Sick

It makes me sick to be sick.

Colonoscoped

On Monday, 7 March, I had my colonoscopy. It is considered essential that we all have colonoscopy when we reach 50 for assuring an early detection of colon cancer. At 50 I was in good health, still in the midst of my teaching career, and it required no effort to ignore the good counsel. It was not until I reached 65 that I started to wonder if it might not be a good idea to have it done, in part observing a few acquaintances succumbing to cancer. Finally, in April 2009, I asked my doctor for a referral for colonoscopy but two years had passed and I still had not made an appointment. Last Wednesday, however, I was taken to the ER for a massive gastrointestinal hemorrhage. I received blood transfusion and then endoscopy, and colonoscopy was scheduled for Monday. I was given a fluid diet from Sunday morning, and that evening I was instructed to drink up a gallon jar of the much abhorred and justly maligned PEG (polyethylene glycol) Electrolyte solution to cleanse the colon. Mine was called GoLytely, spuriously named after Holly Golightly of Truman Capote’s Beakfast at Tiffany’s. . . so I decided in honor of my favorite Audrey Hepburn. I started imbibing the liquid, which tasted like salted sardines, while my two good friends were visiting; this made the task somewhat bearable as the situation rather pleasantly simulated drinking with friends at a pub, well, had the cup been glass rather than paper. Before finishing the gallon, my BM was clarified, and I quit. It was good that I had the preparation done in the hospital rather than at home. Next morning, I was transported to the Endoscopy Department for colonoscopy, which I quipeed “bottom endoscopy.” Thoroughly anesthetized, I was totally in the dark through the procedure. The report came promptly as I woke from the stupor -- all clear. I was certainly glad that, trapped in the hospital as I was with no escape, I got the colonoscopy out of the way after procrastinating it for 28 years. I was so euphoric that I was saying how euphorious I was.

Five days in Limbo

At the Met Opera, Wednesday evening last week, I felt light-headed and inordinately fatigued, as I watched Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, unable to concentrate properly as I usually do and wished I did, despite the impassioned singing of Susan Graham in the title role and of now 70-year old baritone Placido Domingo as Oreste. I was faint through the evening but stayed on till the finale. I got on the crosstown bus to 1st Ave and started walking 9 blocks toward home as I usually do but felt so weak that I had to sit down on the next bus stop bench and waited for the bus to hop on. As soon as I got home I ran into the bathroom and I had a most vile looking tarry black stool. Between 11:00 pm and 1:00 am, I had six bouts of similar stool, later ones with raspberry colored liquid, and then two black vomits between them. Over the night, I had three more similar stools, and when I got up in the morning still another. I felt no pain all through these episodes. I had a bowl of well-cooked oatmeal for breakfast, which I was able to hold. I felt weak, and, having done some reading on the matter on line, made an appointment with my doctor at 3:30. The doctor’s office is a short bus ride, but atypically I got a cab. Hearing my story, the doctor was alarmed and delivered me directly to the ER at the Lenox Hill Hospital. So started my five days in Limbo. The gastroenterologist my doctor referred me to came to see me, and I was taken to a hospital room and was rigged up with IV tubes and Foley catheter for draining the urine; and the following morning I was given blood transfusion by which time I learned that I was suffering from anemia caused by the massive gastrointestinal bleeding. I have rarely been in a hospital in my lifetime, the last one in 1985, when as a result of an automobile accident the steering wheel broke and pierced my duodenum-jejunum, and I was hauled to a hospital for surgery, where I stayed ten days in the ICU. Otherwise, I have been very healthy. But at Lenox Hill, for three days and three nights, doctors and nurses came and went, and I had my blood drawn for tests nearly every three hours interspersed with the check-up of vital signs. I had no internal pain at all and no treatment, except for the blood transfusion; all the pain came from the tests -- much ado for almost nothing, as I put it. Eventually, I was relieved of the tubes; I had endoscopy earlier and then on Monday, colonoscopy, which proved negative, and I was discharged on Monday afternoon with my right arm black and blue from multiple venipuncture needles. Diagnosis for the cause of bleeding was not known, or, if known, never given. Five days, it seemed, vanished poof from my life. The opera on Wednesday should have been another Gluck, Orfeo ed Euridice.

