I coughed for a month. I coughed until subway cars and restaurants emptied. I coughed until the parents of my charges came running into the room to find me doubled over, one finger aloft, wait, wait, wait. I coughed until one mother, regal, Indian, slippered and pashmina'd, came running with her two Thai maids, bearing a succession of silver trays. They gave me a shallow bowl of cough syrup, a glass of water, a mug of honey-lemon tea. "Swallow," they said. "Sip." I put the empty vessels on the trays and they carried them away.

I coughed on several occasions until a kind of incidental puke shot out of me, discreetly, into sinks and gutters all over the city. I'd given up my resistance to opiates and their side effects and chugged narco-syrup to no avail. I could puke from coughing or I could puke from cough syrup. I continued to cough and continued to puke but did it numbly, dumbly.

At night I fell into thick sleep, drifted dreamless through empty white rooms. Someone was always coughing in another room down the hall. It was me, Rebecca would tell me the next morning, coughing through the night. It was me, the neighbors told me when I saw them in the lobby, maybe I should see a doctor. I told them about the doctor, the syrup, the puking. They nodded and murmured. I apologized for the noise.

I coughed until I became religious. I went out and got drunk. The next morning Rebecca told me I'd come home spouting uncharacteristic beliefs. "You kept saying God had given you the cough to make you pay for your sins," she told me. "And then you went into your room and prayed a lot."

I coughed until something inside of me gave way. I coughed until I bruised, broke, cracked, strained, sprained, separated, dislocated or floated a rib, or pulled the muscles or cracked the cartilage in between. It was hard to tell. They all had one symptom, stabbing pain, and one treatment, control stabbing pain until healed. Do not bind ribs, do not suppress cough, do not breathe shallowly, or fluid could collect in lungs and cause pneumonia. Watch for signs of punctured lung.

I begged my parents for my father's dental-surgery Vicodin. I hoarded and nibbled at it, metering it out. The pain would ease, go from searing to stabbing to sharp to just there. The Vicodin would wear off and it would come back all at once. It was like a broken heart. I wished all broken hearts felt this way, so direct, a knife in the ribs, instead of an ether that comes and goes with different songs and skies.

While my rib ached, I imagined different things. I imagined that I was a soldier, keeping my wound a secret so as not to be separated from my men. I'd finger it privately, consider the sticky blood on my fingertips, wipe it on my fatigues. My rib was only the most pronounced discomfort in a battle-battered body. There were also my ill-fitting boots (stonily yanked from the feet of a Nazi I'd killed myself on patrol), my frostbitten fingertips and the shrapnel that remained lodged beneath the skin of my shoulder. (I'd been hit during the jump on D-Day.) I kept my suffering even from the squad medic, refusing to leave my brothers in arms.

I imagined I was some figure of heroic solitude, a survivor of a plane crash or climbing accident, hauling my injured self over mountain passes, left for dead but possessed of a will to survive. I imagined I was an athlete of Jordan-esque caliber, playing through the pain. I was bleeding through my sock, my fever was a hundred and four, after the game I'd be rushed to the hospital for intravenous hydration.

I imagined the revolution had come and I had been shot by the army we rebels were about to overthrow. The wound was fatal but I had a few minutes to live. The last thing I saw was the flag of the fallen empire burning in the street. I died happy.

I imagined I was Eve and she was first, and I was lonely and naked in a garden paradise, and the pain in my rib was God fashioning me a companion who'd spring fully-formed from the marrow near my heart, and we'd have a damn good time until he bit into that fateful fruit.

Labels: Adam and Eve, broken heart, cough, flights of fancy brought on by the delerium of extended illness and drugs used to treat, pain, rib, Vicodin, vomit

For a long time I've had these terrible recurring nightmares that I'm going blind in a bookstore. This could be because since I was a small child I've spent a lot of time in bookstores, browsing myself into a narcotic stupor until my eyes actually do give out and my vision begins to blur.

My bookstore blindness is related to my dental deformities. After I lost my baby teeth, my permanent teeth came in at radically different angles, each one pointing in a different direction. I wore braces for seven years. I had headgear. I had a palate expander, which is a medieval torture device cemented into the mouth of a minor child and tightened each night with a metal key by the child's parent. My parents would chase me with this key and I would hide under the dining room table. Over the course of my transformation from a dentally deformed child to a reasonably normal-looking adult, I had fourteen teeth removed (eleven baby ones and three permanent ones, not counting my wisdom teeth years later), one of them under general anesthesia in the hospital.

"Most of my cases are purely cosmetic," my orthodontist would say. "But not this one. This one is a medical necessity."

My orthodontist was a chichi operation on Central Park South, next to the Plaza Hotel and across the street from where the horse-drawn carriages line up to take tourists through Central Park. To this day I associate the smell of horses with the taste of metal, the poking of stray wires, the bitterness of probing latex fingers in my mouth, the dread of the orthodontist announcing that another tooth needed to come out before he could enact his vision upon my crowded jaws.

