June 2015
I’m lying on a narrow
table, head and knees supported by foam pillows, weighed down by the hospital
gown made of that pure, heavy cotton that only seems to be used for hospital
linens. Every nook and corner of the room is filled with fluorescent light and white
noise, an all-pervading hum as if from a powerful ventilation system, and the
more immediate, slightly lower-pitched drone of the machine in front of me. The
table begins to slide forward. A series of red digits appears above my head.
“666,” I remember. Just beyond the numbers is a dull orange light, which speaks
as I am looking at it. A voice sounding very much like that of the radiologist
who had placed the pillow under my knees says, “Take a deep breath and hold
it.”
A young woman is lying
with her legs across my lap, trembling violently, squeezing my hand with a
steady pressure. She is in the aftermath of another debilitating panic attack.
“Take a slow, deep breath,” I remind her. “It doesn’t help! It’s just something
they tell you, and it’s a lie,” she insists. Like a midwife’s order for
bystanders to boil water and tear up sheets, the question of whether there is a
real, practical necessity in taking deep breaths to disarm a panic attack seems
to be debatable.
We take breathing for
granted. As a former asthmatic, I know this. At our best, we are completely
unaware that we are doing it. We are full of a feeling of well-being, free to
think our thoughts unimpeded by uncomfortable physical intrusions. When you
can’t breathe, or breathe well, it becomes all that you think about. When every
breath feels like it is being drawn through a straw, the thought of death
creeps in around the edges of the antique photo that is your existence, giving
everything a dark and doomed cast.
When we willfully hold
our breaths, the feeling of doom is absent, because we are in control. If I
fill my lungs up as much as possible and hold my breath in an attempt to stop
an attack of hiccups, for a moment the area around my heart and lungs feels
super-oxygenated. It seems like my vision becomes clearer, colors slightly
brighter. I become aware of the blood flow up and out of my chest and down
through my arms and fingers. When I know it’s time to take a breath or else,
it’s in my throat and ears that I feel it. Pressure, deafness, desperation. Out
goes the breath, in comes more oxygen, and surprise! I have held my diaphragm
perfectly still for long enough that it has forgotten to have the hiccups. It’s
the same principle at work as when we have an x-ray or a mammogram (although I
suspect that they make us hold our breaths during a mammogram so we won’t
scream and scare the patients in the waiting room.): holding your breath
renders you perfectly still. A perfectly still subject will provide a clear
image, in focus.
Imagine being a
photographic subject in the early 1800s, when photography was in its infancy.
You’ve taken a bath, put on all of the very finest clothing and accessories
that you own, labored over the tidiness and fashionability of your hair and/or
mustache. . Your corset may be tighter than usual, because you want to show
yourself in the most impressive possible light to future generations. You’ve
laid out a considerable sum of money to have an image made of yourself by which
history and your descendants will remember you....maybe the only such image of
you that will ever be made. The shutter stays open for several seconds,
anywhere up to a minute, and you must sit or stand completely still. You must
be sure to arrange your face in a natural way, severe or pleasant depending on
how you want to be remembered. You probably won’t show your teeth; nobody seems
to. As you sit or stand perfectly still, you may not be holding your breath,
but you will be trying not to blink. And you will be thinking about all of
these things for the seconds that the shutter is open.
When the pressure gets
to be too much, we need to take a breather. When we remove ourselves from the
source of our stress, we can breathe freely. Maybe this is why we love to take
vacations in locations that are full of wonderful smells. There’s the ocean,
with all of its clean scents tinged with a faint trace of fish and marsh mud:
salt water, and the ever-present wind laden with tiny droplets of briny
moisture that quickly become an essential part of your hair, skin, and clothes.
At night, there are the pine trees that release their sharp fragrance in the
wind that is forever blowing through their long, soft needles with a gentle
tossing sound, faintly whistling like a breath over the top of a beer bottle.
The smell of sun-warmed tar and gasoline hovers around the dock in the
afternoon, and makes you think of ropes and planks and sturdy shoes. Or maybe
you retreat to the woods on a mountain, where you will sit on a porch, stare at
the trees, and enjoy a parade of scents as they waft past your stressed-out
nostrils: hidden honeysuckle and glow-in-the-dark blackberry blossoms, the
almost exotic patchouli-like aroma of dark brown humus formed from decades of
slowly decaying leaves and bark, the peculiar and unmistakable ozone scent of
an imminent thunderstorm. And then there is the clean, woody, rocky, herby,
mineral smell of creek water. It smells like turtles and winking sunlight
filtered through green leaves.
“Now, breathe.” The
orange light speaks again, and the table slowly slides back out of the shallow
tube. Only a second or two has passed.
Two days later, I sit
with my doctor in front of his laptop as he shows me image after image of my
heart, liver, stomach, kidneys, uterus, vena cava and aorta, as they slowly
spin in time-stop animation, precisely arranged and coiled around the bright
white vertebra, cradled in the sharp- edged frame of the pelvis, perfectly
clear, delicately shaded and detailed.
1037
