Wake up for the twenty-third consecutive day with a stuffy nose and sore throat. With your eyes still closed, evaluate your symptoms, your body’s various ails and pangs to identify those that signify illness and those your body typically experiences as it comes back into itself after a long night’s sleep. Note the sharp ache in your right eustachian tube, crusty eyelids scratchy and dry as summer hay, a knotted rope of mucous constricting your larynx, and most disturbing of all, a crushing heaviness in your chest.

Open your eyes quickly to see your cat Pauline sitting on your chest, demanding you get up and feed her. Reach out your hand and stroke the warm soft fur underneath Pauline’s neck. She raises her head to give you more direct access to the spot. Run your hands down the length of her body, her black fur gently moving underneath your fingertips. She purrs in your ear.

Wish that your husband, that any man, could summon up such satisfaction in you. He is a good lover, your husband, but still, you have never been able to give yourself over to pure pleasure the way Pauline can, never quite able to forget that after your moment of climax, you will then need to focus on giving pleasure back to him.

Pauline glories in your touch, but when she feels she’s had enough, she drifts away. Immediately look over to the other side of the bed where only an indentation indicates that your husband’s body recently lay there.

Feel abandoned.

Your sore throat returns in full force. Contemplate staying home from work. Remind yourself that you managed to make it in to the office the other twenty-two days you have felt this way, and generally once you’ve gotten up and showered, your ailments linger on throughout the rest of your busy day only as a mild annoyance.

As you pass your husband in the hallway, you heading into the bathroom as he heads out, tell him that you are tired of waking up sick every morning.

“I’m tired of it too,” he says.

Recognize by this he means he is tired of hearing you complain about it. That his sympathy is running out, his days of pushing away the warm covers of the bed to brave the cold tiled floor of the kitchen to fetch you two aspirin and a glass of orange juice are on the wane.

Say, “I’ll make an appointment with the doctor.”

 

Go to the medical clinic during your lunch hour. The clinic is a brick windowless rectangular building that could just as easily serve as a storage facility as a place to heal the sick. Add shoddy workmanship and uninspired architecture to your list of ways HMOs denude the state of American health care.

Stand in line to talk with one of the “healthcare representatives” who will make a copy of your insurance card and confirm that you are who you say you are, and not your aunt or your friend using your symptoms to take “advantage” of the system. The representatives sit behind glassed-in booths in a horseshoe formation that removes them from the arena of the ill, limits exposure, prevents them from connecting with patients on an individual basis.

After you receive a slip of paper from the representative with your doctor’s name on it, take the elevator up to the twelfth floor to his office. Before you even have the chance to sift through the magazines on the rack in the waiting room, the nurse’s aide calls your name and takes you back to the examination room, where she takes your blood pressure and writes it down on a manila chart. Think that you may actually have time to pick up a sandwich on the way back to the office.

The nurse tells you to disrobe and leaves behind a much-washed flannel gown for you to put on. Hang your clothes on the peg. Slip the gown on and reaching your hands behind your head, tie the one set of strings that you can reach in an attempt to seal the gown shut.

Sit on the rubbery examination table and, childlike, swing your bare legs back and forth while waiting for the doctor. He does not come. Perhaps you should have just stuck with your regular GP rather than seeking out this specialist. At least she never kept you waiting. Leaf through a six-month-old copy of People magazine. He still does not come. Ten minutes later, recognizing your need to use the bathroom, which is back out past the waiting room, jump down off the examination table and reach for your slacks. Be embarrassed when, as you pull your pants on over your gown, the doctor opens the door to the exam room and gets a full view. Recognize suddenly that the word embarrassed includes the phrase “bare ass.”

“Good afternoon,” the doctor says, who doesn’t even look away to give you a chance to compose yourself.

Be defiant. With your slacks still down at your ankles, stare at him full in the face, and say, “I’ve been waiting thirty minutes.”

“An emergency,” he says. “Kid with asthma, difficult to breathe, had to hospitalize him.”

Feel tired suddenly.

“Now,” the doctor says, washing his hands in the sink, “tell me what’s bothering you.”

Recount each symptom in great detail, the yellowish color of the mucous, the times of day when you feel the worst, how the fluid thickly drips down your throat.

Sit very still when the doctor shines a light in your eyes, your ears, and up your nose. Resist the need to gag when he pulls a wooden tongue depressor out of the drawer of the examination table.

“Say ahh,” he says.

“Ahggh.”

“Not red.”

He pulls the stick out and tosses it into the lined trashcan.

To justify your right to be ill, to complain, tell him that when you swallow it feels as though your throat is glowing like the tip of the alien’s finger in E.T.

He writes something on your chart. Feel shame flood through your body like the streams of water rush the dirty city streets after a sudden summer storm. Prepare to make a statement apologizing for taking up his time.

