the virgin mary

published in pot muck magazine, october 2015

“I’m not taking those fucking pills!” she screams.

“Mary, please.”

“Let me go!” she yells. Two security guards hold her arms. Another waits, just behind her.

“Mary, take the medication,” I say. I hold out the plastic cup.

“It’s poison! It’s going to kill me. That’s what they want!”

“Mary, I’m not here to hurt you. I’m a nurse. I want to help you.”

“You are a liar,” she says, “leave me alone! What kind of a nurse bothers a poor old lady?”

*****

Mary has been court ordered to be hospitalized for up to ten days, she is to be “compliant with treatment”. Her behaviors have been deemed harmful to herself. According to her chart, she stopped eating two weeks ago, fearful she was being poisoned. She lived on sips of water and packaged saltine crackers, never leaving her one room in the boarding house where she lived, not opening her door, not even when the police came to check on her during a four day long heat wave. They found her, disheveled, dehydrated, delusional, afraid, in a dirty robe, in a stifling room, windows locked shut, flies everywhere, food left in the sink, the place had the stink of garbage and unwashed flesh and rotting meat and urine and feces and something animal.

In the emergency room, she was combative.  She spit on the EMT. She was restrained to a gurney, and given 5 milligrams of Haldol, 2 milligrams of Ativan, and a ½ cc of Cogentin by injection. She has hydrated with IV fluids.  Once she was calm, and medically cleared, her vital signs normalized, she was wheeled, still restrained, to be observed in the psychiatric emergency department. They checked her respirations and pulse, they offered food which she refused. She did not speak. She would not answer their questions.

She arrived on our unit some 15 hours later.

In the Day Room, her first morning, she did not eat breakfast. during the Community Meeting, when the smiling Occupational Therapist asked her how she was doing, She would not respond, a fact that was documented in her daily progress note.

She did tell the psychiatry resident to “Fuck the fuck off, Fucking Fucker!” this was quoted and discussed at change of shift, among the nurses and mental health workers.

She submitted to being bathed the next day, but only because the counselor promised to use a special shampoo. She let her long white hair be combed. She ate lime jello, and drank half a pint of skim milk. She wore a clean Johnny that hung slack off her bony shoulder blades. She wore the green Styrofoam slippers that did not fit her feet. She wore the bracelet that had her name and unit number on it. She let the staff check her blood pressure. In some ways, she became a patient, but not in all ways. She did not go to any of the groups; therapeutic communication, morning stretch, occupational crafts, cookie time, art, afternoon check-in, current events.  She made no phone calls, had no visitors, spoke to none of the other patients, or to any of the staff.

On the third day, she did not get out of bed. She refused to meet with the hospital attorney, who would be presenting her case before the judge later in the day. She turned to face the wall when the director and the nurse manager came to explain to her that she was about to be committed for an extended hospitalization, and forced to accept treatment. Her breakfast tray when untouched. Her lunch was taken away, uneaten, as well.

By evening, her case was heard, and her commitment paper was signed.

From now on, she did not have the right to refuse meals, she would have to accept medications, she would be mandated to attend groups.

“Fuck you,” she says when I tell her this.

I hold out the medications the doctor ordered.

“NO,” she says. Her eyes are sharp and blue, unflinching. “I was named for the Virgin Mary,” she says. “You can not touch me.”

Someone calls Security. Uniformed guys escort her to the Quiet Room where she will be restrained to a bed frame and injected again with a cocktail of antipsychotic meds if she continues to refuse or threaten, the men hold her though she does not resist. She walks without struggle, the green slippers slap behind her along the shiny linoleum floor. Other patients watch as we pass the Day Room. The TV is blaring People’s Court. One guy winks at her. She gives him the finger. He goes back to eating his dinner.

“I’m not taking those God Damned pills!”

“Mary, take the medicine.”

“Fuck off.”

“It’s my job.”

“Get another job!” she screams.

“Take the medications for the nurse,” says one of the guards.

“Screw you, too, Barney Fife!” She spits.

“The court ordered you to take the medicine,” I hold out the cup.

“I was named for the Blessed Virgin!”

She struggles. The guards have her down in seconds. She is small, but they hold her. She screams while leather straps are wrapped around her wrists and ankles. Another nurse rushes in with the staff psychiatrist. “She’s refusing treatment,” the doctor says. He orders medications to be administered by chemical restraint.

Her Johnny is pulled up, her buttocks exposed. My hands do not shake as I swab her pale skin and feel for the gluteus muscle, she is thin, and I feel her papery softness through my latex glove. I have done this hundreds of times. It’s my job. She writhes and screams. She is held more forcibly, to keep her still. I inject her with two needles.

It’s over in a moment.

“You rapist!” she screams. I back out of the Quiet Room. “How could you do this to the Virgin Mary?” She cries.

When I pull off my gloves, my hands still tingle from the touch of her skin,

and the warmth of her fear.

Clean

this piece has been accepted for publication
in aids&understanding magazine, april 2016
http://www.aumag.org
http://www.aumag.org/?s=clean

“Are you clean?” my Grindr date asks me. I met him on the popular gay chat site some weeks ago, and after some pleasant back and forth, we agreed to meet up.

 He’s cute and too young for me, about 30, give or take. His name is Kenny.

