November ending in red ribbons

Ok, it’s official, I didn’t win NaNoWriMo this year. (and by win, I mean write 50,000 words in November).

It may have been a bit ambitious to take on, alongside third year of med school and concomitant hours in the hospital/studying. Then again, I have been spending an hour – two every day writing; it’s just been poetry or essays. Or researching writing.

I did start. Like last year. I was planning to not write something new – I was either going to revise and finish last year’s novel (now at 65,000 words), work on poetry, or do…something. Else. But I sat down on November 1, taking one of the many, many breaks that are scheduled during anesthesia (seriously. The attending come into the OR every two hours. “Want coffee?” “Want more coffee?” “Have you had lunch yet?” Etc. No other specialty does this. I can imagine the surgeons glaring or snickering behind their masks, after they’re been standing for 8 hours without relief. At any rate)….

And a voice was there. So I started to write. It made me feel a little bit smug about my development as a fiction writer, as the voice arrived in first person and she is most definitely not me. Last year, I had started in first person and had to switch to third to keep myself out of it.

It’s an interesting story, maybe, though I don’t yet understand what’s happening, at all. I’ll finish it someday. The characters are: the main character, a little girl (nameless so far), the president (maybe Obama, probably not), and a few three-headed, wooden dogs. So far. I appear, as well, as a bystander at one point; I’m not sure if “I’m” going to be a recurring character. (At least, it’s someone who looks like me at a very particular point – ie, in Zoebefam when I was building the water project there. Only time will tell, I suppose, if it’s “me.”).

            This was a very different experience, in terms of writing – last year’s came to me in words. It’s very fluid, very poet-y prose, perhaps Jeanette Winterson-ish (if I flatter myself. All my influences are somewhere, after all). This year was all images, like I was flying/gliding somewhere and just writing down everything that I saw and encountered.

And it makes no sense. This story takes place in a world that is magical realism, perhaps, in another time period, perhaps. It seems to be some sort of speculative fiction – a genre I’ve read only small amounts of and do not know much about.

A sample of this year’s story, somewhere beginning-middle-ish:

(Context: I have no idea).

The girl looked strangely familiar. She probably lived in a candlestick. She walked toward me with a bounce, little flaring navy dress over transparent knee socks. Looking back at the president, his hand came off in her hand and she continued, unconcerned. The girl started floating a little, like the hand was attached to an invisible balloon without a string (and what do we need strings for anyway except cheese and hamsters?)

Looking into glass, she bit my ears. “This isn’t a wishing well,” the little girl said, “but I’ll throw coins on you anyway. Are you made of stones or salt? I’ll try not to melt you.”

“How would I know if I melted?” I asked her. This sounded concerning.

“Do you carry an umbrella?”

I looked at my elbows, Nothing there except some trailing ribbons.

“Then probably you don’t. “

Compare with last year’s random sample:

(context: Sera, main character, just smashed her finger into a wall, and she’s watching the skin change colors. This is from the middle/end of the scene).

Prisoners, tower-locked in membranes. Not the ones filling her skin. Catabolism – sanitizing catastrophe. Reversal of what is expected, from katastrophein down and turn. Strophe like ballads. Body like dead.

Delicate cleaving, coordinated cycles. Green comes first, biliverdin (Verdi like spring), carbon monoxide floating into tissues. Silent killer. Verdin turns to rubin, darkened red stone, breaking cells – monk-like chambers - into light. The white carriers, protein, to eat and build and break, albumen from alba, docks filled with too much color. In bodies red and green makes yellow, turning eyes and skin to gold.

Insensitive, unseeing to the slight new crook in the bone, Sera went to X-ray to earn more narcotics. White on black, gray for fat, water that wasn’t water. Photographing bones. Calcified proof of how long it would take you to dissolve.

The mind is strange and fascinating.

...And then the patient who does not have schizophrenia (who I thought, previously, likely did).

 This is relieving. I’ve been seeing him most days for the past few weeks, over which time he’s come to think of me as his psychiatrist or similar. – No, I never told him that, and he does understand I’m a student/in training. I am the one who recommended staying with the first drug regimen and adding one, though. I am the one who wrote the initial psych note and the follow-up notes. And somehow, somehow, this is counseling. Therapy. What I do with him, what we do. There was a study that did a case-control (not double-blind, but…something) on therapy with trained professionals versus therapy with other sorts of professionals masquerading as therapists (ie, architects, scientists…whomever). The patients did decently well. I’m not saying the discipline is useless – I believe the contrary, these days, actually. It is specialized, it is important, and the drugs can and do work.

