Chapter 33
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
THE TRUTH
“ O h, hey there, mister.”
I blink blearily as my eyes are assaulted by harsh fluorescent lights. I go to cover my eyes with my hand and that’s when I become aware of three things: one, I feel groggy as all hell, like I pulled an all nighter at the club and the sun and my hangover are stopping me from sleeping any more. Two, my mouth feels drier than the desert, my tongue feeling thick and ungainly in my mouth. And third, my hand is attached to a wire that almost yanks and tears out the back of it.
“Careful, you dumbass. You almost pulled your IV,” the voice becomes clearer as my senses start to, well, make sense, and the familiar sight of Cal comes into view above me, coming into focus wearing a smile that seems forced, masking his concern. Badly.
“What happened?” I ask, as he gently helps me up into a seated position, moving the pillows behind me to prop me up.
“I dunno, man. I was half hoping you could tell me. One minute we’re at the Excelsior party, yelling at your boss and surrounded by your harem of wannabe suitors, the next you’ve face planted the floor,” Cal’s look of worry gives way to a lopsided grin as my hand (the free one) shoots to my face and I let in a sharp intake of breath through my teeth as my fingers brush my nose, “Yup, you’re gonna have a couple of shiners, slugger. You’re lucky you didn’t break the nose. You never hear of putting your hands out when you fall?”
“I don’t think that was an option…all I remember is the room spinning, a buzzing in my head and then it was like someone flicked my switch,” I manage to say, working my mouth around my uncooperative tongue. Cal swings to a bedside table and fills a paper cup with water from a jug and hands it to me. “Thank you,” I say, as I down the whole thing. “Where are we?”
“Hospital, duh. I called your mom and dad, and they called the hospital. Next thing I know, you’re upgraded to a private room and well, here we are.” He shrugs and then settles into the chair next to the bed I’m in, taking my hand.
“Oh my god, Mom and Dad know?”
“Yeah, but they’re not here yet. They’re taking the next flight into town, they’d been away on a meeting or something,” Of course they had, they’ve been out of town for the whole month, helping facilitate a nationwide book tour, but also taking the time for some much needed couple time, their work so often taking them in different directions. “So I’m afraid it’s just me. Always wanted to see what riding in an ambulance was like, should have known a drama queen like you would get me that experience some day.” Cal grins at me, giving me a gentle nudge.
I turn my head to look at him, feeling a burning starting to fill my eyes. “You came with me?”
He turns his head, thinking I don’t notice, but I see it, the blushing, as he lets his hair fall to try and cover it up. “Of course, Jesse. I wasn’t going to let you go through whatever this is alone, I?—”
We’re interrupted as the door opens and a nurse comes in. The guy looks honestly about the same age as me and Cal, and for a second a wild and random jealousy rushes through me. Ah, another guy who’s got his life in order more than me , like I know anything about this guy. What is it about seeing folks my age in jobs of authority? “Don’t mind me, just checking on sleeping beauty here on my rounds. You need me to get you anything, honey?” He says, a slight Latin accent mixed in with his grade A sassy queen voice.
“I…think I’m okay?” I say, feeling embarrassed.
“You think?”
“Well, I don’t really know what happened, and I’m kinda worried…”
“Well, don’t freak yet, sis. You’re in the right place. I’ll check your chart and get the doctor to come and see you right away, okay? Like I said, you lovebirds carry on, just pretend I’m not here.”
“Oh, we’re no—” Cal suddenly gives me a tight squeeze of my hand, staring at me with wide eyes. I give the nurse a smile, and satisfied, he gets on with what he has to do. I lean in to Cal.
“I had to tell ‘em I’m your boyfriend so they’d let me stay,” he whispers.
“You didn’t have to stay, Cal.” I say, kind of self-conscious about ruining his night and keeping him up. Hell, what even is the time?
He fixes me with those big blue eyes framed by those defined, black lashes. “Of course I did. I didn’t want you to go through this alone, Jesse. Never.”
I smile, and then the burning in my eyes takes over and I can’t stop the flow anymore. The tears well up and start pouring out and I can’t help but let out a huge sob. “Oh my god, I’m such a mess. I messed up big time, and now you, everyone, they’re going to hate me and I just…I just…”
“Hey, hey, Jesse, calm down. What are you talking about?” Cal stands up, taking my shoulders in his arms in an awkward sidelong hug. The nurse is doing his best to ignore the situation in here, but I see him glancing at us once or twice.
