I’m thinking, “My wife is going to come home and find me dead, lying naked on a Venetian floor”. And word will get back to the states “Maestrejuan dead from too much milk. The one thing he did that was healthy; killed him.” Nothing is more extraordinary than leaving your body while on vacation. I started to laugh and knew I was getting better.
A couple days earlier I had this sensation in my neck. My neck seems to be my health barometer. I always feel things first in my neck. In times of stress my neck feels tense first, and when physically taxed I can feel blood surging through my neck. I noticed the neck thing decades before when I’d take LSD. The first indicator that it was “coming on” was that I could feel the walls of my throat like a peristaltic cylinder. My acid intake was high and my neck had that hollow feeling a lot of the time.
Twenty years ago I had this pain in the base of my mouth and my neck got solid on the side like a flexed muscle and there was an awful taste like poison. A friend who was a new doctor suggested it was Aids or cancer but I knew it was neither; I wasn’t the type. Not being a doctor, I concluded it was wisdom teeth coming in, and the blood or puss or something was causing the irritation and taste. It went away for a full ten years and then came back for a few hours, only to go dormant for another decade. A few days ago it returned with a vengeance. This time my neck had swelled and produced a little golf ball sized lump at the base of my jaw.
Deborah and I had taken an apartment in Venice and everything was un-familiar there, which is the point of foreign travel, I guess. But the one domestic thing I missed was a good old-fashioned glass of American milk. Ever since I was young I drank a lot of milk. In high school kids said I would turn into a cow if I didn’t slow down. Later, as I got deeper and deeper into alcoholism, I would imagine the milk lined my stomach wall and helped keep the booze from eating away my guts. I knew this vitamin-enriched nectar was my last connection to anything nutritious; if not my only hope of salvation. It was my symbol of health. I drew power from it like Sampson drew strength from his hair. Italy had shops where you could buy “drinking milk” but it was the high-test, high-fat thick milk and I was used to non-fat back home.
Now this goiter in my neck had grown to an unprecedented tennis ball size and had cut off my ability to swallow. Then it took my ability to breathe normally and I was semi-conscious for a miserable day. Then one day Deb went out with friends, with my blessings, and I stayed behind in the flat to rest and recuperate.
They had left while I slept and had conscientiously locked the door for, I guess, my safety. When I woke, I found I was locked in with no chance for escape. I thought about tying the sheets together and shinnying down the four floors to the narrow street below. I thought about a lot of things, and drew a hot bath.
I remembered that years ago I’d gone to get my wisdom teeth pulled and was surprised to find later that only two were gone, two others were still there and caused me some intermittent pain as they went through their growth spurts; but this was ridiculous. Lying in the bath and unable to swallow, breathing shallow through my nose and unable to go out for help, I couldn’t help but thinking this might be it.
In the bath, physically drained and unable to swallow for days, a mighty thirst had developed. If I put some water in my mouth it might just sort of trickle down, slide through some unfelt opening and at least minimally hydrate me. So I pulled my weak self from the bath and gingerly made my way around the hall and onto the linoleum kitchen floor for a glass of water.
As I neared the sink I felt my wet feet slide out from under and suddenly my forehead slammed into the sink. In a reflex jerk I snapped my head back smashing my cranium up into the kitchen cabinet above the faucet. This must’ve looked like some kind of slapstick comedy dance and may have knocked me out for a bit. But the fore and aft head banging definitely put me on the floor, bent and feeble, and I’m thinking, “my wife is going to come home and find me dead, lying naked on the kitchen floor”.
I started laughing at my sorry state and lay there, slowly gathering energy, slowly taking a painful swallow of spit. In no time I was on my feet and cheerily functioning in my normal healthy state. Apparently I had knocked my head hard enough to put my teeth in a better position to displace the poison or whatever was going on in my jaw. Whatever happened in the concussion, it seemed to have cured me.
Eventually everyone came home and all was fine. For the next week I drank a lot of milk, hoping it’s vitamins would rebuild my strength quickly. It was like nothing had ever happened, and then came a recurrence even more severe than before. I was ready for professional help, and we were flying home soon. I’d wait it out and see a doctor I was familiar with.
Arriving at the clinic I found the doctor I liked was gone so they scooted me off to some other guy. In this strange doctor’s office I chose the fewest words possible to explain my wisdom teeth poison theory and he listened earnestly. He was old and kept looking at me with suspicion, like I was faking this and he was on hidden camera, trying to catch him in some dubious act. He asked if I would mind going to an “ear, nose and throat” specialist and I nodded in the affirmative. See a guy who knows about throats? You bet. There the young Asian doctor seemed to have been briefed on my condition and recognized the problem right away. He reached in and squeezed my goiter with authority. “You have a blockage of the saliva gland. Probably a calcium deposit, like a kidney stone.” He gave it a steroid shot, another good squeeze and a prescription for lemonade. “Four eight ounce glasses a day, the acid will break down the calcium and it’ll be fine. Drink it forever.”
Although a possible cure, that sentence was worse than a jail sentence. Overnight I was to go from high alkaline intake to high acid intake. I assumed the lifetime milk overdose had caused the calcium build up and I knew I had to surrender my only link to any form of nutrition. Doctor Delilah had cut my hair and I felt limp knowing there was no more practical source for healthy intake left in my limited diet.
For two sorry years I went without as much as a sip of milk… then I had to go see the doctor for something else, maybe just a check-up, and I told him the story. He agreed with everything that had been diagnosed and prescribed, but disagreed with my conclusion about milk causing it. “Your body assimilates the calcium from milk a different way than it produces the calcium that caused the blockage, drink as much low-fat milk as you want.” Well okay! I knew I liked this doctor better that any other. So I’m back to thinking I’m healthy and therefore I am healthy.
But when I look back at the rag-doll head banging in Venice, I can’t help but think about all the things that had to fall into place for me to hit my head properly to clear the blockage (that I didn’t even know I had). On some level there was a diagnosis and simple remedy bestowed on me. With no conscious effort I had to get the floor wet and there had to be some level of awareness of the cabinetry layout so I’d bang my head properly. I mean when you get down to actual mortality, there’s a lot in play on all sorts of unseen levels.
Some people get glimpses of these powers through their faith, others through drugs, meditation or other means that seem to strip away the immediate limitations that are all around us; things like being confined to our bodies or to the gravity laden earth. Ancestral people used rituals and intoxicants to disorient their perception of the world around them. Modern people may perform their ceremonies in churches and get their hallucinogens on the street; both seem to seek a peek at some world other than this one.
You think about this stuff when you’re wet and naked and helpless in a foreign land. These are the moments you live for. When I was a kid I loved being in Europe, every few hours you had to change your money, speak a different language and order from a different selection of beverages. Everything you learned in one country flew out the train window when you arrived in the next country. This constant disorientation was the lure of international travel. In these homogenized days almost everyone speaks English, everyone uses the same boring Euro-dollar and in even the most remote villages everyone wears Dockers and Nikes and talks on cell phones.
So this physical malady was the perfect way to get the exhilaration of being in a foreign place. Nothing is more extraordinary than leaving your body while on vacation.