Translated from the Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan
I wanted to run away. Who comes to the emergency room willingly? The gray
lobby was chaotic. Patients, families, and visitors all blended together. I
could step right out of here and into the city spilling just outside the
gate. I could walk the streets, sit at a café. But instead, I walked
inside.
It was flu season, and the beds were all occupied. An older man was pacing
the halls in his hospital pajamas, a catheter poking out of his pants, an
I.V. stand dragging behind him like a pet.
I could still leave.
I plopped myself into an available corner bed, shrouded in hospital sheets.
No one approached me. I tried to take a nap, but the buzzing of the neon
lights and the airport-style noise in the background—patients crying out,
broken moans—kept invading my sleep. Still, I felt a little better. I got
some rest. Finally.
Two hours later, a young man in a white coat came to see me.
What’s wrong? He asked.
It hurts, I said.
What hurts? He asked.
Everything.
Please be more specific, he demanded. I wondered how many hours he’d been
running around here, among all these contagious patients, among all this
suffering, on zero sleep.
Go home
, someone whispered inside of me. I won’t, I whispered back. Stop it. Shut up.
The doctor fixed his eyes on me, awaiting more details.
I began to speak. The words hatched slowly at first, as if wrangling their
way out of a cage, then strode ahead. I sat on the high hospital bed, my
legs dangling off its end, bare. I said, the head, my head hurts. My sorrow
hurts. The passing days, the necessity of making a living, putting off any
time for staring into space. The endless errands, the parents losing their
wits before they lose their lives, the helplessness, the new wrinkles
around the eyes, the fact that I used to be pretty but had no idea. It
hurts that there isn’t enough love, that there’s violence and the
situation. It hurts that people in southern Tel Aviv hurt, in houses
wrecked by the rain, on the street, stray cats and dogs lost at the
airport, and it hurts that there’s lack. What’s hidden hurts, what’s
revealed hurts, the places I’ll never see hurt, it hurts that it hurts.
That I want to walk, that I want to dance—but it hurts. That I want it not
to hurt. It hurts even when it doesn’t hurt, and when I smile—it hurts.
Even when I laugh—it hurts.
The young doctor stared at me for a moment. He glanced around, perhaps
looking for backup. Then he pulled himself together. Let’s check your
heart. He pulled out a stethoscope, listened carefully, and nodded. He
checked my blood pressure and called a nurse to take a blood sample. Then
he nodded again. Everything looks normal, he said. The cause of pain is
unclear. I can prescribe small pills that will ease the pain—not erasing
it, only blurring it, but they have side effects, including new, different
pain. Do you want them?
I told him I was looking for a real cure, not a blur, not new pain.
The doctor paused, looked at me, and sighed. The PA system must have been
calling his name: Dr. Situation, Dr. Situation, report urgently to internal
medicine. He pricked his ears, listened, then returned his attention to me.
He was much younger than I was. My heart ached for him. So many hours spent
in this place, fighting viruses and bacteria, angry families, and tired
nurses. He said, there’s innovative machinery, magnetic resonance that
examines the mental makeup. Perhaps that can offer a solution. We could
check.
Here? I asked. Right now? In the emergency room?
Yes, that’s what we do here. We check.
Two nurses pushed my bed into the imaging unit. I wriggled into a long,
dark tube. The technician told me to think about something nice, to make
the experience easier. To stay calm. I thought about the little ginger cat
that used to wander in the yard, sitting on the hoods of cars like a king,
purring at me whenever I came in and out of the building. When I carried
out leftovers from lunch he would run to me, and sometimes even allowed me
to rub his stomach. There were other moments, when I watched him sitting on
cars, and he watched everything except for me, but we understood each other
completely. He knew it and I knew it. Thinking about the cat hurt. I
recalled that—when he felt particularly charitable—he would put his paw on
my foot with the distraction of true intimacy. But then, all of a sudden,
he died. Another cat arrived at the yard, also ginger, but bigger and
firmer than the one I’d loved. He was very nice. He would rub himself
against my shins. But he was different. Just when I’d found someone with
whom I shared a language, even though neither of us could speak it. Just
when I’d found someone in this world. Pain floated through my body as the
machine jerked left and right, with me inside. After a while, I can’t say
how long, the ticking died down and the machine stopped moving. I pushed my
way out and was led back to the emergency room.
The young doctor returned, his eyes tired, the suffering of the people
around him sunken and drowned into them. He spread out a long, narrow strip
of paper, covered with black, asymmetrical marks, graphs, and spots.
There, he said, showing me the results. That’s your pain. He stood proud,
like a winner, as if he’d just discovered the cure for a virus that
threatened to end the world. Our heads leaned together over the paper. His
hand patted one of the pages, as if to reinforce clear, scientific proof.
The female voice called him over the PA system again—Dr. Situation, Dr.
Situation, please report urgently—but he remained beside my bed, taking his
time. The cause of your pain, he said—a complex mental makeup. Too much
scaffolding, too few walls. Even the walls that are there are too thin,
unprotected. The foundations need to be bolstered, and the walls need to be
thickened with reinforced concrete. Basically, you need a bomb shelter
built around you. Then no pain will be able to penetrate, you can be sure
of it. He smiled.
I was skeptical. My mental makeup may not be perfect, but how can I
actually change it? Reinforce it?
Don’t worry, said the doctor. Almost everything is possible these days.
Worst case scenario, we’ll clone a version of you with a stronger mental
makeup. What do you say?
I said, that hurts.
I was just kidding, the doctor said, his face brightening. I’ll write you a
referral to a pain clinic. This is just the emergency room. Only
preliminary treatment. And there’s no guarantee that the pain clinic is the
answer. Maybe acupuncture.
That hurts, I said. It pricks.
In that case, go home and get used to it. Learn to move around carefully,
take pain killers. Morphine or opium or codeine. Medicine has no magic
tricks.
I felt sorry for him. No solutions. Pain is the number one problem facing
contemporary medicine. I told him I’d read that somewhere.
He nodded.
I tried, in vain, to rid myself of this hunched, pricking, bleeding body. I
looked at him, disappointed. No cure? No magnetic resonance? No cloning?
Maybe there’ll be something like that soon, the doctor said, gathering his
tools and rolling up the test results. There’s always hope.
A woman on a stretcher was rushed into the lobby. She was very pale; not
breathing. A man, maybe her husband, was waving a newspaper over her face.
He looked terrified. The woman disappeared inside a circle of doctors and
nurses who surrounded her at once. The voice over the PA system was
alarmed, almost panicked: Dr. Situation, Dr. Situation!
The young doctor turned away from me, hurrying toward the circle concealing
the dead, or dying woman. Suddenly, he turned back to me and said, you can
go. I wrote you some referrals. Then he ran off to try and save the lives
of other patients, ones that were truly ill.
