Sickness
by Sarah Frankfurth

The early morning light was still pale and soft, the heat subdued, as we waited by the docks for the boat to Crete.  Aaron and I had been shuffling from island to island in Greece for a few weeks, one step ahead of sickness, one step away from Turkey.  But finally our luck seemed to have run out as Aaron turned to me, pale and weak, and said, I can't do it, let's go back.  The bus carried us back up the cliffs as we sat silently, afraid of this mysterious sickness that had finally caught him after all these months. Aaron had HIV, so every illness he contracted brought with it the terrible fear that this might be the end.  He could be quite a hypochondriac, but I'd seen him through enough real and imaginary illnesses to know the difference.  This was definitely real. 

For the next few days he struggled to get better, taking antibiotics that he had brought with him from the states, but they weren't helping.  He doubled his dose and tried to pretend that this illness would pass, but soon he was limping, having trouble breathing and red itchy welts were spreading across his skin.  The doctor at the clinic had no idea what was wrong with him, and kept injecting him with cortisone which suppresses the immune system.  Aaron was barely keeping it together.  The cortisone wasn't helping, he was getting sicker, the rash was spreading, and the doctor was gambling with his immune system.

Athens seemed like our only hope, so we went to the island's tiny airport where we huddled away from the fluorescent lights in the corner of a crowded room and waited for the next flight.  When the plane finally landed, the itching was so intense that Aaron was losing his mind.  He was trying to concentrate, but the fear and the confusion and the pain he was in were eating away at his control.  We stepped off the plane and into an inky blackness cut apart by the flickering lights of an ambulance.  It twisted and turned us through the ancient streets of Athens until we arrived at the doors of a decrepit hospital.

We wandered inside, past throngs of people bleeding, crying, injured, suffering, old, young, ill, frightened - all waiting for someone to help them.  Finally, we came upon a large room with dozens of beds filled with suffering patients on one side and on the other side a few folding tables with a long line in front of them.   The doctors were seated at the tables, listening to the pleas of the people in line and writing notes on little cards.  When my turn came and someone was located who spoke English, they told me that the hospital would only admit Aaron to a special ward for people with HIV, but since he didn't have any medical records with him proving he was positive, they couldn't admit him or treat him.  The only thing they could do was test him for HIV and wait for the results.

They drew his blood, gave the glass vials to me, said something in Greek, and pointed down a long dark hallway.  I wandered up and down flights of stairs, through dimly lit corridors, trying to decipher the signs on the walls, and forced myself to hold back my tears.  I was afraid I'd never find the lab, afraid I'd trip and shatter the vials in my hands, afraid I'd come back and Aaron would be dead.  When I finally returned, Aaron was on a stretcher in the hallway where we would have to wait the long, long hours until morning when they could admit him.

I spent the night next to his stretcher, sitting on hard orange plastic chairs that lined the dimly lit hallway.  I stared so hard at him that I felt my body dissolve until there were just two eyes floating in the muggy air, burning a path through the stench of disinfectant and sickness willing him with all my might to live.  Please, just live.  I listened to his moans as he drifted in and out of consciousness, too scared to take my eyes off of him, afraid that if I even blinked he might stop breathing and I would lose him. I scratched the welts on his hands and arms and whispered quietly that it would be ok, unsure that he could hear me, but I kept repeating it to stop myself from freaking out.  I knew that I should think about what would happen if he died, but my mind wouldn't let me, and I found that I was too terrified now to even cry.

He was worse in the morning, barely able to breathe and so weak that he could only nod in response to my questions.  I ran to find a doctor, angry and scared that they were going to let my friend die while they waited for the lab results of something that we already knew.  After a heated pantomime argument, since I didn't speak Greek and the doctor didn't speak English, I managed to get him to come and give Aaron a shot of something, which helped him breathe for about half an hour.  When the results from his lab test finally came back, they shipped us off to another hospital across town where they treated patients with HIV.

When we climbed out of the ambulance into the simmering heat, Aaron looked up and saw the soft brown curves of the hills behind the city take on the shape of a woman's body.  He heard her voice cutting through the sounds around him, telling him to give up, it was his time to go.  Fuck you, he thought.  Don't listen, I begged when he told me what he was hearing.  Don't listen.

I relaxed a little when we went inside the new hospital because it was cleaner and nicer than the first one had been, and the doctors were actually treating him.  But after the initial wave of relief swept over me and the first round of IV's and mysterious injections didn't do anything to relieve Aaron's agony, I felt terrified again.  I wanted so badly to believe that since it was daylight and the hallways were clean, they could save my friend.

I don't want to die here, he said.  I won't let you, I won't let you, you won't die here, they're going to help you, I won't let you, I won't let you, I chanted as I scratched his back, hands, arms.  Don't touch him it might be contagious, they said.  Don't touch me you don't want this, he said.  It doesn't matter now does it'  If it's contagious then I have it, I replied as I scratched his head, neck, legs, face.

The raised welts of his rash slid around his body like a snake, wrapping itself around his head, squeezing his arms and legs until his hands and feet swelled up like sausages.  The various antidotes given to him didn't seem to be helping, but as the days passed I began to believe that he wouldn't die.  There was a different doctor every morning with a different treatment and none of them spoke much English, so they didn't bother explaining anything to us.   The nurses avoided us as much as possible because of their fear and ignorance of HIV, nervously coming into the room with surgical masks and rubber gloves to drop off a pill or a tray of food, leaving us alone to try and piece together what was happening.

We eventually discovered that the doctors had decided that Aaron had a severe allergic reaction to the antibiotics he had taken.  They began to give him antihistamines and cortisone to combat it, but there was really nothing that we could do except wait.  The long hot days passed slowly as we played cards and read books and I continued to reassure him that he wouldn't die.  His mind was fraying from the constant itching and I tried to distract him with stories of the places that we'd been together as I continued to scratch his patchy skin.  I interrupted his half spoken fears with my stubborn promise that he'd be fine, and wandered alone through the halls and floors of the hospital to cry.

At night, I'd stand in the window and watch the traffic on the streets below drying up like a river in the summer heat.  Aaron would close his eyes in the darkness and listen to the music of the hospital.  Do you hear it, he asked.  Hear what, I said.  That music, he mumbled, listen.  I can hear the bass, he said, it's in the air vents.  And there's something else another sound, higher pitched on top of it and that, that beep.beep.beep.  It's just machines, I said, it's an elevator, a respirator, an incinerator.  No he said, it's music.  I'd curl up on the chairs next to his bed and let the sounds of the hospital breathing lull me to sleep.

For ten days we listened to the music and talked and dreamt strange dreams and waited.  As soon as he was well enough to fly, we left the hospital and spent one last day together in the languid streets of Athens.  It felt strange to wander in the brilliant sunshine with him.  Like it had all been a terrible nightmare and now we were awake, but shaken.

I sat on the deck of the boat that would bounce me back through the islands and eventually on to Turkey and scanned the sky for the plane that was taking him back to Prague.  The miles of air and water and land between us grew, but behind my eyes I saw myself sitting beside him until he was delivered to safety.