“Yellow Fever, Ear Infections, Painter’s Colic and Cancer”

My body has been away from my beloved Portsmouth, Virginia but my mind has not yet left. It has been little more than a week since I have climbed a ladder or scraped at sickness, years and lead dust. Since Monday my Ella has been down with an ear infection, her nose has been running like a Sanderling; sometimes just one leg, sometimes both. I myself have been having the fever and back spasms that seem to come out of nowhere and disappear as quickly as a snowflake on my beaten brow. We are in the sun again, warmer than normal even inside the house on Duck Road. The cold air is on, but we don’t notice; Ella and me. My forty three year old eyes see less physically than those of my 20/20 youth, yet in my mind they see beyond my horizon. Nevertheless, I squint through reading glasses at the moles on my arms, once freckles; now like embedded ticks, tiny and crystallized. The blood had been drawn, the poison infused and the microbial war is waging within me. Fevers of one hundred and three have plagued my youngest for the better part of the week. Every five minutes I bend to wipe the greenish discharge from her sinus, using warm wet compresses to dislodge the crust. Every time I feed her the medicine for the fever, the mucous or the microbes she screams like the cat hit on my road last May. It sounds as if I am torturing her. It breaks my fucking mind, every four to six hours, but I must fight where she cannot. “Are you hungry yet baby?” I ask her every so often while my mind drifts to that old sea captain and his sick daughter, and my mother; moved now to a “facility” in Suffolk. At least mom has escaped Portsmouth again, for now. I pray for her rest in Suffolk in the house she shares with my father against the heavy stakes on an inevitable rest in Portsmouth with my history, my friends and my grandparents. “Are you hungry?” I ask again…”I’m cleaning the toys up.” she says. “You’re cleaning the toys up? Good girl.” I say. I flash back to 1855 and the outbreak, the fevers and the hemorrhaging. Only seventy three years later that only daughter of a Portsmouth father would have been saved; only seventy three years, yeah. That’s when the old Army doctor turned bacteriologist discovered penicillin, and changed the course of mankind. Sir Alexander Fleming; and in a strange twist his work would eventually lead to advances in chemotherapy. Bittersweet that all is now that the 6milliliters of bubble gum flavored antibiotic given twice daily will spare my little girls life and the chemotherapy more than likely had a hand in my mother’s decline. Life is a sick and funny bitch. Funny in the sense of a slip and fall on thin ice, funny enough to kill you, funny to camouflage the heart wrenching sadness of it all. The simple discovery of that mold lead to the saving of hundreds of thousands of lives, and spawned an industry that is now hell bent on treating symptoms rather than finding cures. What a fucked up twist. Fleming would roll over in his grave if he could see the flowers of his rotting wood. Flowering fungi circling death plowed under and flourishing in the mystical beauty we call fairy rings. A sick and twisted mess this has truly become; this world which we have created. Before that singular discovery, borne out of a mistake, bacteria and militant microbes killed more human beings than all of the wars in history combined, all fourteen thousand five hundred of them, since man discovered hatred towards himself. Cancer is a business now; part of the medical industrial complex. This once great nation, home of the famously “greatest generation” now leads the world in incarcerated persons, heart disease, cancer and inflated health care costs. Just the other day the cops busted in on an old folks home and using tasers and bean bags shot from shot guns finished what the Japanese couldn’t sixty eight years ago, killing a widower of ninety five years; armed with a walker. I don’t like to use the term and I feel no need to justify the distinction between one or the other, but these weren’t cops, they were pigs. We are truly, as Hank put it, “born into this, into hospitals so expensive that it’s cheaper to die, into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty, into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed…yes, as the chalk faces laugh, and Mrs. Death smiles.” If Bukowski were alive today he would be heralded as a prophet, yet the ones who judge art and give the prizes keep him in the back of the cheap bookstores, the beer soaked speak-easy, and the category of low-brow. He was a true patriotic hero, a Thomas Paine for this “doomed generation.” Nobody listens to the prophets anymore; they beat each other and blow themselves up with two thousand year old myth. One is just as good as the other in my book. Nobody notices anything anymore; not butterflies, not bums, not truth. “Would you like a hot dog Ella”, wiping her nose…”are you hungry yet?” as she stares, glazed eyes focused on a flat high definition screen filled with animated ducks and farting pigs. I think it’s time to be a father, and just cook the meal. I know it is lunchtime, because she can’t. In a few hours my mother will use deformed fingers to dial my number and ask me how she is doing. Meanwhile, as I said earlier, she has been moved to a facility after five weeks of post operation ass covering by her surgeon and doctor who I wouldn’t let cut my hair. They dug into her belly and up her anus for eight hours, carving tumors from her rectum and vaginal wall, missing a bit and then sewing her up again. Now she is “leaking”. While they were in there they fixed a hole they tore in her small intestine, while tearing several others open that they seem to have missed. It wasn’t until blood and bodily discharges began seeping from two of the three incisions they made on her that they noticed. CT scans and best guesses haven’t yet found the troubled spots. All the barber says is that she must rest her digestive system before they can “attempt” to fix it. It will be another two months before they do surgery to venture another guess at that, and then, once rested more chemo. The esteemed surgeon did have the stones to admit that “maybe” the radiation had something to do with the weakening of her bowels. Wow, I thought…really; could shooting radiation through a sixty seven year old body that’s been ravaged by rheumatoid arthritis and all but lost its ability to fight infection, as the disease makes the body attack itself, be affected adversely by that treatment? I wonder to myself while I chew on my tongue every time I find myself in that butcher’s presence. She said that there was so much scar tissue; adhesions from an ill-advised hysterectomy, gall bladder operation, three childbirths and half a life’s worth of mothering, that once inside her guts were like a spider’s web of organ and torn tissue paper; everything just all jumbled up and glued together in her lower abdomen. Now she rests in the facility because my father’s forty years of serving our government can’t buy her the comfort or care of a Congressman, a Senator, or a corrupt Wall Street banker. The whole thing makes me sick. It’s not yellow Fever sick, nor Painter’s Colic sick, not ear infection or cancer sick…it is the sickness of a mind too full, too full of prayer, worry, hope, love, faith, brutality, childhood, hysteria, depression, anxiety, malice and dying freshly cut grass. Mom will call in a few hours, struggling to do so as she wouldn’t want anyone here worrying about her; she just wants to know that her son and granddaughter are alright, never mind the wounds; fresh scars that won’t yet heal. So off I go now, to cook a small meal for my littlest genius and give thanks for my mother’s life, not forgetting that for the last five weeks nor for the next eight that she will not be allowed by her keepers to eat one bite of food, or take one sip of drink. I take off my reading glasses for one moment and look over my horizon and vow to myself; never like that. I will never end like that. I don’t care if it’s by burning or by sky burial, I will never rot away in a bed in Portsmouth fucking Virginia. Outside my sunny Carolina window the fathers and daughters stroll swiftly on the hot sidewalk past my house; necks wrapped with wetted towels and skin of bronze for just one week. In a few day’s time this reality will be a picture in a frame.