Over the next six weeks Rikki shuttled me back and forth to Dr. Mercer’s a total of seven times. The first few times Mercer rinsed my sinuses with saline solution. The rinsing wasn’t like going to the dentist, where you swish around a teaspoonful of pink bubble-gum-tasting liquid and spit. Nope. This kind of rinsing involved jamming a tube connected to a syringe the size of a turkey baster through the hole in my gums into the hole in my face and blasting saline solution against the inner walls of my maxillary sinuses, while I hung my burning face over a big stainless steel bowl.
Mercer kept adjusting the antibiotic cocktail to get the infection under control until the rattler that had me by the throat finally let go and slithered away. Then he sewed up the gaping hole in my gums. There was so little gingiva left and he had to restitch three times just to get the sutures to hold.
I was in trouble. Traditional medicine had gotten me to a place where life wasn’t life at all, but an arid and desolate outpost, where vultures hovered, waiting to turn what was left of me into bleached bones. My sweet Rikki’s loving care and Kyle’s joyful laugh could reach me and soothe me, but they couldn’t save me. I had to save myself.
It was 10:20 on a Thursday morning when I made the decision to live. Light from the fat December sun poured through our bedroom window, giving everything in the room a whitish glow. Kyle was at school, Rikki was at the gym, and the house was silent except for the hum of the heater. I threw the covers off, slid over to Rikki’s side of the bed, and slowly got up. I looked out the front window, and the glare off the snow-covered lawn made me wince. I shook out my arms and tried jogging in place for two steps. That was enough.
I dressed quickly in old blue jeans, a heavy black cable-knit sweater, and my green-and-brown suede Avia low-top hiking shoes. I went to the bathroom, but didn’t bother to shave or comb my hair. That required too much energy. I slowly creaked my way downstairs, went to the closet, and got out the gray wool overcoat and black gloves Rikki had bought for me at Louis of Boston. I worked my way into them and opened the front door.
Taking a deep breath, I stepped out onto the porch. The cold slapped me in the face like a ruler on a school desk, and I suddenly realized that I’d forgotten the keys. I turned around, went back to the kitchen, and plucked the keys to our silver Volvo station wagon from the key rack. If I’d gotten down to the car before realizing I didn’t have the keys, I might not have been able to go at all. Just getting into my coat had sapped half my steam.
I walked back into the cold, down the stone steps and walkway, which Rikki had cleared of the few inches of snow that had fallen the night before, and down the ten railroad-tie steps to the car. I had a plan.
I hadn’t driven in over two months and was actually worried that I might not have the energy to work the controls. I started the car and drove the two hundred feet down to the end of the driveway and stopped. Good. Stopping is good. I turned right onto our street and drove four miles into the center of town. Just before the Stop & Shop I took a right into the parking lot of a little strip mall that housed a deli, a hair salon, a realtor, an educational toy store, a wine shop, and a health food store. I pulled in front of Natural Selection Health Foods and parked without crashing. I grunted and slowly emerged from the car, stepped carefully up onto the sidewalk, and went into the store.
The shop was tiny, about 12 by 30, packed to the epaulettes with enough health food products to fill a supermarket. There was just enough room to move if no other customers came in. To the right, behind the counter, sat a scrawny girl about eighteen years old with long, stringy brown hair that looked like it hadn’t been washed more than twice since George Bush puked on that Japanese guy. When I walked in she’d just taken a big bite of an Italian sub that I guessed had come from the deli. The girl stopped chewing for a second and put the sandwich down on its paper. She looked at me and shrugged as if to say, “Oops.”
“Is that a healthy sandwich?” I said, managing a mini-grin with the half of my face that worked.
She flashed a smile that reminded me of wax fruit, then stared at me vacantly with the lump of food jammed in her cheek. “My boyfriend works at the sub shop,” she mumbled and started chewing again. I glanced down at her sandwich. Next to it was a bag of chips and a grape soda. Mmm, health food.
I felt weak and wanted to lean on something, but was afraid if I touched anything a domino effect might take place and everything in the store would come crashing down.
“I need some help,” I said. “Do you know if the owner has a list of holistic practitioners in the area?” My face hurt, and the stitches in my gums were digging into my cheek.
She shook her head, swallowed, and said, “We don’t, but there’s a lady named Hanna at Geneva Farm on Route 226 who knows everybody. She could probably help you.”
She said it was only about five miles away and explained how to get there. I thanked her, sucked in my shoulders, and turned to walk out, careful not to hit anything.
The kid’s directions were good, and in less than ten minutes I found the place. Geneva Farm was a small, single-story, rusticlooking house that stood about thirty feet from an identical, larger, single-story, rustic-looking house about a hundred feet down a gravel drive off a narrow two-lane road in a semirural section of town.
There was a white-and-red plastic sign that said OPEN on the raised-panel wood door. It was eleven-thirty in the morning and already past my bedtime, but I was on a mission, so I hobbled up to the door and went in. Some hanging bells jingled when I opened the door and again when I closed it. As I stepped into the room, I was immediately met with the cozy smell of orange and spices drifting off the steam curls rising from the spout of a teapot that stood on a small hot plate on the counter.
Behind the counter a tall, sturdy-looking woman, somewhere between forty and fifty, wearing a white sweatshirt and overalls, was using a metal scoop to pour herbs onto a scale. She had a well-scrubbed face with no makeup and long brown and gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. She looked up at me with clear and vibrant blue eyes and smiled warmly. In her smile was a pleasant air of self-confidence and compassion. She had to be Hanna.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” I said back.
