Nuit en Enfer - Night in Hell

Rimbaud: highlights the moment of the narrator’s death and entry into hell.

Very late one night in October I packed all of my belongings because I was feeling like Providence may not be the place for me. I just wanted to see the two options in front of me in a visual sense. Providence outside around me, Tampa inside the boxes.

I left that same night, four times, slept for an hour, was kicked awake, and we left our separate ways, her to work, myself to my car back to Florida.

Twenty some-odd hours into driving, Fourty some-odd hours into not sleeping, and about four or five Chesterfield Kings later I realise a bump on the left side of my neck. I figure that it’s just from the sleeping I hadn’t been doing and the smoking I had been doing. When I get back to Florida and sleep I’ll be okay.

I come home to my mother’s house, where I imagine that I’ll be staying maybe two or three weeks at this point before moving back into my room at my now-deceased Grandfather’s house. My mother greets me in tears, I guess between my coming home and tells me that my dog of eleven years has passed. I begin to cry, I wak out to see my Grandmother and she is…herself…in her wheelchair, eating dinner, watching television, wearing a Burger King crown on her head. She asks me why I’m crying, I tell her about the dog, I can’t remember what she said, something to the effect of, yes but I’m here. Hug her, tell her I love her.

I go to lay down on the couch. I sleep so well, and forever. I wake up and acclimate to the couch living. Somewhere down the line it is found out that I can no longer live in the house I had planned to return to. A week after that is found out my grandmother becomes ill, we wait for the symptoms to pass, eventually take her to the hospital. My lump at this point has been diagnosed as cat scratch disease and I am being treated for it.

My grandmother dies on November 4th, 2008. Election Day. At 2:45 AM. The day of her funeral was the last day of my antibiotics. They tell me that it can take three months for the adenapothy to return to normal size. We’ve also scheduled a Biopsy just in case, to see what we find, the biopsy comes December 11th. It doesn’t get any better, It doesn’t get any worse between then.

I have the biopsy, by the time of my return check up it is just after Christmas and other areas of my neck are starting to swell up as well. I’m still sort of operating just fine, thinking that it may be something else easily curable.

All this time passes and my neck only continues to grow much larger and larger. I become more fatigued and disinterested in things. I feel sick a lot. So I go and see an infectious disease doctor after a failed doctors appointment with my primary care doctor. ID tells me that he thinks it’s tuberculosis and that I need to have a fine needle aspiration biopsy done to confirm. All results from that come back inconclusive, so we go for excisional biopsy number two, and the Hodgkin’s is found.

That was Friday March 27th. I am meeting with an oncologist the following Monday, he is telling me that I must get a MUGA heart test, a PET scan, a bome marrow biopsy, and a port implanted all before Wednesday or else he’ll have to admit me into the hospital to get everything done. Thursday would have been the day he’d have admitted me, and Thursday would have been my 21st birthday. No.

We accomplish it all by Wednesday, I have my birthday, it is a miserable even because it feels like I am dying in about four different ways. It will not be as miserable of an event as the hospital, though. I will save that for the next post when it is not 7 am and I am not freaking the out about why I should be asleep.