My visit the following week with Geno was far less jovial. He was terrified.
His first hospitalization came on his thirtieth birthday, the last day of September. His hospital room door was papered over with biohazard warnings, statements of risk, protocols for visiting, and generally threatening verbiage that did more to discourage your visit than invite you in.
It was a time, despite slow advances, of great unknowns about the disease. Geno’s nagging cold and cough had been the precursor of an opportunistic form of pneumonia almost never found in an otherwise healthy young man. Fortunately, his doctors had found an antibiotic cocktail that worked on the mystery pneumonia. Now they were concerned about a series of brown lesions that had appeared on Geno’s back.
On any normal day at any pool party, Geno had been regarded as a hunk. Clad in tiny cutoff jeans and a tank top, Geno enjoyed showing off a muscled physique that he had earned through countless hours at the Workout Locker. This was in stark contrast to the gaunt, drawn young man I found in Isolation Room Four.
Geno was genuinely glad to see the face of a friend who didn’t keep him at arm’s length. I sat on the edge of his bed, and we made small talk about work and his return. When we ran out of the requisite hospital banter, Geno’s eyes welled up and he asked me if I would just hold his hand. “The nurses wear gloves and masks, and despite the fact they know I can’t give it to them, no one will touch me.” The tears flowed. “I feel so alone.” I held his hand.
By the second week of October, Geno had made, by any standard, what seemed to be a remarkable turnaround. With his lungs clear and his weight stabilized, he returned home where Curtis instituted a strict no-smoking policy and took charge of Geno’s meds regimen. I remember Curtis remarking that Geno had been sent home from St. Mark’s with twenty-three different prescriptions, each with its own set of dosing, food, and timing regulations. “I shoulda been a nurse,” Curtis joked.
“Yeah? Uniform and all?” Geno shot back, with a mischievous and loving look.
Back at the office, our president, Bruce Williams, with Geno’s permission, held an all-hands meeting about Geno’s illness and his impending return. To his credit, Bruce invited an old Princeton undergrad buddy, Rick DeBlazio, MD, who was now a teaching fellow at St. Mark’s and a leading AIDS researcher. After briefing the staff on the facts and fiction surrounding HIV and its transmission, Dr. DeBlazio fielded the question asked by our receptionist, Linda Merritt, that everyone was too scared to ask: “Can Geno give it to us? I mean, will we be safe?”
“Are you planning on having sex with him?” Dr. DeBlazio was trying to make an important point about the latest findings regarding transmission. Poor Linda turned crimson, and I thought for a moment she was going to cry. Taking a moment to recover, she collected herself and stammered out, “No,” with a light chuckle. Despite Dr. DeBlazio’s thorough presentation of the most recent research, there were a few who remained skeptical—and afraid of Geno’s return.
Fannie, however, remained hospitalized. “I’m the queen of chemo ‘round here and the nurses love, love, love me! Now take me for a spin.” Fannie’s need to entertain never waned. After spending all of August and September in isolation, her white count rose to acceptable levels and my visiting privileges returned. Her new favorite thing was the “Wheelchair Derby,” a competition she devised to cheer up some of the children in the pediatric oncology unit. Unable to have her own children after her primitive first rounds of radiation following her mastectomy five years earlier, Fannie’s motherly instincts were visited on Geno, me, and any child within hugging reach.
On Saturdays, partly to give Carlo a break and mostly to get some time alone with Fannie, I accompanied her to her morning radiation treatment. These treatments were much more focused than her first ones in years prior, but they required longer prep. While Carrie, the radiology tech, taped Fannie’s forehead to the treatment table, I held her hand and we told each other jokes. The goal was to tell the grossest, most vile joke you dared to tell in front of Carrie, who Fannie called the “Madam with the Marker.”
Carrie’s job was to carefully mark the areas around Fannie’s lone breast, and later her neck and hip, for pinpointed radiation. Carlo told me privately that Fannie’s oncologist wasn’t really certain that these treatments were anything but a last-ditch effort. Carlo said that Fannie was adamant that “doing something is better than doing nothing,” so the treatments commenced, four days on, two days off, always on Saturday.
On our fourth Saturday, Fannie outdid herself. Her pre-treatment story about the elderly gentleman on his honeymoon with his twenty-two-year-old bride reached new heights of filthy, and Carrie announced that she’d had enough, handed me her marker, and stormed out.
“You owe me fifty dollars, Drew,” Fannie cackled and rolled on her side laughing. When the laughter stopped, we found ourselves feeling a little bit ashamed for torturing poor Carrie with our juvenile humor.
Fannie sat up, and pulled the purple treatment smock over her shoulder. Her features softened, and she looked over and took my hand. “All of this,” she gestured to the equipment that filled the small treatment room. “Don’t tell Carlo, but this is so he’ll feel like we’re trying.” Fannie looked at me with eyes that said, Please just let me admit this and don’t try to cheer me up or change the subject. Let’s not talk. Just be with me and let’s just accept this frustrating, shitty thing.
So, with nothing more to say, and having driven off Carrie, I helped Fannie off the treatment table, tied her purple gown in the back, and offered her my arm for our usually defiant, post-treatment “gonna kick cancer’s ass” walk back to her room. “I think I’ll take a chariot back today,” she said motioning to a stray wheelchair in the hall. “You know, Drew, I’m tired. I’m really just tired.”
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