THE CHANGE Janet C. Beaulieu Copyright © 2000 I sat at my desk, scratching my hands. My fingers, actually. I hadn't noticed anything until midmorning, after I had spent a couple of hours doing research through Telnet at the computer. My eyes had begun to ache from their constant fixation on the color monitor, which I had only recently shifted from green and yellow to pink and red, and my neck had gone stiff on its right side, so I decided I'd better take a break and dash downstairs for a cup of coffee (the more laden with caffeine, the better). I scratched idly at my right hand as I went downstairs, realizing the left hand was also vaguely itching, but there was nothing to be done about it because it was holding my coffee cup. On the way back to my office I couldn't scratch at all (somehow scratching and carrying a full cup of coffee required more coordination that I could summon), and was even more away of the annoying itch. By the time I got back to my desk I had decided I was going to sit down and go right at it with my fingernails. I knew this wasn't wise, that it would probably make the itch worse, but often I am not wise, not wise at all. I sat and scratched, and after a minute my hands were streaked red with irritation and had begun to hurt. At that point sense took over, and I realized I had better lay off on the scratching business and had best pick up some Calamine lotion at the drugstore during the noon hour. I bought the Calamine and, at the last moment, some Benadryl, figuring the Calamine might be a little messy if I was going to continue working on the computer all afternoon. I knew the Benadryl would make me sleepy, but figured it would be easier to force myself to stay awake than it would be to try to wash pink guck from all the nooks and crannies that is a computer keyboard. That night I gave the itching hands the double whammy treatment with both medications, tugged on some old white cotton gloves that had somehow survived in one of my bureau drawers from an era now long past, and went to bed early, lulled to lala land by the diphenhydramine. As I edged towards sleep, I tried to figure out what on earth I had done to my hands. I hadn't been working with caustic substances around the house, hadn't eaten anything that would cause an allergic reaction (that I knew about, at least), and didn't feel sick. I had been outside cleaning up the back yard, which virtually overnight had become covered with the red and yellow and orange leaves of autumn, and although I didn't recall poking about in any errant brambles or bushes, it seemed likely that I had, and that somehow I had tangled with some poison oak or ivy. Whatever it was, it was a minor annoyance, and would be gone in a day or two. It was about two weeks later that I noticed the bump. Bumps, actually, but I only noticed the one on my right thumb first. I had almost forgotten about the previous episode of mysterious itching, but one morning, again working at my computer at the office, I noticed my thumb had started to hurt. It was most evident when I hit the space bar, and I was busily editing a rather lengthy manuscript, so I was hitting the space bar frequently, and as the day went on the strange little hurt turned into a rather annoying and petulant ouch. I seemed to be on a roll with pesky bodily ailments; I had spent all three days of the long weekend in bed with a killer migraine and had sprained my ankle to boot. That evening I inspected my thumb carefully under a bright light. The area around the inside of the first joint was taut and smooth, and had an unnatural shine. There also appeared to be a hard little nugget just underneath the skin. I pressed and poked, and the nugget responded with angry snips of pain. I probably wouldn't have noticed anything else at the time, except after those few moments of pressing and poking, I realized the fingers that had pressed and poked had also begun to hurt. I turned the light more directly on my hands and began a wider inspection, only to discover, at the first joint of each and every finger, the same hard, painful little nugget, the same taut, smooth skin, the same unnatural shine. My immediate reaction was panic and a strong, unexplained revulsion. Something very weird was going on, something scary, and the scariest part was that the weirdness involved my hands. I made my living with my hands. I had heard countless horror stories about rheumatoid arthritis, and other not-so-wonderful stories about related ailments, and knew I was in deep trouble if anything of the sort were in store for me. How on earth would I live? I fought down the panic and resolved to call the doctor's office in the morning, whether I could afford it or not. By now you must wonder who I am and what I do. Primarily I am a writer. By day I work at a local college writing and editing publications, doing research, and writing grant proposals. Most of my colleagues are somewhat in awe of me; they admire my ability to sit down and scratch out a letter in less time than it takes to say it, but are somewhat intimidated by it, too. Frankly, I enjoy their discomfort. I like being able to do what most other folks can't, particularly in the wonderful world of work, which for the first few years after my divorce wasn't so wonderful. When Jim and I split up, I was faced with the necessity of having to earn a living with no marketable skills. I had gone to college in the 60's and had earned a degree in history, but I had married instead of going on to graduate school, so the degree wasn't worth much, and during my married life I had had no burning desire to work and Jim had been enough of a macho type to prefer that I stayed at home. When I took inventory of how I might begin to earn enough money to make ends meet, I was dismayed. In high school I had taken one semester of typing class, and had mastered that enough to peck out the requisite essays and term papers, but I knew nothing about other office skills, like using mimeograph machines and copiers and other assorted gadgets, and my math was so dreadful I needed a calculator to balance my checkbook. I was, however, bright and very well read, and to my amazement discovered I had the ability to convince people I could do things I really couldn't, and could quickly learn skills I had to admit I didn't have. The long and short of it was I got a job with very little fuss, which surprised me in itself, because the world of the 