Dreams and Nightmares 6: Crazy with Fear


Crazy with Fear


The media was relentless. Every day there was some news about some possible treatment, some possible discovery, some possible cure. Most of this was just so much verbal electronic spinning. First such news would bring optimism and hope, and then when the newest promise fell through, it would again stoke our fears and incite panic. There was nothing any of us could do. Monogamy helped, unless one’s boyfriend cheated, which happened. How terribly tragic to think that you had trusted a man with your body and your health only to find out that he infected you, and now you were both on your way to an early death. I heard such stories and did my best to ignore them. I felt like a child who claps their ears and says, “nah, nah, nah,” to drown out someone who’s telling them something they don’t want to hear. There were times when the only peace I could find was when I was with my friends or Vince and I was totally absorbed into the present moment of whatever we were doing. For a moment I could forget.
It was not always easy to keep deeply busy and thus to keep the anxieties and ruminations at bay. One Saturday I got home from my regular errands and sunk into my couch, despairing. I started to breathe heavy and my heart was pounding and my hands began to sweat. An anxiety attack. I had read about them, but never experienced one myself. I went to the bathroom to splash cold water on my face and when I looked in the mirror there were five or six blotches of Kaposi’s sarcoma on my face. I let out a little scream whimper and cried and made my way out way back to the couch, frightened like no other time in my life. After I had calmed down, I told myself the best way to handle it would be to assess how bad the lesions were and then to call my doctor in the morning. I went back to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and my face was clear. Clearly the situation was driving me crazy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dreams and Nightmares 4: Disinvited

Disinvited In the spring of one of those years in the late 80s I heard that my youngest brother was going to get married. Weddings are always huge family events, with many of the plans happening at all intervals and in chaotic ways. Vince decided that he didn’t want to go in so I made reservations to fly alone. I would use that time to reconnect with some old friends in Cincinnati, Jimmy with whom I was especially close, and my cousin Paul. I was happy and relieved that Paul and Jimmy had become friends because I had felt guilty about leaving both of them behind when I moved to San Francisco. Sometimes we get so absorbed in our day-to-day lives that we don’t realize how much time is past. But suddenly it was three weeks before Kevin’s wedding and I have not received an invitation. Not unheard of since the formal invitations were more of an obligatory detail rather than an actual guest reference. Yet even in a family as large as mine this was an unusual oversight. I called my mot...
Read more

Dreams and Nightmares 1: Driving throught Rabbits

Driving Through Rabbits  My friend Denise and I had planned our trip from Cincinnati as well as we could. We both would need our cars in California so we decided to drive separately, together. We didn’t know how long it will take us to get to there, but we figured it would take five or six days. Looking back from an era when we have electronic supports for maps, planning, and finding resources along the route, it seems like a rather risky and difficult trip to undertake, but at the time it seemed ordinary. I can’t imagine now taking off and driving across the country not knowing where we would stay, or the exact path from day to day. But that’s what we did.             We left on the morning of June 5, 1981, and headed west. Through the use of flashing our headlights and beeping our horns we signaled to each other when we need to pull over to go to a rest stop, or to get something to eat at a restaurant. There we would plan ...
Read more

Dreams and Nightmares 3: Kenny

Kenny One of the first people I met when moved to San Francisco in 1981 was Ken Stevenson. He and I were both in our 20s. He came from Maine and talked about harvesting potatoes. When we were pigging out with some delicious food he’d cackle, “As my grandmother used to say, ‘Slow down! Food was meant to save a life, not take it!”’ I was from Ohio and both sides of my family were farmers, so I understood his potato references. And we both loved our grandmothers dearly. Actually, Kenny and I were similar in several ways. He and I had both been part of Catholic religious communities, had unaccepting families, and had moved to San Francisco to begin constructing our new lives. We met in church, at a Dignity mass for gay Catholics, and became fast friends. We would spend a lot of time together because we lived very close to each other. And because we genuinely liked each other. We laughed at each other’s stories, hung out at bars together, and talked about dating the various man availab...
Read more