a shy person, soft-spoken. I dislike confrontation. On the subway, if someone vacates a seat, I’ll look around to see if anyone else needs it before sitting down. If a student comes to me upset about a grade, I’ll listen to her arguments. Sometimes I even change the grade. But this was different. This woman, my doctor, was standing between me and my health. Because the insurance industry or medical profession or whoever it was who makes these decisions had determined that women my age could not have osteoporosis, women my age were not tested for the disease. How then could I support my claim?
I told the doctor that I needed her to authorize a bone density exam. She refused, saying that premenopausal women are not at risk for osteoporosis. But my mistrust of my body—too profound for her words to sway—convinced me I was right.
Look, she said, it’s highly unlikely you have osteoporosis.
Highly unlikely or impossible?
The doctor opened her desk drawer, took out her prescription pad. Patients were backed up, waiting to see her; not yet noon, it would only get worse. We hadn’t begun my exam. She wrote something down and, unsmiling, handed me what I needed.
When the results came back, she called. The doctor said she was sorry for having doubted me, it was good I’d been so insistent. Still, I had to understand how unusual this was. I felt vindicated, but also angry. Not only at the doctor, but at myself. Why hadn’t I noticed that in three years no one had recorded my height? Wasn’t I the one ultimately responsible for my health? If I’d paid closer attention . . . then I stopped. How else could I have known? I had to shrink to realize that I was shrinking. I hung up the phone and began to cry. You’re my doctor, I wanted to shout. What if I had listened to you?
Femur, tibia, fibula—I pictured the long bones in my body crumbling to powder. The doctor had mentioned Fosomax. I’d seen the commercials: silver-haired women rode horses and did leg lifts at the ballet bar while an announcer intoned See how beautiful sixty can be. As far as my doctor knew, no studies had been conducted about the long-term effects of Fosamax on forty-year-old women. She’d called an endocrinologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who’d told her that Fosamax can remain in the bloodstream for up to seven years. Supposing I became pregnant?
The doctor recommended exercise, calcium, Vitamin D, a follow-up visit in a year. It was nearly two years, however, before I had health insurance again. This time I knew exactly what to do. I made certain I was measured. I’d shrunk another quarter inch. When my new doctor balked (Osteoporosis? Are you sure?) I had proof. Now, with a fresh batch of results showing further bone loss, he was “astounded.”
He said it was essential I start taking Fosomax. He also set up an appointment with an endocrinologist at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital near Columbia University. Late winter, early spring I walked from my apartment in Central Harlem past the decaying buildings along Frederick Douglass Boulevard, through Morningside Park, up the hill to Amsterdam Avenue, where the neighborhood abruptly turned cleaner, shuttered buildings giving way to bookstores and cafés, welcoming beneath bright awnings. Snow melted to mud, crocuses poked through the earth, then daffodils, tulips, until the park was a riot of new growth.
The endocrinologist—British, exceedingly polite—ordered tests. Lots of tests. I had blood drawn twice, another bone density scan. For twenty-four hours I peed into a jug that I lugged back to the lab in a plastic Fairway bag. The next day I got a call—they’d neglected to give me a vial of preservatives to mix into the jug; I’d have to redo the test. Up and down the hill again with my jug of urine. When the tests finally came back, they revealed nothing—except that I had osteoporosis. The endocrinologist confessed to being “perplexed.” But I was not. My bones have always been treacherous, and once again they had betrayed me.
I moved to New York during the first year of the new century, a boom time, though my neighborhood, Central Harlem, was not yet booming.
The sales office for my building was a double wide trailer parked on West 116th Street. The marketing director, a formidable woman with a crown of coiled braids, referred to me as her “queen.” As in: “And how is my queen today?” Like the other women in the office she was overtly religious, and on the day I signed the purchase and sale agreement for my unit, a Sunday, she celebrated by inviting me into the office staff’s prayer circle. I stood between her and the accountant in a group of a dozen or so praying, swaying women, all of us holding hands. Some of the women “testified”—about struggles overcome, family members who needed help, a son in prison, a daughter with an addiction, a diploma recently achieved, people who needed prayers of supplication or thanks. I didn’t know the words to the prayers and I had no inclination to testify, but I felt moved to be included in this circle, to have crossed some invisible barrier from client to communicant. When it was my turn to give thanks, I said simply, I’m so happy to be here.
Across the street from my new building were two vacant lots heaped with demolished car parts that glittered in the sun. The lone neighborhood supermarket had brown lettuce, sawdust-strewn floors, gangsta rap. There were abandoned buildings on both sides of every block. Crack vials crunched underfoot; I had to pay attention whenever I wore sandals. But my apartment was large and sunny, and every day, weather permitting, I went for a walk in Central Park.
I had only to read the paper to be reminded, starkly, of how my neighborhood differed from New York below 110th Street. There, people ate gold-flecked desserts in celebrity restaurants. Hermès kept a waiting list for five-figure Birkin bags. A famous woman with a famous father backed her Mercedes SUV into a crowd of people milling about a Hamptons nightclub while screaming “Fuck you, white trash!”
I’d known about the excess before moving, of course. Still, the contrast between where and how I lived and the antics taking place to the south was jarring. One day, I no longer recall where, I read an article about a couple who had plastic surgery and liked the results so much that they decided to have their children undergo the process, too, “So we’ll look more like a family.”
I’d been diagnosed with osteoporosis only a few months earlier, and it occurred to me that this was a serviceable metaphor for the creative person in the consumerist vortex that was twenty-first century Manhattan. So I wrote a story in which a woman, a poet, is shrinking so rapidly that she has to carry a milk crate to stand on. When she disappears entirely, no one notices.
The story, being somewhat heavy-handed, didn’t really work. It was funny, but tainted by bitterness. I knew that. Still, I showed it to some colleagues in my writing group, who asked me about the piece’s genesis.
So I told them. About my osteoporosis and then, haltingly, about its precursor, scoliosis, the years I’d worn back braces and body casts, my spinal fusion at age fifteen, the difficulty I’d had re-learning how to walk, the even greater difficulty of learning to see myself as “able-bodied.”
I’d known these women for years. We’d gone to grad school together, had met every Thursday night for dinner and workshops, and had stayed in touch when school ended.
They were astonished. We had no idea, they said. Why didn’t you ever tell us?
It doesn’t seem important anymore. Even as I said this, I knew it was a lie, a way of distancing myself from the house of cards I still felt my body to be.
That’s the story you need to write. They were adamant and unanimous.
I didn’t want to listen. These women, my confidantes, were urging me to open a door I’d nailed shut. No, I thought, I’ll never write that; it’s nothing I want to revisit.