I sniff and run the heel of my palm over my nose until it suddenly reminds me about the fall onto my face with a searing jolt of pain. “Ow. Um, where’s my phone?” Cal opens the drawer in the bedside table and pulls it out in a baggy with the other contents of my pockets. I pull it out, unlock the screen, scroll to the text and hand it to him. He looks at me with a mix of curiosity and confusion, before looking to the phone. The nurse heads towards the door.
“‘This is the Village Sexual Health Clinic. We’d like you to come in to discuss the results of your recent HIV test. Please call…’” My head is hangs low as Cal reads the text out loud, but out of the corner of my eye I see the nurse, halfway out the door, spin on his heel and head back into the room. “I don’t get it, Jesse, you had an STI test? So what?”
“Don’t you get it? They want to talk about the results, they didn’t just say I was negative, they want me to come back in. So there’s something to discuss, something they can’t tell me by text, or a call, I need to be sat down. And you know that can only mean bad news, which means…and I know it makes me a bad person, I know I am the scummiest guy to have ever scummed, but I saw how it went for Ricky, and I don’t know if I could do that alone, and I just thought I need to…before I…I needed to find someone before it was too late. Before they found out I had HIV and no one would ever want me…” it all comes out in a slurred mess, between sniffs, snorts and deep, chest-heaving sobs. The knot I’ve been holding in the bottom of my heart for weeks thrown up into the room, laid bare, letting my best friend in the whole world know what a messed up piece of shit I really have been since I found out.
And for the absolute life of me, I cannot believe it, but he puts the phone down, looks me in the eyes and then kisses me on the forehead before pulling me into a hug.
“It doesn’t matter, babe. All the messed up shit, I get it, you’re going through a lot. But you are not going through it alone. I’ll go with you, and we’ll go through it together. HIV is not the end of your life, you know that.”
“Uhhhh,” our moment is broken suddenly when we remember the other person in the room. “You don’t have HIV, honey.”
Sniffling, I pull back from Cal and look at the nurse. “What?”
He heads back to the chart, and the nurse, Carlos (as I finally catch his name tag), picks it up rifling through the pages before loudly smacking his fingers against it. “Yup, honey. We did bloods when you came in. Did a whole battery of tests. No sign of HIV, chico. Soooo what’s this about a text?”
Cal hands me the phone, I unlock it and hand it to Carlos. “Mmhmm. Okay. I guess I can see why you jumped to conclusions. But really, hun, this is a standard text that gets sent out, it doesn’t mean anything either way to the test results.”
He walks over to stand at the bedside next to me, handing me back the phone. A knowing, tight smile rests on his lips as he explains. “Okay, let me guess: you went and got tested after maybe having a bit of a slip up? Maybe got some PEP while you were there?”
I nod silently.
“Yup. So, when someone has asked for PEP, regardless of what the results are, this text gets sent to do a brief follow up to discuss safe sexual practices, make sure you’re fully informed about your options, and help you make better choices for yourself. It’s not only sent to anyone who gets a positive, just anyone either new to the clinic or who may need information. They really were just wanting to make sure you were okay and knew what you were doing, honey. That’s all.”
A wave of relief mixed with a sense of absolute mortifying embarrassment rushes through me, almost leaving me light headed. A snort involuntarily bursts out of me, prompting Cal to laugh too. We laugh like idiots for a full minute, before embarrassment takes me over in full. How could I have gone to such a wildly overblown conclusion? I’m smarter than that, hell, I know that living with HIV isn’t even the end of the world, how could I let this completely irrational fear just utterly take me over for over a month?
I shake my head, angry at myself, and Cal stops laughing too, grabbing my hand again and squeezing it.
“I’m so stupid,” I mutter.
“Jesse…” Cal purrs my name at me, trying to soothe my self-hatred at my stupidity.
“You’re not stupid. You’re human. And you made some stupid choices by the sounds of it, sure, but that doesn’t make you stupid. Your brain just went a bit haywire and ran away with you.” Carlos smiles at me, a look in his eyes that speaks volumes, like this isn’t even the worst he’s ever heard of.
But then, if this isn’t that , then…
“If I don’t have HIV…then why did I collapse?” I ask Carlos, eyebrows knitting together.
His smile remains, but he nods curtly and then backs away towards the door again. “Let me just go get the doctor, Jesse. They can explain everything.”
