On a Pale Horse (46 page)

There were other little niceties of hospital life. One night I had a headache. I asked the nurse for a pill—but she informed me the only medication listed on my chart was Demerol. Synthetic morphine for a headache? This was like shooting a sparrow with a cannon! So I had to struggle along with the headache until the doctor came to apply some common sense. I had the usual hassle with the food, too. I am a vegetarian and diabetic, so I stay off all meat products and sugars, and I don’t drink coffee or tea. Naturally my lunch consisted of coffee with two packs of sugar, gelatin (which is made of protein from the bones of cows, mixed with sugar), sickly sweet fruit, and a piece of cake with horrendously thick sugar icing. Fortunately, there was also corn, beans, and mashed potato, so I didn’t starve; and my wife visited and fetched me some water—naturally my pitcher hadn’t been filled—so I survived. Not that I really needed to eat, with the IV dripping sugar water into my vein.

When I finished, I wanted to go to the bathroom, but discovered that the bedside table unit that overhung the bed would actually tip over rather than swing out of the way. I think if more doctors got sick and had to wrestle with these little matters, some improvements would be made. I explained gently about the food to a nurse, and that brought the dietician, who remembered me from two years before, and we finally got the matter of no-meat, no-sugar, no-coffee straight—just about the time I was to be released from the hospital.

Then there was the Candy-Striper. These are teenaged girls who bring fresh water and juice and such to patients,
thereby gaining experience in the operation of a hospital. They wear cute pink-and-white-striped uniforms with sweet little matching caps. This one showed up about 4
P.M
. my second day. She had golden hair flowing to her bottom. She not only filled my water pitcher, she brought in her family and they sat around my room and ate pizza and chatted. Then she made me brush out her hair and braid it, so she could go on duty in decent order. She seemed to take such attention for granted.

Oh—perhaps I neglected to mention that this particular Candy-Striper was Penny Jacob—my mundane daughter. Penny-Candy-Striper, Heaven-Cent. This time she had me right where she wanted me. I understand some fathers don’t pay enough attention to their children; obviously they don’t have children like mine.

The consulting urologist prescribed a gallon of urine a day. Uh, no, not to drink; I merely had to imbibe enough fluid to generate a full gallon of void each day. Have you any idea how much drinking that entails? The purpose is to dilute the urine so that no additional stones would form. It seems that kidney stones are the province of middle-aged men and that I live in a kidney-stone region; there is much calcium in our water (though they aren’t sure that’s the cause) and the local heat causes body dehydration, concentrating the urine, so that stones form. So I must, for the rest of my life, be constantly drinking water and passing it through. I can no longer sleep the night in one haul; I have to get up once or twice to you-know. But if that’s what it takes to keep the stones away, so must it be.

The first night home, I got up at 2:30
A.M
., did my business with the funnel and container—and then could not get back to sleep. I didn’t want to turn on the light to read, lest that disturb my wife, who had had problems enough, with her father so ill recently, then losing her mother, then having to deal with my illness. Problems had been striking like explosive shells around us, and that gets wearing. So I dressed and went off to my study in the pasture to type some more on
Pale Horse
, which novel had been interrupted by my hospitalization. Naturally our horses thought it was feeding time, and Blue knocked on
my door—with her hoof. I went out and explained that it was 3
A.M
. and that feeding time wasn’t for three hours yet, but she resumed banging the moment I went back inside. I was afraid she would break down the door, so finally I went out with the broom and swatted her on the rear. That moved her off—but when dawn broke, she would not speak to me, and I felt like a heel. Such is life-after-kidney-stone.

I had not let the time in the hospital go to waste. I continued reading books, including
Dream Makers
, edited by Charles Platt, which tells what other genre writers are like. They are all oddballs, almost as strange as I am! I will be in the companion volume, however, so I’d better not criticize. I also had my clipboard along. Remember, I was reworking
Chapter 6
and adding scenes. So while I was there I wrote the scene about the atheist—whose attitude is basically mine, with the fundamental difference that I do believe in doing good in this life and try very hard to benefit the universe, whether by being kind to a wild animal or by writing a novel like this one. And yes, I also wrote the scene about the old woman in the hospital. I could hardly have had a better environment for that one. But if the hospital staff had caught on, I might have had trouble getting out of there. As it turned out, there was one nurse who was a fan of mine, but she did not realize who I was—remember, I use a pseudonym—until too late to catch me. However, my daughter the Candy-Striper arranged to have that nurse visit me at home a month later, so all was not lost.

I settled back into my routine. My run series was broken at eighty-four, and I was awash in fluid, but life went on. The neighbors (the ones with the contract-negotiating boy) had to take off suddenly because a parent had a serious complication of the pancreas; we had learned the hard way about that sort of thing and knew it was terminal. Death is ever with us. While they were away, their prize mare, Navahjo, went into labor, and there wasn’t anybody around who knew what to do. She was having trouble; the foal was hung up with one foot protruding for the better part of an hour, and we feared a stillbirth. But another neighbor came, took hold and pulled, and got it
out: live birth of a colt. What a relief! The little horse was healthy and soon was frisking about; I suggested mischievously that they name him Colt 45, or maybe Colt 46. Thus, with our neighbors, life was originating even as it was ending. This, too, is as Nature decrees.

My funnel caught no stone in a month, so I had a follow-up pyelogram. I had to drink a magic potion concocted from senna fruit to clear my bowel. It was awful stuff, as these brews are, but I gulped it down. It had no effect. Then about eight hours later, in the middle of the night—FWOOM! Mount St. Helens!

