Sometimes We Use a Sledgehammer, Sometimes We Give Tongue
Wind chimes chime. A neighbor dog bays. A seabird joins in.
I sleep with the window wide open. I want the outside in. I want the air, heavy and wet, a mugginess atypical this far north. I want the hound and the gull and the underground stirrings only owls can hear—the voles chewing earth loose, pulling chunks away with their forefeet, kicking what they’ve excavated behind them, pressing what remains into intricate tunnel chains.
“You’re right. It’s not the best tool for the job. It’s just the only tool we have.” Lying here, I gnaw at these words from my rheumatologist. We met this morning to review my latest labs, following a new treatment plan, a twice monthly injection (the not-quite-right tool).
Seven months earlier, my immune system perceived a harm apparently not there and launched a response it can’t stop. The injections are slowing the resulting damage. But what about coaxing the system down? I pressed. Surely there’s research into some kind of system reset?
“Nothing that’s finding any answers,” Dr. T said. “So for now, we’re taking a sledgehammer to the whole system.”
I like that he gives it to me neat. He’s the bartender who sets the bottle on blond wood, the shine of the polish standing out in the dim lighting, and pours straight into the glass in front of you.
“So, where would you rate your pain levels now?” he repeated, before I could start a new line of query. I like his single-minded focus: Is the sledgehammer working? Well, in truth, he has a split focus. I like this part. He wants me to feel better.
Back at my sister’s house after the appointment, I found my two-year-old niece before the wide full-length mirror in the foyer, mouth pressed into a thin line. She tilted her head. Her glass doppelgänger followed suit. Two small hands touched high half ponytails, dropped to shoulders poking out from yellow cotton dresses. Then, like helium balloons let loose, serious expressions lifted. “I like that,” my niece said softly, the pair reaching out to touch fingertips.
“Me too,” I whispered.
“Helloooooo, Auntie Holly,” she cried, whirling to greet me, the girl in the mirror, back turned, retreating. “How are youuuuu?”
Better now, I thought, sweeping her into my arms and twirling her—a move unmanageable a few months ago, before the sledgehammer.
Damn but the wind has a way with those chimes. It’s a wild dance, an eyes-closed, skin-warmed-by-fire, head-thrown-back dance.
Maybe the pain wasn’t as bad as you were making it out to be. This is a chunk I’ve tossed over my shoulder before. Maybe you were just scared. I scurry on, sculpting. Exaggeration is fixable; pain can be pushed through, stretched out, overridden. Voila! The sledgehammer (and its collateral risks) could be eliminated.
The wind, set done, takes a break. My niece, in the room down the hall, calls softly from her dreamland. Her baby sister, in the room on the other side of me, stirs, snuffling like babies and warthogs do. Just months back, here for another appointment, I had to bite down on my shirt in the morning to sit up in bed so as not to cry out and wake them. Fine. Sledgehammer it is—for now.
Do the voles have more sense than me? Does some kind of radar tell them they’re nearing an obstacle neither fang nor claws can work loose? Is that why some tunnel chains run just below the surface while others veer down a foot into earth before spreading out horizontally once more? Or maybe something from below calls.
But what was the trigger? A virus is one theory. But I wasn’t sick. What threat did you see? I want to ask. Did I set it in motion? This path is a dead end. Still, I can’t help but follow it through foolish choices and unresolved tensions.
The other day, I was driving somewhere. At a stoplight, I watched a man, bent at the waist at nearly 90 degrees, make his way along the sidewalk, his red shoes forever his view. My breath came quicker, and I surprised myself by needing to stifle a scream.
I turn back. I’m lucky. The injections are working (they don’t for everyone). They’re available (they weren’t just decades earlier, for those like the man with red shoes).
The wind retakes the stage. The chimes ring out. A gust twirls salt and possibility into my nostrils. And I’m off. I picture all the nomad-ing my future still holds, the long treks I’ll trek, the connections I’ll forge. Will adjustments be necessary to accommodate the sledgehammer? Certainly. But what is life, if not a series of turns that require bending around them?
Just before dinner, my niece spied my sister across the room. Throwing open her arms, she dance-darted across the room. “I’m your mommy. I’m your mommy. I’m your mommy,” she cried, joy topsy-turvying the roles in their call-and response.