Point being – part of the whole deal is just having someone to listen to you, who cares and is all-in. Who’s unbiased – as much as any human can be – because the only context in which they know you is what you’re telling them. They might get collateral (friends, family, previous physicians). But in general…

So I sit, in the yellow disposable isolation gown, with gloves on, and we talk. He talks, I ask questions, sometimes. The narrative bit is amazing. I have the agency to ask And then what happened? It’s an unfolding story to me, and somehow, in the telling of the story, he feels better – he says, at any rate. And I don’t think he has schizophrenia. Something, certainly, but it doesn’t seem to be that.  One of the psychiatrists who taught us a few years ago called it the “cancer of the mind.” True. Not for everyone – some people can recover from an initial episode of psychosis, and that’s it, or maybe they’ll have another one far down the line. That’s not what we see as often, though – but working in the hospital is its own bias. We only see the people who are sick.

(banner below is from AIDS Action Committee's website. Because I think they're really cool (used to volunteer there)). 

......And I’ll segue into World AIDS Day, a thought debate on does-this-sort-of-“visibility”-help-anyone, and December.

Addendum on the One Campaign – as far as I could understand, in 2005, their main message was “Africa is poor. Africa has AIDS.” Both of which are DUH, as in, clichés in language, at any rate, empty of meaning, digressive, pejorative, and oversimplified. Take that. But THEN, you get celebrities to play concerts around the world, bringing together tons of liberal, left-leaning, world-loving young adults to chant “Yeah!” to that sort of a message. And you don’t harness the energy. At all. You don’t use it to raise money. (“Awareness” in that arena is… what. Meaningless, in any manner I can see. Maybe someone with far more vision than I could create something spectacular). So, money. Volunteer hours. Donations of other sorts. ANYTHING. Millions of people there for free. Nothing happens. Except they buy rubber white bracelets, maybe (are those still in fashion?) And they go home feeling good about themselves. It’s like expensive shoe stores in Berkeley or similar telling you some minuscule percentage of the shoes you buy goes toward breast cancer research, or something. So you feel good about going shopping – there’s your good deed for the day. (at least that’s raising something for something. maybe. maybe.) At any rate.

I work in an HIV clinic in the states, now. This is a poor town (where I am currently). These patients do not have much income, and they get assistance from the Ryan White foundation (and federal) for ARVs and such. There are social workers in the clinic, case managers, a psychiatrist, nurses who do home visits…

And the patients look good. They look damn good, in fact. For 90%, you’d never know. They may have presented with AIDS, even, cachectic from tuberculosis or PCP or something in the hospital. Then they got into a care, on a good regimen, and they got better.

And damn, they look good. They come to the HIV clinic, get refills, basically, and take care of their hypertension, diabetes, hypercholesterolemia, insomnia, depression, chronic back pain, headaches, sore throats, etc, etc, etc….

We give them graphs of their viral loads and CD4 counts. This is pretty amazing to see, too.

They look good.

In Cameroon, I did see some who looked good. And I saw a lot who didn’t. And I saw a lot of babies die. (Another day. Another day). World AIDS Day? It’s pretty incredible what’s happened here. I won’t say it’s not. It’s absolutely incredible what the transformation has been, from GRID to the 1993 HIV/AIDS definitions from the CDC, ACT-UP, AIDS memorials (movements that did, I think, do something), the literature of HIV of that era (Mark Doty. Thom Gunn. Etc…), Angels in American, And the Band Played on, Rent, even... We’ve come a long, long, long way. So it’s easy to forget sometimes. Even fellows doing infectious disease/HIV don’t often see the kinds of opportunistic infections I’ve seen (wow, lucky me). We should celebrate the progress. We should disseminate the progress by figuring out ways that make sense to do that for other countries. And we should show the rest of the world – the southern world, the developing world, whatever – how well people can do with ARVs (HAART), and how well life can go on. This is the reality. “Poor” and “AIDS” and “Africa” have lost all meaning in connection to each other.

Far away, on the forgotten continent, who remembers Africa as more than a pop cause?

~j

And I leave you with a photo of my health club in Cameroon, performing a skit they wrote for World AIDS Day. December 1, 2006. (friends of mine). Below.