Free A Season in Hell by Marilyn French Page A

office when there was a long wait.) I felt that these patiently waiting people had stepped in the elephant dung. (There is a saying in academia about working in a low-status college: If you once step in the elephant dung, you will track it around behind you forever afterward; you can never get rid of it.)
    The elephant dung this time was the condition of being sick: not suffering from a sickness, an occasional bout, but having a chronic condition of illness. For such people, illness was a way of life. Their days were centered around appointments with one doctor or another, picking up a new prescription and keeping records of side effects, trying the new herbal tonic a friend had recommended. Husbands and wives together made the sickness of one (or both) the focus of their lives. Sitting for hours in a waiting room was a common part of this kind of life, something to be endured tolerantly, something expected. If you were a cancer patient, the hospital and the doctors became your life, constituted your entire life, circumscribed all the conditions of your life. Beyond weeping that this was what one’s life had become, what was one to do?
    My adamant determination that this not happen to me contributed to my bad temper at being kept waiting, but besides impatience, I suffered from a piercing need to escape. As a child, when faced with threats from other children, or disapproval from an elder, I would raise my head and eyebrows in the most supercilious manner I could manage and try to sail above it (successfully most of the time, I must admit). So now I raised my head and set my mouth and vowed they would not get me, I would not become a professional patient, I would remain a human being, a thinker and writer who was temporarily ill. But in the end, there is no escape.
    The day after I was readmitted to the hospital, I developed what are called mouth sores. Like many chemo patients, I would develop them every month. This sounds innocuous, but it is horrible. The chemicals in your blood kill all fast-growing tissues in the body. Besides cancer cells, they destroy the soft tissue in the mouth, throat, intestine, and bowel. Cuts in the inner wall of the mouth, the gums, and the tongue hurt when you try to eat or even talk. Two or three times a day, a nurse comes around and sprays your mouth with something—boric acid?—that calms the pulsing heat of the cuts. But the relief is short-lived. The sores lasted about two weeks, ruining most of my (supposed) out-of-hospital time. A seemingly minor problem, mouth sores are agonizing.
    But the nadir of this second hospital stay concerned television. I was again fortunate in my roommate, who willingly used earphones when she watched TV and did not watch it constantly. I knew that the Republican National Convention was occurring that week in Houston (though I did not watch TV, I had the New York Times delivered every day, and Isabelle brought me The Nation ) and that Pat Buchanan was to give the keynote address. Fervently hoping that my roommate would not want to watch it, I was relieved when she fell asleep early that evening. But I was not to escape—a man down the hall was determined to watch it and force everyone on the corridor to hear it. He tuned his set so loud that it blasted the hall. I begged the nurse to ask him to turn it down; she grimaced, saying other people, too, were complaining, but the man absolutely refused to reduce the volume.
    For me, Buchanan’s speech was symbolic. In my vulnerable state, I had no defense against it; it fit right in with my mood of despair. The speaker’s words, his tone, epitomized everything about my country and the world that made me receptive to death, made me feel on occasion no regret about leaving this world. So do impersonal events collude in our lives and our death.
    I had expected to remain in hospital for a couple of days, but they kept me for eleven, until Sunday, August 23. In tearful frustration, I realized that in only seven days