80's was vastly different from the world of the 60's, which had been the last time I had used any of the office skills I had for any purposes other than my own. I slogged through several dreadful secretarial jobs, hating them with great passion, and consoled myself with the realization that paid rote work during the day kept my mind free for unpaid creative work at home evenings and weekends. As a small child I had been fascinated by the world of stories and books, and had spent the greater portion of my time with my nose pressed deep between two covers, reading something, anything. When in junior high school the great hue and cry was raised over Grace Metalious' Peyton Place, I eagerly scoured around for a copy of the forbidden book, and when finally I managed to hold the novel in my hands, I was fascinated far more by the photo of the author on the book jacket than I was by the doings of the Peyton Place populace. In retrospect, I think it was there and then that I decided I wanted to be a writer. So during my free time I worked towards that goal. I worked on countless short stories, starting many that I never finished, completing several dozen, actually selling a few. I went to a few writers' conferences and started working on a novel. Late in the 1980's, the opportunity finally arose for me to get paid for my writing skills, and I accepted the position at which I am still employed. It has, of course, evolved over the five or so years I have been at the college, becoming increasingly more challenging and complex, and has become a real source of satisfaction for me. Finally I do work that I enjoy, and have learned to stop resenting being single (which was the life transition that necessitated my working in the first place). The absence of the constant presence of a man in my life was a difficult adjustment at first, but I am used to it now, and although I enjoy the occasional date and have struggled through a couple of longer term, but ultimately unsuccessful relationships, I have no particular desire to remarry. Actually, I have no particular desire to tie myself down with anything, even a goldfish. The visit to the doctor was frustrating and did nothing to set my mind at ease. Arthritis, he said. "It looks like rheumatoid," he said, a tinge of regret in his voice. There was nothing to be done about it, he told me, I would just have to live with it. "You'll adapt," he said. "People do," and wrote out a year's prescription for 600-milligram tablets of Motrin. It seemed a terribly ominous diagnosis for a 10-minute office visit and what seemed a rather cursory physical observation and probing of my hands. I asked about x-rays, but he shook his head and said there was no need, he'd seen lots of rheumatoid arthritis in his time and that was what he saw in my hands. I must have gone a bit panicky, because I insisted (rather urgently) that I really would feel a lot better if I had x-rays taken anyway, so he grudgingly wrote out an order and sent me off to a nearby hospital to get the films taken, admonishing me I was wasting my money. After a week of silence, I phoned the doctor and asked what the results of the x-rays had been. "Rheumatoid arthritis," he told me. I thought I heard a tone of I-told-you-so in his voice. Spurs were forming on the bones in my fingers. I should take the Motrin regularly (with plenty of milk to make sure I didn't destroy my stomach lining) and should make sure I continue to use my hands as normally as possible. "You have to keep working the joints, whether it hurts or not. If you stop, it will get worse." None of this was what I wanted to hear, but clearly there was nothing to be done about it. Resigned, I headed off to the nearest branch of Mr. Paperback and bought a book on arthritis. I had to do something. About a month later, my feet started to itch. Two weeks later, right on schedule, there were hard little bumps on the inside of the first joint of all ten of my toes. By the new year, I was beginning to hurt almost everywhere. My back ached with such fury I often found myself hunched over in my chair, or assuming a pronounced question-mark posture when I walked. The vertebrae at the end of my spine were particularly painful, and sitting was extremely uncomfortable unless I was at home and could lean up against the sofa and perch on one hip. As the weeks passed, the only way I found relief from pain was to curl in against myself, scrunching up as small as possible. My doctor was sympathetic but helpless. It was, he said, one of the most rapidly advancing cases of arthritis he had ever seen, and he wished he could do something for me, but there really was no cure. I was to continue with my Motrin, and to use hot packs when the pain was really bad. I asked about Ben-Gay and he told me to use it if I thought I was getting any benefit, but I could tell he thought that, too, was a waste of money. I asked him how long I was going to be able to continue to work, and he looked at me sadly and said only I could answer that question. I would know, he told me, when it was time to stop, and no, he didn't think I'd have any problem getting long-term disability benefits. By spring I could no longer climb the stairs to my office, and although my boss offered to move me to ground-level space, I declined and gave my notice. I was not getting any better and was not going to. It was time to bite the bullet and file for disability. At least at home I could continue to work on my creative writing, and when I reached the point I could no longer type, I could tape record my work and hire someone to transcribe it, and I found some solace in that. The one bright spot in all this painful transitioning was David. David and I had begun dating just before the first itching episode, and I had quickly learned that I could lean on him when life seemed overwhelming. He was one of those rare people who were not put off by frailties of the body, and as my disease progressed, our relationship strengthened. At one point we even discussed having him move in with me, but my hard-won independence ultimately won out, and things stayed as they were. We saw each other once or twice a week, and as my mobility grew more and more impaired, he was happy to spend evenings at home with me, often bringing dinner or the newest video. His companionship was an oasis in my new world circumscribed by pain and Motrin, and it was only in our times together that I was able to