The Cure

By SARAH MANGUSO
13 april 2008 -- For a year I worried that I might die having had sexual intercourse with only one person. Like many college students, I thought intercourse was the greatest thing in life. And it just about killed me to hear of everyone’s rambunctious affairs while I was in the hospital.
When I was 21, in the mid-’90s, my immune system filled my blood with poison. It was trying to destroy my nervous system — a misperception that caused me a lot of trouble.
When a medical student came by my hospital room after his rounds were over, with a book or a mix tape he’d recorded, I thought about inviting him to sleep with me if they told me I would die there in the hospital. But I went back to college in spring still sick, with a tube still implanted in my chest. It looked like something I should pull out — a white dart, a poison arrow — but I couldn’t pull it out.
I needed the big tube so my blood could be removed and cleaned and put back with the cells intact. I’d had it done with big needles, wide bores, in the crooks of my elbows, but my arm veins had long since blown. Then I had three catheters in my subclavian vein. The scar tissue from those still feels like hard cranberries buried under my collarbone.
The permanent line was a 20-inch tube that never clogged as long as blood thinner was shot into it every two days. From one direction it went into my right breast, under the collarbone and up, just under the skin, into my jugular, and then into my subclavian vein and toward my heart. On the outside it hung like two white drinking straws, six inches long, with one red clamp and one blue one, like a piece of jewelry.
I gave away my scoop-necked sweaters. I used big clear adhesive patches to cover the entry site when I showered. The catheter never got torn out in my sleep because I learned how to roll over slowly, even in deep sleep, while cradling the catheter in my left hand. Every month or so I went back to the hospital to have my plasma replaced or to have a bag of medicine infused.
My blood was removed and cleaned and put back more than 50 times. After that, my hematologist tried another treatment: massive gamma-globulin infusions. The second infusion kept me going for three months, and it was decided I wouldn’t have to have my plasma replaced again. My neurologist said I’d turned a corner, so after 11 1/2 months, my central line was pulled.
I believed, though, that I would stop secreting antibodies only after I had sexual intercourse. And though I looked worse than I ever had in my life, thanks to the steroids — I was fat and swollen, covered in acne, and had a gruesomely round face — I thought my legendarily promiscuous musician friend might still be interested.
So I called him and invited him to have a drink with me that night. We had our drink and walked back to our dorm and sat down in the courtyard, just talking. It was June, two days before commencement. He was graduating, and I was graduating, too, sort of, but the envelope I was getting wouldn’t have a diploma in it. I had another semester of course work to complete.
Only the seniors were left at school, and most of them were in the courtyard. I felt exposed. Finally, getting up from the bench we’d been sitting on, my friend said, “Your place?” And we went to my dorm room, which was a single suite I had all to myself, with my own bathroom, because my neurologist had written a note to the university.
We sat on my futon, drinking out of a plastic bottle of vodka. Eventually he said, “Do you have any other rooms in this place?” and walked me to the bedroom, and lay me on my bed, and had intercourse with me. Then he asked me about the scabs on my chest from where the line had just been pulled out and listened to the things I told him, and held me very tightly.
Two mornings later, when we were in the courtyard again, seated in rows for graduation, he was wearing a buttoned shirt and sweating, because his neck was covered with bite marks.
Years passed. He and I wrote almost every day. I lived in one city and he lived in another. He told me some of his secrets, and I told him some of mine. Our letters were intimate, but I didn’t get around to explaining to him that I recovered from my disease only because he had selflessly had intercourse with an ugly version of a girl he once had a crush on.
A little less than seven years after I was cured of my disease through the mystical power of intercourse, my friend died of a sudden illness. I never told him about my magical cure, his sweet medicine. And I wish I could have saved his life. I hope he knew somehow that he had saved mine.