“What do you mean?” I ask, as if I don’t know. I sip my Starbucks.

“You know,” he says, picking at the raisins in his half eaten scone, “are you disease free?”

“Are you asking me about my HIV status?”

“Yeah. Are you clean?”

I hate this question. I hate it because it states clearly in my profile, the one that no one bothers to read as they scroll through pictures of faces and torsos and body parts, my status is HIV positive, undetectable, on meds. These days, in the age of medications, being undetectable means that my ability to transmit HIV is drastically reduced. This, and safer sex practices that we all learned in school, helps prevent new infections. But sadly, there is still stigma in the gay community toward those of us who are HIV positive. I am healthy in every other aspect. I have a good job, in fact I am a nurse in the HIV field. I own my own place. At 50 I’m in pretty good shape, well reasonably good shape, anyway. I’m basically considered a nice guy, a real hoot at a party, a catch. Still, when this question about my status comes up, as it almost always does, in just this same way, I feel like an undesirable, untouchable.

When I tell Kenny my status, I watch his discomfort, his pretty blue eyes that look anywhere but at me, as if he’s scanning the place for an emergency exit. I know he will be gone in about two minutes.

“I should get going,” he says, right on schedule, suddenly forgetting we had plans to hang out together. It’s a bright, warm, sunny October afternoon. We had talked about walking along the Charles River, to see the beautiful autumn leaves. We were going to go to the Square, to browse the stores.

Kenny thanks me for the latte. “Nice meeting you.” He manages a tiny smile. He zips up his jacket hastily, the hem of his untucked flannel shirt gets caught. He just leaves it like that. He can’t get out of there fast enough. And then he is gone.

From the table at the window, I watch him as he crosses the street. He does not look back.

The place is busy, noisy with people.  I stay there a while longer, alone and quiet. The coffee gets cold. I take a sip, still not able to shake this feeling that’s something a little more than sadness, I sit there feeling for a moment dirty, and unclean, diseased.

I can’t be angry with Kenny. He’s too young to remember. He doesn’t know what it was like, to come of age just as AIDs was on the horizon. I understand his fear. I was scared in those days, too.  Who was not? They were truly terrifying times. I was barely 20 before the first casualties began.

Robert in July of ‘85. He went fast.

Davidwas in hospice a few weeks, so we got to say goodbye.

Everet lingered. He was a ghost by the time he passed like a shadow, after months and months of wasting away. He scared me the most, with his face, so thin, so gaunt. The feel of his bones when we hugged made me cringe.  I hated myself for how I felt.  I couldn’t wait to get away from him, away from the bottles of pills, the diapers, the smell of dying and death. I hated being there, and I was afraid of him.  And, worse, he knew it.

Everet died, then Seth.

Those early years, it was like playing musical chairs. When the music stopped, someone was out. I stumbled through, numb among the sick, skeletal, walking dead. In between, I kept dancing and drinking, I smoked and snorted and rutted to forget. I needed to feel alive, to feel a pulse, a warm body, someone to hold onto. I had boyfriends, I had tricks, lots of them, like survivors in a shipwreck, I clung on, sputtering, dazed, wounded witness to the end of the world, what could I do but keep playing the game? What I really wanted was to say:

Take care of me. Don’t let me go. Love me, a little.

By the 90’s, we had collectively moved through the stages of grief, from shock and denial, to anger. Anger was the dominant mode, and it took the form of activism.

We wore black Tshirts that said SILENCE=DEATH as we marched in pride parades along with QUEER NATION and Act UP. These groups organized protests that politicized the epidemic into a call for action. They verbalized the rage we felt, they made people uncomfortable, but they were visible, vocal, and they would not back down.

We were angry. We were scared. We didn’t know what to do, so we marched along.

And then it was my turn. I sat in my doctor’s office when I got the news. I just sat in a hard plastic chair, staring at her calendar. It was December, 1999. I didn’t cry. “Do you want to see a counselor?” she said softly, nudging a box of Kleenex toward me. I shook my head. My first and only thought was escape. My thought was to get out of that office, out of that building, I needed to get out on the street and walk in the new falling snow. When I got home, I didn’t talk to anyone for weeks, I unplugged my phone, called out to work, stayed in bed.

Somehow, those days turned into weeks, months, and now almost 20 years have passed. In the end I was lucky to be diagnosed when things were changing on the cusp of a new century. And yes, it was luck, the kind that comes randomly, but also, thanks to the efforts of a generation of men who went before me, those who marched and protested, those who died, those whose efforts brought new meds and treatments in the pipeline, I would be ok. I would survive. But I would never forget.

I cannot forget that history; it’s as much a part of my blood as this virus, and just as potent.

Now here I am, dating again in my 50’s, trying to navigate in a foreign digital playing field that presents new challenges. I was not prepared for this new environment, surprised to be confronted with stigma toward HIV that still lingers, even in this new era. It may be people have forgotten. Or this next generation coming up just doesn’t know what we went through. I wonder, what happened to all that we learned? Where did all that  hard won understanding go?

When some guy shrinks from me because of my HIV status, yes I get angry, yes I am hurt.

 But it will pass.

I leave Starbucks after the last sip of coffee. I walk out into the bright autumn day, to breathe in the air, the air that feels cold and sharp,

the air that feels clean.

http://www.aumag.org/?s=clean