Homeland Elegies(66)
“Infection in the heart.”
“And what are the symptoms of that?”
“Fatigue, fever—”
“Haven’t had those.”
“Trust me, you would know you had a problem by the time there’s a rash like this. And that one usually looks smaller anyway,” he said, pondering my palms anew. “Toxic shock sometimes, arthritic complications…”
“I don’t think it’s arthritis. My joints have been fine.”
“Did you write a play about that, too?”
“A play? No. I said a paper, Dad. Like a report…”
He shrugged at the evident irrelevance of my clarification: “What you think is fine and not fine doesn’t matter. You need to get to the emergency room.”
“Can I take the car?”
He shrugged. “I would drive you, but someone has to stay with her—”
“No, of course. It’s fine. I feel fine. I can get myself there.”
“I’ll get you the key.” He stopped on his way back to the door inside: “Just wipe everything off, okay? The steering wheel? If you touch anything else? You know what? On that shelf with the garden tools”—he was pointing now at the sagging plywood shelf on the far wall—“take those gloves. You can wear those.”
“You want me to wear gardening gloves?” I asked, but he was already disappearing inside.
I pulled the gloves he was talking about from under a pile of trowels. The notion of wearing mud-caked gardening gloves over the lesions didn’t strike me as particularly hygienic, but when Father returned with the car key, he assured me—with a dismissive Indo-Pak bob of the head from side to side—that any incidental contact with dirt now dry for years was nothing to worry about. “Just put them on, you know, in case you’re right. So you don’t, you know, get it all over the car.”
*
The local emergency room was empty, and I was seen right away. It was a small hospital perched on a wooded hill, one of the first to go up that far west of the city, where professionals didn’t start settling among the farmers until the early ’70s. The attending ER physician was, like so many locals around whom I’d grown up, a particular breed of Wisconsin paradox: tender and Teutonic. Seeing my hands, she suspected at once—as I had—syphilis and asked about my sexual history. Yes, I’d had multiple partners in the last six months—though only one for the last four. Yes, some of that sex was unprotected. Her pitched features sagged with what seemed a disapproving thought as she tore the nitrile gloves from her hands. She explained that though she’d yet to encounter an active case of secondary syphilis in that idyllic suburban enclave where my parents lived, she was aware of the unusual rise in rates of the disease across the country; a good portion of the most recent issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine was devoted to the subject. The latest clinical thinking suggested administering the penicillin treatment for the illness if it was suspected—barring allergy to the medication, of course—even before the test results came. The good news, she said with a sudden smile, as if announcing an attraction she thought I might enjoy at the upcoming state fair, was that if it was syphilis, and only syphilis—unfortunately, HIV was often a companion ailment, but we would know about that very shortly because a strip test would tell us within minutes—the cure was simple and the prognosis great.
After the phlebotomist took my blood, the attending returned to the exam room with a polyglot trio of young visiting foreign medical graduates in tow: Chinese, Colombian, Ghanaian. They crowded in to introduce themselves and stare at my palms. Only one of them—the Colombian resident—had ever actually seen a secondary syphilitic rash. Here I was, a teachable moment. The attending warned that a test result would be needed to confirm the diagnosis but then addressed the residents with a certainty about the distinctive lesions that belied her note of caution, using a pencil to point out the breaking skin along the largest of them; if it was indeed syphilis, she explained, any of the broken sores they were seeing were actually contagious. I saw the Chinese resident visibly cringe. The attending went on to explain that the palmar rash was often accompanied by another on the soles of the feet and, in some cases, even the torso and back. “Fortunately for this patient,” she said with a smile, “not in his case.” Even so, they pored over every inch of my skin, then watched their instructor stick a needle into my ass and pump me full of penicillin. If I didn’t need to be out and about, the attending said as she stuck a small adhesive bandage to my butt, it was probably best I rest—with minimal contact with others (and none of a sexual nature)—for the next few days.
Something strange happened when I got home.
As I walked into the house, I heard my mother was awake. Her lucid moments were rare now—and not particularly lucid—mostly coinciding with the short windows between her doses. I pulled off the blue nitrile gloves I’d been given in the emergency room to replace the filthy gardening gloves I’d shown up there with—I didn’t want to alarm her—and rummaged in the mudroom bins for something else I could use to cover up my hands. All I could find were two thick rabbit-fur mittens. I recalled Father bringing them home as a gift from a trip to Iceland and Mother laughing at how they looked when she slipped them on. I didn’t remember her ever wearing them again.