LITMIR.BIZ

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Especially after what just happened in France, you know.”

      I knew. But I took this as him taking a liking to me, which felt at least safer than where my mind originally went, and so I was grateful when he dropped me off in front of my building as a reward. They weren’t supposed to do that, he told me. Then he rambled on a bit about how he had once towed an Iranian restaurant owner—“Iran or Iraq, one of those”—who’d then fed him for free. “Sometimes you guys are good” was his moral, apparently.

      I nodded numbly, thanked him. By the time I got into my apartment, I had many worried calls on my cell phone.

      How did everyone know this happened? I texted back my friend Alex.

      He reminded me that I had made a Facebook post about it, when I was waiting for the ambulance—just as I’d apparently called back Mason, who said I sounded incomprehensible. I remembered neither.

      Alex kept asking if I felt okay, and I did. I told him I survived, and I instead lingered on the tow truck driver and the season of xenophobia and all its perils, what was most on my mind.

      Please check in with me, Alex kept writing.

      K, I kept typing back. K.

      I began to get sleepy.

      That night I fell into the deepest, thickest sleep of maybe my entire life, but definitely since my Lyme had begun to relapse that fall. In Lyme relapse, I never get proper sleep; it always feels like that light buzzy rest of past drunken nights. But this night was different. I slept twelve hours. When I finally woke up I was on my couch, and everyone was calling and texting at once, wondering why I wasn’t at the hospital.

      Why would I do that? I’m fine. I slept well.

      But people were reminding me that I wasn’t supposed to have fallen asleep. That people are supposed to wake you up every few hours after a potential head injury, in case of a concussion.

       But so what, I’m fine now. Who says I have a concussion?

      But no one thought I was fine.

      Okay I’m not fine—I’ve been having a Lyme relapse.

      Soon my old editor was ringing my doorbell and at my side, taking me to the hospital.

      Upon seeing that dear friend, a deep panic took over me. I had a feeling I didn’t want to get into what came next; it was something I knew well and had fought to get away from. “I don’t want to do this again,” I cried into his shoulder in the cab. “Not another hospital. You know how many hospitals I’ve had in my past. Not this again, please.”

      My editor knew my story and reminded me this was different, that I had to go, that it wouldn’t be like those other times.

      At the hospital on the Upper East Side, I fell back to my old element, almost finding the waiting comforting, all the systems ones I knew well. I was explaining to my editor how it would all go, when he interrupted me. “But we’re not here for the Lyme, we’re here for your accident. Remember?”

      It was sometimes hard for me to comprehend there could be room for anything more.

      I had been to the hospital so many times for my Lyme disease, not just explaining but overexplaining, as if I had something to hide. Lyme is a disease that many in the medical profession, unless they specialize in it, find too controversial, too full of unknowns, to fully buy it as legitimate. It’s thought of as the disease of hypochondriacs and alarmists and rich people who have the money and time to go chasing obscure diagnoses. For years I’d become used to dealing with all sorts of skeptics whether in person or online, but it never stopped being frustrating. I’d always catch myself getting preemptively ready to argue, feeling a defensive heatedness from years of impossible experiences with so-called medical professionals. It was always a risk, me getting into it, and yet I had no choice. I had the script down as if it was a script and not my reality. My case is a CDC-level Lyme case, I’d learned to say, which was true, hoping doctors would understand I was one of the small percent of Lyme sufferers who actually had the luxury of CDC recognition, what the rest hope for. I’m not like those other ones . . . I’d try to knowingly add, to speak their suspicious dismissive language, to let them know I was real.

      After hours of waiting, my editor had to leave to catch the last train upstate. When the young internist finally admitted me, he was surprised by my cane, but I didn’t want to get into a conversation about Lyme right away, especially without an advocate at my side. The internist examined me and wanted to give me x-rays or a CT scan, but I insisted on an MRI.

      “I’ve had too much radiation in my life,” I said. My Lyme doctor always reminded me to say this; he did not like me going through airport full-body scanning machines, either, to this day only getting pat-downs. I had just had a CT scan in November and I remembered even then feeling like I shouldn’t be going through with it.

      The internist asked, “Why?”

      Here it went: the great downhill. “Lyme.”

      And there it came: his half smile.

      And here it followed: my rage.

      He ended up prescribing me some Tylenol and said it might be a concussion but that they could not do an MRI and that I was likely fine, and to follow up with my Lyme doctor.

      I watched him walk away, and as I put on my shoes and coat, I saw him and a nurse laughing.

      As I walked out of the ICU, I felt that old state of mind consuming me, taking me back to my time in so many other hospitals, and the anger at being misunderstood boiled up in me again, that feeling of not being taken seriously by those who had your life in their hands. All the many times, the people who shook their heads at Lyme, who looked at me with pity for my circumstances, who could barely stifle their rolled eyes. I’d tried to avoid this hostile world of hospital rooms and doctors’ offices for years, but it haunted me. Here I was again, with something unrelated to Lyme and only two choices—to come clean or to hide, but I knew every decision would have something to do with my diagnosis. It amazed me that even after all these years, with all the time that had passed, as I managed to stay out of the medical system for the most part, and my fluency in their language still being proficient, that I could still be in this position—helpless, crazy-seeming, confusing, inconvenient, out of their norm, a problem. And not one worth the time to be solved.

      The internist and nurse were still smirking as I walked by. I couldn’t keep quiet. Long ago I had promised myself to keep my self-esteem intact in a medical system that had too often threatened to destroy it. “I hope you know I can see you laughing there,” I called into the room.

      “No, come on” was the call I got back.

      “How can you prove that anyway” was another call I got back.

      “I can file a complaint,” I shouted, and just like that I was escorted by a nurse to a desk where supposedly people filed complaints.

      For hours I waited, though I could hear the voices of family and friends telling me I needed to rest. Instead I watched every interaction with the people in the ER waiting area, which was remarkably vacant. Eventually they told me whoever I was supposed to talk to was not there till the next day, and so I left.

      Like I was never there. The old feeling: like a ghost I walked out into a still Manhattan, taking a cab home with little idea of what had happened those hours.

      That Monday my friend Bobby came with me to my last day of Sarah Lawrence classes—me showing up to class was already against the wishes of my department chair, but I felt with a friend’s assistance I could get through that final bit of semester. I was in denial about what indeed turned out to be a fairly severe concussion; all I wanted was to hold on to some sort of normalcy.

      I’m fine, I kept saying. I have Lyme. I’ve had Lyme.

      But what I meant was I did not have room for this new thing that happened to me, this thing that was making the old thing worse.

      I had been hit

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