I had been through the pyelogram procedure before, but this time the details differed. They put me in a hospital gown with three armholes; I wondered whether triple-armed alien creatures patronized these facilities. They injected the dye into my arm—and suddenly I felt sick and dizzy and generally spaced out, and then sneezed several times. They said it was normal, though none of this had happened the last time. In between the spaced X-ray shots, I lay on my back and read a science fiction novel I planned to review; no sense letting blank time go to waste.

We took the pictures directly to the urologist. There was no sign of the kidney stone; apparently it had cleared at the outset, and we hadn’t caught it. Too bad; it would have helped to know what kind it had been. But this latest X-ray showed a spot inside the bladder. Oh-oh—could that be a tumor? The doctor decided he’d better have a direct look. So we made an appointment for a cystoscopy, four days later.

It was a nervous wait. With everything else that had been happening during this novel, it could be just my luck to discover—but maybe it was nothing. Old scar tissue, maybe. I know my readers like stories with definite conclusions, so I held up my typing of the last of this Note for two days to await the dread verdict.

That cystoscopy was sort of scary to approach. There I sat in the doctor’s office, a yard-square paper napkin draped around my quivering naked loins, eying the torture instruments laid out for the procedure: a black box with an electric connection, an IV bottle with transparent fluid,
sinister gray tubes, and two immense nine-inch-long monster metal needles. Ouch! They gave me a good five minutes to examine that array before the doctor arrived. I know psychological torture when I experience it!

The doctor squirted an anesthetic solution up the conduit; it felt like voiding backward. Then he inserted the larger-diameter needle, sliding it up the urethra to the bladder. Unfortunately, that particular channel has a natural curve in it. What do you do when you have a straight instrument and a curved channel? I found out! You straighten the channel. WRENCH! and my curve was straight. No, it didn’t really hurt, but it was uncomfortable, physically and psychologically.

Then the doctor slid the lesser needle into the larger one, sending in a mirror and a light bulb or whatever so he could see through the tube and look about inside. The IV bottle filled the bladder with clear fluid; I dare say that improved internal visibility. I could picture that light flashing around all the crevices, spying out excrescences, kidney stones, pebbles and boulders, and whatever other garbage there might be in there. Finally he closed up shop and drew out the instruments, letting my anatomy try to recover its curvature.

The verdict? Nothing. There was nothing in there. I was clean. No kidney stone, no tumor, no garbage. Apparently the X-ray blob had been false. Another sending of Satan. A thumbprint, my daughter suggested. I’ll settle for that.

Oh, yes—I was a little sore following the cystoscopy and voided a few drops of blood. But nothing bad, and it was worth it. My kidney-stone incident was over.

This, then, is the story of the manner in which my consciousness of death has been heightened, in and out of this novel. Has it been worth it? I hope so. It seems to me that all living species need to survive, so nature provides them with instincts of pain and self-preservation that compel them to live. They also need to die, to make way for progress; otherwise the world would still be full of dinosaurs. (There’s a new theory about those dinosaurs: at certain temperatures, some reptiles produce offspring that are all male or all female. Suppose the climate
changed enough to throw all the big reptiles into one sex?) But circumstance takes care of termination, so it isn’t necessary that creatures
like
dying. When something is truly voluntary, such as procreation, Nature makes sure it is pleasurable—for the male. Cynically, she does not require pleasure for the female; that is optional. With many species, rape seems to be impossible; not so for ours. Nature really is a green mother.

So we are left hating and fearing our inevitable death, though objectively we know this is pointless. Possibly, as my protagonist suggests, if we had a better appreciation of the larger picture, of the place death plays in life, we would suffer less. This novel is an attempt to encourage such understanding. If I succeed in this one thing, my own life may have justified itself.

So now I try to appreciate the mixed splendor that life is while it is mine. I watch my daughter with her horse and can not imagine a prettier sight. I also watch Blue galloping at dusk by herself, mane and tail flaring, playing Nightmare. I say hello to the wild gray bunny that comes out at dusk to feed on the grain spilled by the horses; sometimes I can get within six feet. I call it Nicky (ie), because of a nick in his/her left ear. I see the rare pileated woodpecker working on our deadwood; that’s the largest woodpecker in our nation, and that species will be preserved as long as we have deadwood. I see the wild deer, and the big box turtles, and hope for a glimpse of an armadillo. I see the myriad spider webs, fogged by morning dew. The flowering cactus, like lovely yellow roses. And the confounded red-bellied woodpecker that sneaks into our coop to peck neat holes in the eggs; now we have to race the little critter to the eggs.

There are other pleasures. I watch the sales figures for my novels, doing better and better. I like competing, however briefly, with the mainstream blockbusters for space on the bestseller lists. I’ve been answering fan mail at a rate as high as one per day; it does take time, and I am excruciatingly jealous of my time, but I do value these contacts with those who are moved by my work. I know that, all things considered, my life is a happy one, and it is better that I dwell on that than on the prospect of
eventual death. Is this a sufficient philosophy for existence? I don’t know. I feel a certain guilt because I am unable to solve all the problems of the world, but I hope that I am doing my little bit to alleviate one of them.

I think my most significant personal revelation is that life changes hour by hour and minute by minute, like the constant flowing of a river. I am not quite the same person today that I was yesterday; small aspects of me have changed, physically and mentally. I will change a little more by tomorrow, and a great deal more in the course of future years. To try to hang on to one particular section of life, such as the one I am experiencing at this moment, is foolish; it can’t be done, and if it could be done, it would not be worthwhile. Change is much of the essence of life. Death is the final change. We can not hold on even to a day; how, then, can we capture life itself? Perhaps our whole awareness of individuality, of self, is an illusion. If so, it is better not to grasp unduly at that illusion, but rather to live our lives in such a manner that when we must at last lay them down, we will not be ashamed. Life has meaning only if we live for meaning.

Piers Anthony Dillingham Jacob
May 17, 1982