Rochester Stories 2. The American Hotel

A couple of weeks later she pulled up outside his house. It was 9AM late summer and the sun shone and its warmth infused the day. The Rochester Urologist ordered another ultrasound. And the catheter was due for its monthly replacement and check-up. Like a car service. He wanted to look inside too for signs of cancer. And this meant injection of a radioactive tracer isotope and a PET scan. I wasn’t too sure about that.

The kidney condition was  improving but the doctor wanted more images, graphs and numbers to trace the path forward. This is high-end search and destroy western medicine: Find the culprit, cut it out, poison it with chemo or radiate the bastard. Maybe all three. Western medicine has diagnostic tools, technicians  and machines. Chinese medicine has rhythm, timbre and texture, the pulsing throb of the pulsing body under three  fingers on your wrist  reporting the inside story.

It was a quarter century ago in this small cubicle deep in China Town, New York. Dr Wong has three slender fingers on my wrist and I feel him press and release, press and release as he deciphers the message. For thousands of years Chinese have done this, the pulse of life beating through centuries, beating, fluttering, throbbing, weeping, the interior music of the body unraveling like a music roll from a pianola under his fingertips.

Dr Wong lifts his hand and begins scribbling Chinese characters on a yellow pad. It’s the recipe, the herb selection and quantities that will be the bitter tea concoction. This is how healing began - from Nature around us - dried herbs picked and dehydrated stored in a hundred glass jars on a shelf. Weighed and measured with a chopstick, string and  brass dish.

And now, flashing forward twenty five years: They arrive for the procedure with a few minutes to spare. Everything is familiar, as if the movie is rewinding. Past the sliding self-opening glass doors, spacious rooms with high ceilings and a few other patients waiting. You hear your name and a nurse in medical scrubs that look like combat fatigues standing in the doorway  invites you down the rabbit hole. 

Another wide corridor sweeping past bright yellow black radiation warning signs and machines and wheel chairs and the mechanicals of modern medicine. It’s like being in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and suddenly you seem smaller and everything around you oversized and vivid. The nurse leads the way and you follow down the corridors  until you enter a large darkened room humming with machines and blinking lights and at any moment Caption Kirk or Picard and
Spock may appear. Come an hour early the instructions said. We need to inject you with radiation. 

"What if they find something", she said. I didn’t have to think. "I’ll do nothing". 

"Do you want to know?" 

"Not particularly". I say. 

"Well if they do find something at least you’ll have an evidence path for decent pain meds in Hospice." 

Fuck it, I said and looking into my guardian angel’s pure blue eyes that were like the sky said yes. 

I was already lucky to be in my eighth decade and surely there was not too much further to go. The headlight coming at me down the tunnel is getting closer and closer. And you know when you look - it hardly seems to be moving - then suddenly BOOM!

We were ushered into another room. This one with a medical lazy boy chair ready and waiting. Now a male technician in a white coat is holding a gray box big as a loaf of bread. It’s the radioactive isotope. Don’t worry he says. He puts it down carefully on the other side of the room.  It’s safe, he exclaims and without looking at me says, I’m going to inject the isotope now and he unlocks the box, takes a syringe and loads it. There’s tubes running out of my vein and he says you might feel some burning - but don’t worry - the isotope is acidic. It’s too late now, I feel a tingle as the isotope begins its journey.

The technician stands back from me now and indicates my Guardian Angel should leave the room. As she does he reaches out his arms, puts his hands up and stops her in front of him. This is how far you stand back from him now he orders. The distance between seats in the car is ok but sit opposite if you go out to eat and don’t sleep together tonight.  And keep away from small animals like cats for twenty-four hours. And then he asks if I want a warm blanket.

He adjusts the lazy boy and lays the blanket over my legs, reclines the chair a little and places a pillow under my head. Back in an hour he says cheerily and closes the door behind him. 

Beep, beep, beep, 

tick, tick  tick, 

the isotope continues its journey through my anatomy. 

I look at the large wall clock above the door. 

In an hour on the dot there’s a quiet knock on the door and a nurse invites me to follow. And now radiated walking down another corridor deeper and deeper until she opens a door into this large room. There’s a gurney covered in a white sheet and a pillow and a portal-like hole in the PET machine and its bigger than a Volkswagen and it’s humming like Stanley Kubrick's Hal in the center of the room.  Now I lay back on the gurney and Glen Campbell is playing somewhere and I’m ready for the oven. The gurney eases me through the portal and the walls close in and I breathe. Remain still it says. Put your hands over your head and lay still.

The next day he lay in bed watching the early morning light playing on the leaves outside the window. He smelt the coffee and went downstairs. She sat curled in the dim morning light with just slivers of sun cutting into the room across the hardwood floor. She held her coffee in both hands. I’ve been thinking she said - let’s have lunch at the American Hotel.

As we drive south she asks what kind of music and I’m neutral and she puts on Allison Krause and Lucinda Williams. 

It’s a David Hockney postcard flat against the blue sky- surrealistic  and unstuck in time. American Hotel emblazoned on the wall in large black letters. We cross the hot wide street and step up to the heavy wooden door. Established 1861 it says in brass numbers.

It was cool and dark inside, varnished wood paneling and carved wood columns that smelt of the past. A man with a crooked walking stick was standing in the shadows. The floorboards creaked a little and somehow that made you feel comfortable. A man in shorts and thongs sat at one end of the bar.

Later I’m scribbling possessed in my note book. It’s almost a romance.  I wonder about the American Hotel. The hostess in black who appeared like a ghost, the phantom past in the patina on the walls, how we headed for the table in the light, overlooking the wide crossroads with the gothic church spire on one corner, the Free Masons temple on the other and motorcycles thudding past. 

We wait for soup. A brown and white dog tip-toes clicking across the black and white marble floor and licks my hand. There’s a phantom feeling about it. It’s been here  since 1790 - twice burned to the ground then built with stone and bricks and mortar in the 1860’s as we see it today - post card flat against the Hockney blue sky on a hot dry day in late summer lingering like a Dylan song. 

Two days later I learn the PET scan is clear.