“A Panic Attack?”
I’ve managed to get myself dressed after Carlos returned and removed my IV. Same clothes as I wore to the party, and I’m patently aware that it smells of booze from the night before. Oh god, what if they think I’m an alcoholic? The doctor came in shortly after, a woman in her, I’d guess, forties or fifties who looks mildly frazzled by what I’m sure is yet another busy day, but she covers it up well.
She asked how I was feeling, and if I was ready for her to go through what happened, if I wanted Cal to stay. I wanted him to, I wasn’t sure what she’d found and was about to tell me, but I still asked.
“Of course I’ll stay, Jesse,” Cal said, squeezing my hand again to keep me in the moment.
He moved the other chair in the room over to the one by the side of the bed, and we sat down as the Doctor, Fiona Hader, dropped the bombshell that what made my heart tense up like it was filled with ice and concrete and sent me out cold was…a panic attack.
“Yup. Along with some dehydration and signs of exhaustion, we found your stress hormones to be pretty high, but that was about it. When you look at that alongside the symptoms your friend described, it seems likely what you suffered was a pretty severe panic attack,” she looks up from the clipboard in her hand, looking straight at me with a gentle smile as she takes off her glasses. “Jesse, can you tell me what you were feeling in the moment before you passed out?”
“Like, what was I thinking that got me so stressed out?” I ask, nervously.
“We’ll definitely be getting to that, don’t worry. But no, tell me what you were feeling physically. Can you remember?”
I tilt my head back, going back through the night before. I feel my chest tighten a bit, and it brings it all back.
“Well, I guess my heart felt like it was racing, but my chest felt, like, tight? But also weirdly hollow? Like my heart and lungs were just giving out, and I couldn’t remember to breathe anymore. I remember thinking I felt really hot, and then the room started to spin and well…well, then I woke up here.”
Dr Hader makes a knowing nod as she pulls her lips in and closes her eyes. Eyes snapping back open, she smiles and walks over to the foot of the bed, resting on it.
“Yup. That’s all text book signs. Your body went into fight or flight mode, Jesse. Combined with the dehydration, and I’m going to guess that maybe you’ve been very busy lately? Maybe even running yourself ragged? Your body just couldn’t handle it in the moment and you just, well, kind of shut down for a little bit.
“It’s nothing to worry about, though. Honestly, panic attacks are pretty common, though them getting this bad and leading to fully passing out suggests they’re getting out of hand. Have you really never had one before?”
I think back over the last few weeks, and think about all the times I felt a little winded, or like my head was swimming. Then I look back further, the time leading up to graduation when I wondered if I’d ever make anything of myself and almost threw up. The night I started crying because I thought I was letting my parents down because I got a lower grade than I wanted on that one essay. Making that first comic and worrying that the colorist I’d only ever spoken to online was going to just ghost me halfway through, or that no one would ever read it, and I didn’t get out of my bed all day because I thought, ‘ what’s the point ?’.
“No. I mean, I’ve never passed out. But I guess…I guess I’ve felt kinda stressed and frightened before…”
She tilts her head at me. “Obviously feeling stressed and frightened are normal reactions, I’m not suggesting you should never feel those. Those feelings can help us survive, and let us know when things aren’t safe for us. But sometimes, especially in the modern world, we feel those feelings when we’re actually perfectly safe. Would you say that’s happened to you before?”
“…Yes.” I admit, feeling ashamed.
“Does it happen a lot?”
“…Yes.” I go to say, but it comes out as a sob, and I realize I’m starting to cry. Cal comforts me, rubbing a hand on my back and muttering words of reassurance, but why? Can’t he see what an idiot I am? How broken I am? How something so small and silly can literally wreck me?
Then I’m surprised to find Dr Hader resting on the balls of her feet in front of me, pulling my attention back to her face.
“Hey, now. No need for that. But this is an example of what I’m talking about. Jesse, can you tell me why this news is making you react this way?”
I flash a glance to Cal, and he just nods, a tight smile on his face, trying to mask his concern and failing. But he’s trying, and that means so much to me. “What you’re telling me, it makes me…it means…I mean, I’m broken. You’re saying I can’t cope with the world, and everything, the most minor thing, is too much for me and I’m just…I’m just going to fail, so hard.” I cry out, a mix of shame and incredulity.