Ex cathedra

As the Chair of the Art Department, Swarthmore College, 1975-1981, with my "guardian angel," an oil sketch by William Morris Hunt (brother of the architect Richard Morris Hunt of The Breakers in Newport, RI, for Cornelius Vanderbilt), dated ca. 1878, a study for the figure of Fortune in the now-obscured mural in the NY State House in Albany -- From the College Art Collection.

Learning

Some things are harder to learn than others but everything is hard to learn, especially if we are intent on learning well. Yet nothing is too difficult to learn, and the reward of learning is on one level getting to know or be able to do something you didn’t know or couldn’t do before learning. But it is the triumph of overcoming difficulty that is most rewarding of all. Learning anything at an old age is all the more rewarding since it is often more difficult and therefore more challenging. On the other hand, what has been learned is more quickly forgotten than what one had acquired at a younger age. The consolation is, however, that what has been forgotten can be recovered more or less by relearning but of what has never been learned there is nothing to recall. Good life is a continuous process of learning and relearning. Live and learn, as we say.

Seeing/Naming

“Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees” is the title Lawrence Weschler gave his book on the contemporary California artist Robert Irwin, who, manipulating light and space on a scrim, created works that defied being verbally described. Irwin once said: We know the sky’s blueness even before we know it as ‘blue’. let alone as “sky’. Weschler’s title happily encapsulates in one sentence the most fundamental tenet in my teaching about art. You gotta see first to know whatever it is you see; before saying anything, you gotta really see it -- intensely and systematically. In reverse, I also say that naming something is the most efficient way of knowing what it is in relation to other things and phenomena in the universe of named things and phenomena; it is a taxonomical act. But naming generalizes, and is as such less efficient way of understanding what a thing or phenomenon really is. A familiar face, unfailingly recognized, often resists description, and a face fully described veils the visual reality of that face. Description is no substitute for experience. Life fully lived is experienced intensely; it is only approximately recollected in writing.

Huff 'n' puff

In the last ten days, I have kept up a busy schedule, rather typical these days, actually. After Nixon in China, John Adams's remarkable 1987 opera, I enjoyed Molière's Misanthrope at Pearl Theatre, which was superb, wisely using Richard Wilbur's translation in rhymed couplets, so ingenious, and wonderfully performed, and I'm going to see it again Tuesday (a repeat that I do if I like a play intensely, as I did Shaw's Heartbreak House some years ago and also Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia and Horton Foote's The Orphan's Home Cycle). Mint Theatre's 1909 What the Public Wants by Arnold Bennett was also a delight, a story of a newspaper magnate deep and unconscionably into sensationalism who begins to change on meeting a woman and falling in love. Rajiv Joseph's Gruesome Playground Injuries at Second Stage dealt with an accident-prone young man and woman, friends from childhood, meeting off and on and finally admitting they have been in love all the way along. Black Tie at Primary Stages by A. R. Gurney, my favorite playwright from Buffalo, now 81, concerns a two-tier generation gap which comes to a head on the eve of his daughter's wedding to which his father's ghost appears with advices. Matthew Lopez's The Whipping Man at Manhattan Theatre Club was a story set in the aftermath of the Civil War, where a freed slave and his former owner's son who returns home injured sit together for a seder, interesting enough a proposition and well acted. The matinee show of The Road to Qatar was a silly but entertaining vaudeville-style musical parodying the real life event of two young Jews -- composer and lyricist -- invited by the emir of Qatar to put on a Broadway musical. These were all Off-Broadway; I don't go to Broadway shows much because they are commercialized (catering to tourists) and overpriced and often mediocre; but I will go to Stoppard's Arcadia. Then, at the Met, I attended Donizetti's Don Pasquale, conducted by James Levine and featuring Anna Netrebko, and earlier in the week La Boheme, the superb Zeffirelli production; during the intermission, my friend who works at the Met took me to look at the scene change in the backstage, the scrim with painted trees used for the misty effect of the snow storm of Act III being rolled up, and the garret for Act IV being rolled in from the side; and I tried on the muff Musetta brings dying Mimi. Then, at Joyce, I saw the dance program of Ronald Brown's Brooklyn-based company. Then, Tennessee Williams' Vieux Carré, production of the Wooster Group. I went to the Met Museum, too, for the new show of Cézanne's Card Players, and the MoMA for the exhibit On Line: Drawings in the 20th Century, and some galleries. Not bad ten day's labor. But it feels like trying to keep two full-time jobs and freelancing on top of all. Huff 'n' puff, but elated.