The oral surgeon was also a chichi operation, somewhere in the East 50s. He was a tiny little man who collected antique dental equipment. My mother was very concerned that some of this equipment might still be in use and was perhaps not up to modern safety standards. The oral surgeon had a German nurse named Margaret who would hold my hand while he pried my teeth from the bone. At some deep and ethnophobic level of my Semitic body, I found Margaret's accent and smile deeply disturbing as she squeezed my trembling hands with her efficient, gloved one.

My parents bribed me into withstanding these heinous acts of orthodontic torture with books. After having my braces tightened I would be allowed to buy books at the nearby Doubleday bookshop, which I loved for its glass elevator. After my oral surgeries I would be permitted to buy many, many books. After one oral surgery, blood started dribbling out of the side of my mouth where the cotton packing had come loose from the latest crater in my gums, and still I wandered the aisles of the Doubleday Young Adult section, my arms full of books, the other children shrinking from me in terror.

Books were my first addiction, and it was also through my orthodontic travails that I had my first drug experience. It was discovered that one of my cuspids was about to grow out from underneath my nose instead of descending to where it was supposed to be. The orthodontist decided that it could be exposed, lassoed with a little wire, and slowly dragged down to join the rest of my teeth. (This did come to pass and for a while I had a tiny, S&M-style chain inside my mouth. It was kind of punk rock, actually.)

This was a complicated surgery that would require general anesthesia. An operating room was booked and I was promised many, many books at Doubleday bookstore if only I would go willingly to the surgery. I was twelve and just beginning to understand that the world was a terrible place and life sucked and would suck for some time. I actually believed it would suck forever, having no inkling that things would ever get as good as they are now. This surgery was just the latest in a stream of indignities being visited upon me. First suburbia, then middle school, then puberty, now this.

I recall a rather embarrassing episode in which I was dragged up the street bodily by my parents, having frozen in protest and fear outside the hospital. I recall being somewhat shamed by the idea that there were kids in the hospital having far worse surgeries than mine, who stood no chance of getting out of the hospital that day, that week or ever, for that matter.

However, when I was given a hospital gown to put on my self-pity returned. I was about to remove my clothing so that strangers could knock me unconscious and go at me with sharp objects. There was no amount of books that could make up for this indignity and very soon I would run away to a place where people had teeth growing out of their noses just like me and I could live in peace, like on that episode of the Twilight Zone where everyone looks like pigs and the beautiful woman thinks she's ugly.

Some very kind residents came over and I was petulant with them. Then they inserted a needle in my arm and put something in it and instantaneously all my troubles disappeared. I found out later that this needle conveyed to my veins a combination of Valium and sodium pentathol. "Cut me open, I don't care," I sang as the gurney went down the hall. "Do whatever you want. I love you all so, so much, do you know that, do you, do you?"

They let my mom come into the operating room to watch them put me under. Her face, upside down, was the last thing I saw as I counted backwards. I didn't understand why she had tears in her eyes, in this, the most wonderful place in all the world.

I woke up in a distinctly less positive mood. My first (and only) experience with intravenous barbiturates was over and I now had my first hangover. My parents were standing at my bedside, my father wearing a scrub shirt and carrying a canvas sack. They only allowed one parent in the recovery room at a time, so my father had stolen a bag of laundry off a cart in the hallway and snuck in, posing as an orderly. My parents had this terrible look on their faces I thankfully wouldn't see again until I totalled the family station wagon six months after I got my driver's license. It was the expression of parents looking at their child lying in a hospital bed.

In the end, they lassoed the tooth down but they couldn't make it fit. "I told you when we started that her mouth was crowded," said the orthodontist defensively. His bold, risky move had failed, like when they dropped paratroopers into Belgium in the summer of 1944, or tried to dock blimps on the Empire State Building.

I went back to the oral surgeon and he and the German nurse collaborated in defanging me, leaving me with only one canine and a slightly lopsided smile. For a long time I carried my fang in a small pocket of my bag wherever I went, fingering it compulsively from time to time. I would run my fingertip along the smooth surface of the tooth part, up the root and onto the curved hook at the end. Baby teeth break off from their roots when pulled, but permanent ones are meant to last a lifetime, and come out with the root intact. I was perversely proud that I had this part of my body, perfect and complete and knowable in a way it wouldn't have been if it was still attached to the rest of me. There is a hole between my front teeth and molars not big enough for a tooth that I can probe with my tongue, another nervous habit. My room is full of books, and when I stay in bookstores until my eyes blur, I feel strangely brave and safe.

Labels: adolescence, books, childhood, dental problems, drugs, orthodonture, pain