My sister, laughter bubbling like champagne, called back. “You’re my baby. You’re my baby. You’re my baby.”
In her hurry to round the couch, the toddler caught her leg on the corner and toppled to the floor. “No!” she cried. Rolling to her back, she wailed into the ceiling. “No, no, no,” she howled, before turning back to her stomach to sob.
My sister dropped to her side. And with a flurry of kisses, all was right once more.
The hound’s baying picks up, more intense this time. And you’ll get the injections on all this trekking how? My mind sits on its haunches, filing through what could go wrong. And what about these new tests?
This is Dr. T’s other focus: Complete the diagnosis. There isn’t an incisor sharp enough nor forefeet strong enough to break through the fact that, next month, a host of specialists will search for a second way my immune system may have gone off the rail.
At dinner, the baby tried spaghetti with chorizo, her introduction to spice. With the first bite, her eyes widened. Her tongue worked a morsel between her gums. She looked up, beyond the spoon, into her mother’s eyes. She swallowed. Her mouth opened wide.
From then on, whenever my sister would stop to take her own bite, the baby’s entire body would quake, feet and arms flailing, a fury of anticipation. The next spoonful would come, and a moan would escape her, her knowledge of what the world might offer forever altered.
Before bedtime, I told the toddler I’d be leaving for awhile again. I stay farther south between appointments.
“What did you say, Auntie Holly?” she asked, hands stopping her work over her toy sink.
“I’ll be back to see you soon, OK?” I said.
She looked up, studying me as she had the twin in glass before deciding. “OK,” she said and lay her hand on my knee.
Hounds baying are said to be “giving tongue.” Look what I found, they’re saying. Decades ago, my then husband and I shared our home with a basset hound / some-far-too-large-for-her-bones mix, Daisy. Daisy would pump her short legs and work her stocky body through the thick undergrowth in the hills behind our home and give wild, unanswered tongue to the scents she was tracking. Hounds need packs. We once tried to make our way to her but soon realized the brush was piled over fallen trees with gaping holes hidden by leaf litter, and a sprained ankle would be the least of our problems. After that, I’d listen to her cry and wish I could let her know she was heard.
Now, it’s the scents I want. Heat and wet expands odor molecules. And the neighbor dog has some 200 million sensory cells to my 5 million. I want to stand at the window and bay back: Show me. I want the images those cells must create. The truffles sidling up to poplar roots to grow. The deer tucked into a pine thicket just out of reach in the gulch. The musk of a sea lion carried up from the bay.
I want to give tongue to the images in my memory, too—to show this dog the night wild donkeys circled Ruby the van, how I kept waking to find them still braying, how, in the morning, I looked out and saw only hills and dung piles and a jackrabbit playing statue. I want to unveil the pack of coyotes that surrounded the van on another night just as I snuggled under my covers. I lay still, pinned by wonder, listening to their yipping, growling chatter. When I flipped off my lights and drew back the curtain, I could make out their outlines so close I could reach out and touch them. I sat that way for a long time even after my visitors were swallowed by night.
I got you, boo, I want to say to the hound, to my immune system, to my burrowing mind. All will be right again. I lay a hand across my heart. I want to mean, All is right already.
For the comments
A quick welcome to new readers. I’m so very glad you’re rolling with us! If joining in the convo is your jam, you’ll meet some truly amazing people connecting with each other in the comments section. Those who’ve been following along know this diagnosis is my most recent “passage” (here’s what else I’ve written on the health challenge). At first, I was hesitant to share. People are here for the stories from the road, I told myself, the adventures. But isn’t all of life the adventure? Isn’t whatever road we’re looking out on or pacing or dancing along the road?
I’d love to know, what’s your current road? What are you pondering late at night? What do you want to give tongue to?
I am here for the journey of your writing, wherever you are on yours. This is so full of want and yet do thoroughly grounded in the unknown now. That tongue, that twirl, that spice, that open window- thanks for letting us inside and giving it to us so it feels like our own. Beautiful.
This piece captured everything that is life: the unexpected pain but also beauty, the wildness of children and animals, the sense of a journey that is taking you to places you planned but also never anticipated. Gorgeous writing. I wish you less pain, more answers, and,always, coyotes calling to you from outside your van.