Crack a joke: “So how many days do I have left to live?”

“Allergies,” he says. “A pretty good case.”

Resist the urge to thank him for the compliment. Feel vindicated. Feel almost jubilant, since your illness now has a name and therefore you are entitled to the misery you have experienced over the past month. In fact, feel so jubilant that the earache and sore throat seem to have vanished. To name the disease is to cure it.

“So now what happens? You give me a pill and I go home?”

“We have to determine what you are allergic to. Have you ever had a scratch test?”

Listen attentively as the doctor describes how he will inject you with small doses of different allergens. Twenty needle pricks, all neatly lined up in four rows of five shots on the soft pale skin of your left lower arm. You will then go sit in the patient waiting room for an hour and see which of the needle pricks swell into an angry red hill.

Envision your arm as rough terrain where molten lava rises out up out of your pores to form mini-volcanoes. Ask, “Can I at least go get some lunch while I wait to erupt?”

Notice that your doctor ignores your sarcasm. Wonder if he is married.

“I’d prefer that you stay in the waiting room where we can keep an eye on you,” he says. “In case you have a severe reaction and we need to resuscitate you.”

Now hold on! You haven’t bargained for this, crash carts, code reds. Decide that you can live with a sore throat and runny nose for the rest of your life.

“Don’t worry,” he says, as he asks you to sign the form granting permission for the procedure. “It rarely ever happens.”

Pretend that you are a movie director observing a scene in an exam room, where a reluctant though somewhat attractive young woman is being prepared for a procedure. Give the woman directions: stay calm, look as though this doesn’t scare you to death, act grown up and do not burst into tears even though that’s what you want to do. The nurse, now fully covered in a white mask and latex gloves, carries a plastic lab kit into the room.

She dabs hydrogen peroxide on a white cotton ball and rubs it quickly over the inside of your lower left arm. Then she pulls a fresh needle out of its sterile packaging and inserts it into a hypodermic syringe.

“You’ll feel a slight prick,” she says. Remarkably you feel nothing. But by the time she takes the third needle out of its packaging and prepares to insert it, your nerves are frazzled and raw awaiting the moment when the nurse will slip up, insert the shot too deeply, cause pain. Think that maybe you were hasty in coming to the clinic today; maybe the allergies will go away all on their own. After all, you fail to drink your eight glasses of water each day, maybe if you do that the allergens will be flushed away.

Tell the nurse that you feel as though you might faint.

She looks at your face, takes your pulse. “You’re fine,” she says. “You’re finished. Go sit in the waiting room until I call you again.”

Try to concentrate on your magazine. Within fifteen minutes, your arm is red, swollen and itchy. Realize suddenly why it is called a scratch test—because you are desperate to scratch and you can’t.

Finally, the doctor calls you back into his office and measures each one of the red raised bumps with a ruler. If the bump is more than .25 mm, you have an allergic reaction. You test negative for ragweed, hay, and dandelions. You test positive for dust, mold, grass, horses, dogs and, inevitably, cats. The cat bump is the largest one of all.

“You have a cat, I presume?” the doctor asks.

“Yes,” you say. “Her name is Pauline.”

“Well,” the doctor says. “You have three choices: do nothing and continue to feel sick, get rid of the cat, or try allergy shots.”

You say that getting rid of Pauline is impossible because she is a perfect entity, and one cannot get rid of perfection.

“What about pills?” you ask. “I see advertisements for pills all the time.”

“We will give you pills temporarily, until the allergy shots can kick in,” says the doctor. “Wouldn’t you rather be cured than have to take pills every day?”

“There’s a cure?”

“Each treatment, we expose you to a little bit of allergen. We add a bit more of it each time until you build up a tolerance and can be around the allergen without it being an irritant.”

“How long will the process take?”

“About two years. At first, you will have to come once a week, but after six months, we will go to every other week. After a year, you only need to come once a month. How does that sound?”

Think it sounds horrible, but then decide if this is what the doctor suggests you do, you should probably do it. Acknowledge that you are not a rebel, not one to ignore the recommendations of authority figures.

“Do most people get rid of their pets?” you ask.

“No,” the doctor says. “Most people come here.”

You haven’t always been allergic to cats. Your family has had a cat since you were two. In fact, your family first bought a cat because of you. Your mother says that when you were an infant, you were frightened of animals, dogs, cats, birds, even fish. She took you to the zoo once with your brother, and you cried the entire time.

“I don’t know whether it was the smell of the animals, the noise, or what, but you were absolutely terrified. I didn’t want to have a child who was afraid of things, so we adopted a pet hoping you would learn to love animals,” your mother says, when you call her on the phone to tell her about your allergy.