forget the bleak future that loomed ahead. Being able to talk to someone, to touch someone and have that someone touch you, made life easier to bear. It was not long after my disability checks began to arrive that I realized that David was not enough. I needed something to talk to and cuddle more than two nights a week, and decided it was finally time to take responsibility for a creature other than myself. I decided to adopt a cat. David was furious. He hated cats, he told me, which was a rather astonishing revelation because I had thought David to be incapable of hating anything. His vehemence, however, was unmistakable, as was his final pronouncement at the end of our conversation: I could have David or I could have a cat. Pick one. Shaken by all of this, I tried to put him off and suggested that we both settle down and think things over for a week or so. I wasn't going to do anything right away, and I pleaded with him to try to understand how desolate and alone I felt when he could not be with me. He started to raise the issue of moving in together again, but I interrupted him and insisted on a cooling-off period, to which he eventually agreed before going off into the night. When I closed the door I realized I was hyperventilating. I was completely perplexed by David's inexplicable behavior. What on earth could cause such passionate hatred of a small furry four-footed creature that purrs? And what did such passionate hatred of something, anything, imply about David? How much did I really know about him? I had a lot to think about, and my hunch was that a week was probably not going to be enough. It appeared I had been clutching a stranger to my bosom, and I had no idea how to deal with that. During all my trauma, I had allowed myself to rely heavily on him, and now I was not at all sure he could be trusted. What else did David hate? Or who? I took a sleeping pill and went to bed and had nightmares. I ended up breaking it off. The decision was almost as painful as the fusing, twisting bones in my body, but at the end I knew it was the only decision I could make. I could not maintain a relationship with someone capable of such irrational hatred. It was a decision David did not understand. He seemed, in fact, incredibly hurt, and actually cried when I said I thought it best that we not see each other any longer. He was stunned that I would throw away everything we had together for a cat I didn't even have, he said. I tried to explain that it wasn't the cat that was the issue, it was his hatred, his unreasoning rage. If he could react in such a fashion to a mere idea that he didn't like, how would he react to a reality that he didn't like? I wanted love and caring in my life, not uncertainty and hate. I suggested he see a counselor. I did not cry until after he had left, but then I let it all go, and probably could have filled buckets with my tears. It was just one more awful thing in what had been an almost unendurable litany of awful things, and I had reached a stage where I felt at the end of my endurance. I went back to the doctor, told him about the breakup and the depth of my trauma, and he shook his head and prescribed antidepressants. I bought myself a parakeet. After that horror show with David, there was no way I was ever going to adopt a cat. By summer I had taken down the hall mirror. I had realized that my appearance was changing, and knew as I went about my chores in the house that my spine had shrunk and that I was at least several inches shorter than I had been a year ago. I had not, however, absorbed the full impact of the physical metamorphosis until one morning when I caught a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror, and was stunned to find looking back at me a wizened, crookback old crone whose face I barely recognized. It was like looking at something not quite human. I found the experience thoroughly loathsome, and gathered up each and every mirror I owned and put them out with the trash. I did not bother going to the doctor when I realized the knobby growth at the end of my spine had lengthened. Nor did I call for an appointment when my cheeks began to itch. I no longer went out, nor did I see anyone. I had arranged for my groceries and prescriptions to be delivered, the same orders every week, and hired an accountant to pay my bills on a regular basis. I had the telephone disconnected when the change reached my voice box and my speech became unintelligible. At times I thought about suicide, but realized my body incapable of performing the task. It seemed there was little for me to do but continue to exist, however reluctantly. I consoled myself by staring out the windows for long hours, watching the birds as they fluttered to and fro. Yesterday there was loud banging and yelling at my front door, and later vaguely familiar voices muttering in the hallway. It appeared someone was lost, or perhaps hurt. Someone suggested breaking down the door, but someone else insisted they wait until the landlord could be located. I did not understand all the fuss and bother, and was frankly relieved when all the feet walked away and the silence returned. When I was reasonably sure they were not going to come back, I went back to the window and peered outside, watching the explorations of the neighbor's old tomcat. He saw me in the window and hissed. I turned away and ignored him, then curled up in the sun and went to sleep. This morning the landlord unlocked my front door and let David in, cautioning him not to disturb anything, just to make sure everything was all right. He would wait for David outside, he said. It sounded like he did not want to be with David if he found anything unpleasant. I hid under the bed and listened as David wandered from room to room. He kept calling my name: "Sunny? Sunny, where are you?" He sounded very concerned, and after a few minutes I decided that this was, after all, my sweet David who had been so patient and kind through all my traumas, and surely after all he had gone through with me I should not be afraid to show myself to him now. So I crept out and padded into the hall. "David," I called (although it didn't sound like 'David.' very much). He turned at the sound, then his face turned red and contorted into a paroxysm of rage. "You get the hell out of here!" he screamed, and drove his foot hard into my side. I sprang upon him. E N D

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