The Sickest of the Sick

Angela La

“Did you know that the lungs are considered the organs of grief?” the chiropractor asks me, slowly moving the cold diaphragm of his stethoscope across my back. He tells me to cough, and I do. I wonder what he hears. Is there something wrong with me?

My mother sits in the corner, hand on her chest and watching with a slight frown. She’s always frowning and touching her chest, like she can’t believe anything is ever happening.

“She just coughs and coughs,” she gripes to the chiropractor. “She’s sick.”

At another time and place, I’m in a restroom, squeezed into the smallest stall with my girlfriend. She’s sitting with her legs crossed on the toilet, and I’m up against the door trying to keep myself from sliding down. We’re both whacked; before this we smoked a blunt, skin-popped a couple Dilaudid ampules, and chased it with a double G&T. I need this, and I watch her work her keys in the little plastic jar, breaking up the little white rocks. Live heavy music thumps through the walls, and I’m growing impatient. I pick a lump from the jar with my fingers and crush it between my teeth. My girlfriend laughs, calls me a sicko. We rejoin the crowd, arms linked and clinging to each other, mesmerized by the light show and the crooning silhouette on stage. This is sick, man, and I’m swallowed up by the crowd, the heat, and the colors.

Somewhere else, some time later, I hear my mother and sister arguing in the hall. I’m slumped in a mechanical bed, sort of dressed in a too-big hospital gown, sort of wrapped in that scratchy not-wool kind of blanket. I stared straight ahead, feeling very tragic and suffocated by the sunlight that beat down through the window.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with her head,” my mom says. I can’t see it, but I can picture her shaking her head in disbelief, hand on her chest.

“She’s sick,” my sister pleads.

Sick is a magic word. “Sick jokes and sick cartoons, sick comics and sick singers, sick, sick, sick – till it almost made you sick,” wrote Albert Goldman. It can mean twisted or disturbed, like this Lenny Bruce joke: “Can Billy come out and play?” “You know he has no arms or legs.” “That’s ok, we just want to use him for home plate.” That’s sick, man. It can mean physically ill, like “I got sick all over the backseat of an Uber.” Or “That’s a sick kickflip:” gnarly, dope, awesome. In standard English, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, sick means “affected with disease or ill health,” as in I have a fever so I am sick. If you read from the New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, it means “excellent; wonderful. On the principle that BAD means good,” as in The Linda Ronstadt concert was sick. In my NA group, we’re not supposed to say “addict.” We come up with different ways to describe how “sick” we are, how far along the prognosis we are: I am a person with a substance use disorder. I misuse hazardous drugs and alcohol. I am in recovery. These are all to say I have a problem, an illness. Not I am the sickness.

“When confronting the power of addiction, the power of language is important to keep in mind,” said Colleen Walsh in “Revising the language of addiction.” The terms “abuse” and “abuser” have a lot of negative connotations to it; Sarah Wakeman wrote in an article for the American Society of Addiction Medication that the words imply “a willful misconduct and have been shown to increase stigma and reduce the quality of care.” Then, there’s the difference between dependency and addiction. Someone can become dependent on opioids used to treat chronic pain, meaning if they stop taking it, they will experience withdrawal. Addiction, according to the American Psychiatric Association, is a medical disorder that involves compulsive substance use despite harmful consequences. The Gateway Foundation says, “The pervasiveness of addiction replacement shows that addiction is a disease, not a bad habit.”

I line it all up on the table:

-Antibiotics

-Ketamine nasal spray

-The prescription I take to sleep

-Cough syrup with codeine

-The prescription I no longer need to take, the one I took in addition to my regular Prozac and Seroquel and the propranolol that combats the side effects of the Prozac and Seroquel

-Advil (sugar coated)

-A brown bottle of capsules filled with Chinese herbs, something to combat phlegm and wheezing

-Subscription vitamins

-Homemade smokable herb blend to help with smoking cessation

-The prescription I’m supposed to take for smoking cessation

According to my doctor, I have a lot of drive and ambition that he told me I should not confuse with well-being. He wrote in my chart that I was Classic Depressive, Substance Abuser, Articulate. He asked me how I felt, being in the psych ward, and I said I felt pretty desperate. It was the worst thing I could ever imagine, and at the same time, I couldn’t imagine it. My brain was in two pieces and I couldn’t bridge the gap. “Sick was as good a way as any to describe it,” wrote Suzanne Scanlon.

It’s a weird feeling to be a member of the unexclusive club of people who have been damaged by addiction, perpetually in recovery. The period when a person is recovering from sickness is called a convalescence. The time in this space is slow moving, we often say at the meetings to “take it one day at a time.” I wish sick only meant the thing you’re first taught it means, that it involves sneezing and coughing and chills. We use it to mean being angry all the time, not getting enough sleep, sleeping too much, hurting people and breaking promises. It’s desperate and maddening, and Supervert wrote it best: “I am taunting my future self, making my own life more painful and difficult. I do it willingly, proud of the work I do in terrorizing myself, all the while fearing the point at which it will catch up to me.” Would a healthy person do that to themself?