“So on your second birthday, we got Stinky from the shelter. Poor thing, he was only a kitten, just taken from his mother. We put him in a box downstairs with a blanket and a clock like the vet advised. The clock was supposed to comfort him. He sat in that box downstairs, shaking, frightened of his new environment. And upstairs, hiding under your covers, you shook as well. You refused to even go look at him.”

“Who named him Stinky?” you ask.

“Your brother, of course.  He was only five at the time.”

Somewhere between your second and fourth birthdays, you decided that Stinky was all right after all. He sat next to you while you played dolls, his purr like a soothing song, his cat breath warm against the white flesh of your thigh. You became fascinated by his stillness, how he could sit for minutes at a time not moving an inch, yet completely alert to everything that went on around him.

You and Stinky practiced stillness together, holding a pose for twenty, thirty, forty-five seconds at a time. Stillness appealed to you: muscles taut, you brought your breathing down to a minimum, just the slight rise and fall of your chest as your lungs drew in oxygen. You learned to hear the whisper of the trees as they grew, the hum of a bee as it pollinated the roses in your mother’s garden, waited for wetness to gather on the back of your neck signifying danger. You discovered that inside stillness was movement that you never knew existed before. Your body remained constant, but your mind soared ahead, journeying to exotic lands and places in which you were always the heroine. You were ten by then and in your imaginings, you spoke fifteen foreign languages, freed your people who were enslaved by an evil maharajah, and won the heart of every prince who saw you dance on stage, and save for Stinky, you always traveled alone.

“The cat deserves a far better name than what he’s got,” you had told your mother and christened him Sir Stinky. You began the campaign to allow him to sleep on your bed so he could accompany you in your dreams. Your father believed that cats were cats and people were people and Sir Stinky would give you fleas if you slept together.

Every night at ten o’clock before he and your mother went to bed, your father put Sir Stinky downstairs in the basement to sleep. You lay in bed in the darkness, listening to the sounds the house made, the creak of old doors, a slight knocking in the walls. You were very good at stillness by then; you waited twenty, thirty, sixty minutes until you heard the sound of the toilet flushing and your father closing the door to your parents’ bedroom. Then stealthily, putting one foot carefully before another, you made your way to the basement door. The doorknob squeaked just a little as you turned it.

Sir Stinky sat inside on the top stair, awaiting rescue. Like burglars complicit in a crime, you made your way back to the bedroom together. You crawled into sheets grown cold with your absence and settled your body back against the mattress. Sir Stinky leapt once to land on your sheeted stomach where he stayed for the night.

In the morning, your father found the two of you together.

“How did that cat get upstairs?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” you replied.

 

Now, after all these years, you learn you are allergic and wonder what it means. Recognize that what you told the doctor is true. Pauline is a perfect entity. That for the first time in your adult life you are not being glib, not using words, you who make a living manipulating words to help promote the latest software product or shampoo, to hide behind. You, who talk loudly in social situations to prevent silence creeping in, who uses cynicism to feign confidence, who pretends not to mind how quickly time passes even as you feel your childhood dreams of fame and adventure moving further and further away.

Certainly, Pauline isn’t without faults. She has the annoying habit of biting your bare toes in the morning after your shower and insists on drinking out of the toilet instead of the fresh bowl of water you put out for her each day. But Pauline in her very catness has no expectations of you, demands no compromises, no bargains. She loves you unconditionally. She’s the first being you’ve ever loved unconditionally as well, a pure love with no strings attached. You never question why on the weeks between paychecks you and your husband willingly live on soup and crackers for several days while Pauline still receives her cans of Fancy Feast. You never ask how come you shell out four hundred and fifty dollars to the veterinarian for a series of tests after the cat stops eating for three days. And now, facing a two-year sentence of needle pricks and costly doctor bills, you never once doubt that it’s the right thing to do.

For late in the middle of the night when insomnia consumes you, wondering whatever happened to the girl whose courage could free slaves and talent could enchant royalty, worrying that you have been discarding past desires and experiences as if they were no more than empty syringes, you feel Pauline lay her tiny head on your thigh.

There in the dark, for the first time in years, and with Pauline’s soft purr urging you on, you practice stillness. You practice stillness, for to move even an inch might trample the world’s fragility.

Sandi Sonnenfeld writes fiction and creative nonfiction. She’s the author of the memoir This Is How I Speak (Seattle: Impassio Press), for which she was named a 2002 Celebration Author by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association, which recognizes writers whose books deserve special consideration by bookstore owners/managers. Her short stories and personal essays have appeared in more than thirty literary magazines and anthologies, including Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sojourner, ACM, Necessary Fiction, The Raven Chronicles, Dr. TJ Eckleburg Review, and Perigee, to name just a few. She’s currently working on a historical novel set in 17th-century Russia. For more visit, authorsandisonnenfeld.com.