Hanna held the metal scoop loosely in her right hand while she looked me over. Then she tilted her head slightly and her smile disappeared. She put the scoop down on the counter.
“You are very ill,” she said in a thick Swiss accent. Her words jolted me and tears welled up in my eyes, but I choked them back. I took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and nodded.
I said, “Somebody from Natural Selection Health Foods said you might know of a good holistic practitioner in the area. You are Hanna, aren’t you?”
She nodded. “Yah.”
“I’ve had some sinus operations that didn’t work out too well. Maybe you know someone who can help.”
“Mmm,” she nodded again. “I have a list in the house. I’ll get it.”
Hanna walked briskly out and then quickly turned back as if she’d forgotten something. She stuck her head in, pointed at the pot, and said, “Oh, if you’d like some tea, help yourself.” And she disappeared again.
“Thank you,” I said loudly, but Hanna was already halfway to her house. The tea smelled great, but I was fading and felt like if I didn’t get out of there in the next few minutes I’d have to ask Hanna if she had a cot in the back room. Tea and a chat were out.
I looked around the small shop. There were about fifteen oak barrels filled with different teas and grains. Built into one wall was an oak unit of little bins that housed maybe a hundred different kinds of herbs, and off to one side was a low freestanding magazine rack with half a dozen holistic-type magazines. I would have picked one up, but it was too far to reach.
In less than a minute, Hanna came back with the list. She came around the counter and stood next to me, flipped the first page over, and ran her index finger down until she found what she was looking for—Lloyd Kessler, M.D. Hanna tapped the paper twice with her finger and looked at me. “This guy is very good,” she said. “He has a big practice in Cambridge. He’s a psychiatrist who went into natural healing when his daughter got very sick. I’ll write his name down for you.”
“Thank you very much,” I said, leaning on her counter for support.
Hanna wrote the name and number on a yellow sticky pad, tore it off, and handed it to me. She looked at me again with kind blue eyes and said, “Go home now and rest. And call that man.”
“I will.” I nodded, smiling the best I could. “Thank you, Hanna.”
I walked out the door, jingling the bell as I stepped into the cold. The winter air felt jagged in my lungs and against my skin, and I was a little light-headed as I groaned and slumped behind the wheel.
I drove home carefully, hobbled upstairs, climbed in bed with my clothes on, and slept like a dead person.
* * *
I put off calling Dr. Kessler all winter. I guess my grip on life was so tight and so tenuous that I had trouble letting go long enough to give him a chance. Rikki provided gentle care and support, and eventually I was able to return to work, albeit at a greatly reduced schedule. But by March I was once again lower than a snake’s ass in a wagon wheel rut, and when I bent down in an airport to get something out of my overnight bag and couldn’t get back up, I decided it was time to make the call.
Two weeks later I was at Kessler’s office. Hanna was right about the guy having a booming practice. It took up half of one floor in a large modern office complex. He had a staff of more than twenty, including a nutritionist, a physician’s assistant, an acupuncturist, nurses, doctors, lab technicians, and people manning the in-house health food store.
When I first saw Dr. Kessler, he was standing behind his large desk in his spacious walnut-paneled office, facing a wall of windows, drinking a glass of something that looked like swamp water. He finished drinking, put down the empty glass, and patted his lips with a white handkerchief. He shook my hand, smiled without warmth, and waved me to one of the three client chairs in front of his desk.
Dr. Kessler was about fifty, tall and thin, with a doughy face and a full head of curly white hair that gave him the appearance of being older. He read the extensive medical history his physician’s assistant had pumped from me during the previous hour and asked me some additional questions about my symptoms and my diet. And then to my surprise, without examining me at all, Kessler told me he believed he could help me get well. Just like that. With an angstrom of hope, I said I’d try whatever he suggested.
Lloyd put me on a strict elimination diet for a few weeks and had me take a number of different vitamin supplements, enzymes, immune system boosters, and antitoxins. I took a food allergy test, which showed that I was allergic to more than a hundred different substances, including wheat and all dairy products. Incredibly, it appeared that my sinus infections had all been caused by eating foods I was allergic to.
The dozens of courses of antibiotics Mercer had poured down my throat had weakened my immune system so much that it couldn’t have kicked the skin off a rice pudding, let alone knock out a common cold. On top of that, since Mercer had never told me to take acidophilus with the antibiotics, I’d developed a severe case of candidiasis, which, left untreated, could have killed me.
To my total dismay, for a while I felt even sicker than I had when I’d crawled into Kessler’s office—like pure poison was coursing through my veins. He’d told me that might happen, but that if I just stuck with it and didn’t go jumping off any bridges, I’d feel better before long. So I kept at it, even though I wanted to throttle the guy three or four times a day. Sure enough, after two months, the vultures were finally gone.
For the whole spring and summer I stuck to my new diet and wouldn’t have touched a cheese steak sub if you gave me ten bucks. By the fall I was feeling and looking almost lifelike. I resumed working full-time and wasn’t getting lost in my hometown anymore. I even managed Buns in Space with Kyle again, which made me cry with joy. Rikki wasn’t there when that happened or she would’ve cried, too. She was thrilled to hear about it, though, and hugged me like she wasn’t afraid I'd break.
Rikki looked even more vibrant than usual. She stepped lightly and breathed easily, as if it were the last day of school.
She had her man back ... or so she thought.