hurled at the floor and my muffled cry of “Crap!”
While I could hide most of my edginess at home, I had a hard time concealing it from students. One of the joys of teaching had been getting to know them personally. I had discovered early in my career that once I knew a bit about individual students, I would like them, which would motivate me toward better teaching. During the first class, I would ask students about their hobbies, part-time jobs, travels, and ambitions. As they took turns introducing themselves, I would memorize their names and distinctive qualities.
In the past I had learned two-thirds of my students’ names as they chatted on that first day of class, and I’d learn the other third within a week or two. But during the two years before my diagnosis, it seemed there were far too many names to learn at once. I become increasingly unable to remember who was Jean and who was James. I couldn’t recall which student bred labradoodles, which one worked as a house painter, and which in which class came from Thailand. By the middle of the semester, the year before I learned I had hep, I could recall only five or six names out of the ninety-four students I taught. It was maddening.
The semester before my diagnosis, I decided to give up on the memory work. Why try to remember names when you know you’ll forget them in an instant? It got to the point that when a student raised a hand, I’d just nod. It wasn’t a great way to establish rapport. I started drawing little pictures of my students’ faces on index cards. I added arrows to facial features and labeled them “honey-brown hair” or “squinty eyes” and made notes such as “born Thailand, high school England, trekked through Italy with her dad.” That helped somewhat, but it was hard to riffle through a stack of cards when a student or two raised their hands.
I knew I didn’t have Alzheimer’s because my grandmother, who was stricken with the illness, experienced different memory problems. Her memory lapses had been like sudden gaping holes that filled themselves with confusion and hurled her backward into earlier times. I remember visiting my parents’ home in Manhasset, a chichi suburb of New York City. I had just reconnected with my parents after avoiding them for almost a decade. My grandmother, in her late seventies, had moved in with them so they could help her through her dementia. In her lucid moments she was a jolly white-haired lady, but those moments could dissipate fast. Once she took me to her room and pulled a shoe box from under her bed. “I’ve got some nice ribbons for you. You can wear them in your hair,” she said, yanking a tangle of ribbons from the box.
“Thank you,” I said, unraveling a length of inch-wide blue satin. “This one’s nice.”
She grabbed it from me. The kindness in her face evaporated and fury replaced it. “You’ve been stealing from me! Give that back,” she wailed. Later that day she dressed in her finest blouse, hat, and gloves, and she slipped out the door. My mother found her wandering along a sidewalk a few blocks away in a neighborhood of sprawling single-family homes, muttering, “I’m looking to rent an apartment. Where is the apartment building?”
No, I didn’t have Alzheimer’s. I was just getting to be an absent-minded professor, I decided. But I didn’t like the situation, so I would move on. I started planning my retirement from teaching. Later, after hearing I had hep, I realized my teaching problems had come from brain fog, a common complaint of people with hepatitis C—and one that usually vanishes after treatment.
IN SPRING 2014, I wanted to get far away from work so that I could put my head back together, so to speak. Flights to Cancun were cheap from Vancouver, and the eastern strip of the Yucatán Peninsula seemed to be just the place to go for R&R. I still thought my cloudy thinking came solely from pain-caused sleep deprivation. I had been getting less than three hours’ sleep a night, not enough to enter deep, slow-wave sleep, without which the memory suffers. I imagined that having nothing to do under a hot Mexican sun would lull me into prolonged slumber. I would enjoy a mindless vacation and regain my mind. I knew nothing yet about brain fog and little about hepatitis C, and I was certain that other than having an unrelenting case of fatigue, I was as healthy as a puppy. So I booked the flights and a stay at a resort near Akumal, Mexico.
The resort curled through lush, tropical forest along a white-sand lagoon on the Yucatán Peninsula about halfway between Playa del Carmen and the Mayan ruins at Tulum, with swimming pools, pyramid-shaped residences, restaurants, tiki bars, poolside bars, and beach bars. Part of the relaxation I sought was the sleep inducement of free-flowing liquor, which was included in the resort fee.
We arrived around midnight at the Cancun Airport. The cab that picked us up drove sluggishly along the Mayan Riviera highway and crawled slower than a snail through a Federales roadblock along the route. Finally, the cab turned into the resort’s winding entry road, which was shrouded with palm trees lit from below by spotlights. We shuffled up the grand staircase and past a wall of blue glass into the lobby. The desk clerk said we had missed the dinner buffet, so we strolled into a bar in the main building. A band played contemporary rock. About a hundred people milled about. A few were dancing, but most were drinking. The bar reached along one of the walls, where eight bartenders poured every color of alcohol, ceaselessly. I slid onto a stool and asked for a drink. It was the first of quarts of margaritas I downed at the resort. For someone like me who tends to avoid in-pool volleyball games and goofy poolside contests designed for kids, there wasn’t much to do. So I did what most visitors did most of the time at the resort: eat, swim, and drink. I must have drunk at least forty alcoholic beverages during our five-day visit.
When we arrived back home, I left my bags scattered on the living-room floor and walked out onto the deck that runs the length of our home. The phone rang, but I didn’t bother to go inside to pick it up.
Four days later I dialed my voice mail, and a message asked me to call Dr. Radev’s office. After a blurry week on the Riviera Maya, the threat of having hep antibodies had slipped my mind. I figured that since Dr. Radev was new as my doctor, her office probably wanted information about me they had yet to collect. I waited another few days before I called back. Exactly one week after the end of my vacation, I poured a morning mug of coffee and dialed the doctor’s number. “You called last week?” I asked.
“Doctor Radev wants you to come in,” a pleasant voice said.
“How about two weeks from today?”
“We can take you much sooner,” the medical receptionist said.
“When?”
“Today?”
“No. I can’t make it.” I sipped some coffee.
“Could you be here Friday morning or early afternoon?”
“How about Monday?”
“There’s an opening first thing in the morning. How about 8:45?”
“Sure,” I said. I was pleased that Dr. Radev’s schedule had so many open times, when I was used to having to book two weeks ahead for a doctor’s appointment. The spacious waiting room had been buzzing with patients the last time I was there. A lot of her patients must already have left for summer vacations, I thought.
I was wrong. I learned that Dr. Radev wanted me to come in as soon as possible because my situation was pressing. At 8:45 a.m. Monday, May 12, I sat in her examining room. Dr. Radev took a long breath, lowered her voice, and said, “You have hepatitis C.”
1964–1967
GROUPIE
DURING THE DECADES between the razor cuts and my father’s death, I avoided not only bloodletting but my father as well. In high school my strategy for this was to become a groupie. The pastime required a lengthy bus and subway trip
