, my foot was size of a medium-sized eggplant, and there was that unmistakable red line creeping up my shin. this was all the fault of a pair of new shoes and a night out at a new hip-hop club. a blister on my toe opened as the night wore on and got infected somewhere amid the sounds of booming jay z, whispering japanese hipsters, chain-smoking euros, and screaming young shanghainese. i hadn’t noticed the slow swelling until the champagne cocktails wore off, and I awoke to discover my foot had ballooned overnight and my walking was compromised.

i wasn’t sure how to explain my champagne-soaked shanghai days to the doctor, so didn’t really have a good answer for him when he asked why i’d waited so long to come in. “ummm, i thought it might just go away?,” i feebly offered. he remained silent. i think he expected me to continue. but what could i say except i’d been in bed all day after a big night out? wasn’t that enough? was it possible, i wondered to myself, that not everyone in this city was still living as though the swinging jazz age never ended?

the nurse came with the i.v. they put the needle in my arm and left me to contemplate the ceiling as the antibiotics seeped into my blood. when i was ready to be unhooked, the doctor explained that i would have to come back every six to eight hours for more antibiotics. taking out the needle and re-inserting it each time would be cumbersome, the doctor said. tnstead, he calmly informed me, they were just going to leave the needle in my vein and wrap my arm in a bandage while i was away from the clinic. he must have seen the horror in my eyes, because he noted that this would save them having to re-find the vein each time and would make my visits faster. even so, i was aghast. the doctor smiled and said he’d see me later.

having a needle in your arm at the crook of your elbow for any significant amount of time is an incredibly strange, softly agonizing sensation. i could feel the needle in my vein with the slightest movement, and had irrational, paranoid visions of a sudden move jerking the needle out of my vein or causing major injury to myself as i rolled over in my sleep. i thought the bandaging made me look tough and people were suitably shocked and horrified when i explained that i had needle semi-permanently in my vein. on the bright side, i completely forgot about my foot because i was so distracted by the needle in my arm. on the less bright side, i had a needle in my arm.

i somehow found myself thinking about that experience in shanghai this afternoon while inhaling medicine through the nebulizer and waving at our ayi. ahh, a few days of silence and introspection. here i come!

*this is not the same as over-thinking, i swear.

**i realize this policy has also at times applied to injuries. about a year ago at this time, on a blue sky morning, i decided to go for a run. i had barely made it out of my door before i managed to trip over a well-hidden sprinkler head and bruise and batter myself. the bump on my knee rapidly swelled to the size and shape of a baseball and my elbows were bleeding rather profusely. but i brushed myself off, hobbled home, had a shower, and went about the day. my boyfriend at the time, little trouble, suggested that i should probably go to hospital. but i said no. my elbow continued bleeding and when there were droplets of blood near the printer, my office manager politely gave me a plaster. that night i had a conference call which ended around 10:00 pm. as i got off the phone, little trouble wanted to have a look at my elbow. as soon as he peeled back the plaster, i knew i was in trouble. he said we needed to go to the emergency room right away, that it was still bleeding, there was a deep gash, and i clearly needed stitches. even then i tried to argue, saying that i had a doctor's appointment the following morning (which i did) and i could just deal with it then. eventually he won (although not after i called both my sister (an ER doctor) and my ba (my father) to get their opinions, which i think infuriated little trouble). i did need stitches, but my knee was ok (although i wasn't able to run for many months). some might find it strange to be in the ER at 11:00 pm for an injury that occurred at 7:30 am, but it seemed very natural to me.

***in a very calm manner i informed my friends of the situation and there were some moments of panic. then i instructed one friend to go inside and search for a first aid kit, another to look for ice, and a third to pull the nail out because i didn’t think i could do that. everyone executed brilliantly. we considered whether to go to the emergency room, but decided against it. i wanted to get started on the drive to the farm, didn’t want to ruin the weekend, and was hungry (and a rusty nail was not going to stand between me and a good meal). we also reasoned that it was a friday evening in SE washington and if we did show up in the emergency room, we would clearly be lower in priority than the gang shootings surely trickling in at that point. and we had so much fresh produce! we laughed at the idea of turning up in the waiting room with our fresh seafood and gourmet cheeses – humboldt fog, anyone? i hobbled around for the weekend and went in for a tetanus shot on monday morning after realizing that i was not, as i had assumed, up on my tetanus vaccinations. the doctor who looked at my foot said that i was incredibly lucky because the nail had penetrated quite deeply and i was dangerously close to having done real damage. she asked why i hadn’t gone for treatment right away. i squirmed a little when i said i prioritized delicious cheese and the sunset over the potomac.