Again, Dr Hader nods, but she meets my eyes again and flashes me one of those weirdly serene smiles. “No, no, Jesse. That’s not what I’m saying, and it’s not the case either, is it? I mean, you work in some kind of publishing, right? I couldn’t even imagine doing what you must do to get all those books ready, to work with all those…writers, and printers and PR and press and whatnot. But you do it, don’t you?”
I wipe tears from my eyes, tilting my head at the slight inaccuracies in her assumptions, the same kind everyone makes. “Well, not quite. But sort of. And I guess so…”
“Because, thinking about it logically, you know that even though what I’m telling you might be a new challenge, you also know you’ve faced up to challenges and obstacles before and survived, right?”
“Well, yeah…”
“Good,” she stands, and moves back to the foot of the bed. “Now, we’re going to talk about what you were thinking that night. I don’t need to know all the ins and outs, but Carlos did tell me that you were worried you might have contracted HIV. Can you tell me why you thought that?”
I gulp hard. Again I look to Cal, sure that this will make him disgusted in me, but he just nods and continues to rub my back reassuringly.
“Well, just over a month ago, I…I hooked up with a guy on a night out. And we’d been drinking, and we really hit it off, um, in a sexy way, I mean, like we?—”
“I get the picture. I was young once, too,” Dr Hader smiles sardonically at me.
“Yes, right. Well, we were getting kind of heavy and we wound up back at his place and making out became…more. And well, I guess in the moment, we were in such a rush, and I didn’t…we didn’t…
“We didn’t use a condom. And he…finished inside me. And in the moment, that was fine. But as I walked home, I started thinking, ‘What if he’s Positive?’. We hadn’t really discussed it, and like, I know it’s bad to think like that, but?—”
“But you started worrying what if this one night of passion turned out to be the one mistake?” Dr Hader finishes.
She looks at me, and I silently nod. “Okay, first things first, I’m going to guess you two aren’t really boyfriends, right? This guy you hooked up with wasn’t the handsome, patient and charming young man beside you?”
Cal and I look at each other, a moment of panic passing between us, before we turn to face her and let her know she’s right.
“I’ll overlook that this time,” she laughs. “Secondly, if the medications details we got from your friend here are right, you take PreP, right?” I nod. “Which means I’m going to guess that you understand that that can help protect from contracting HIV. Not that it should be a replacement to condoms, true, but it’s a sensible precaution you’re taking that’s more than some do. I’m going to guess you also know that undetectable means untransmitable too, right?”
“Yeah, totally. But, we didn’t exactly exchange numbers, so I never got to ask him afterwards. So I guess I just kinda…”
“Spiraled,” the doctor finishes my thought. “Well, that’s understandable. But obviously, things are so much better now than they were at the beginning. That doesn’t change the weight of that history and the loss at the beginning though, does it. The generation of young, vibrant men gone. In some ways, it’s different for you, you missed the worst of it all. Some of us saw the real horror of it running rampant before anyone knew what to do about it. While many didn’t even seem to care to do anything.”
The room goes quiet for a moment, Cal and I just watching the doctor for a moment as she seems to lose herself in memory. I can’t even imagine what she might be seeing, and I feel like such an idiot for making such a big deal about it when it wasn’t even happening to me.
“Whether or not you know the reality of living with HIV now, the weight of what it was like then has rippled out across generations into the present, hasn’t it. Education is still poor on it, and societal opinions still tangled up in the worst images we saw in that time. So, Jesse, that panic you felt, while not logical or based on reality, is entirely understandable.”
She claps her hands together, returning to her more matter of fact tone. “Okay. Well, assuming he was Positive, it’s possible he’s medicated and healthy and undetectable. It’s just as likely that he’s Negative, which means that HIV transmission wasn’t on the cards anyway. And if I understand correctly, in your spiral, you actually made a sensible decision and went to get checked out and get post-exposure prophylaxis just in case too. PEP?”
“Yeah, well, I’d read somewhere that if you thought it was possible, you could take it and it would lessen your chance of becoming Positive too, and the sooner after the instance it happens the better, so…I know I was probably jumping the gun, but I figured better to be safe than sorry?”
“That’s good, that’s good, Jesse. Yes, absolutely. Obviously, we’d all sooner have you using every precaution, after all, PreP doesn’t protect against any other sexually transmitted infections. But we also understand that people are only human, and slip ups occur. You did the right thing, despite your head spiraling with the possibilities. A lot of others would probably be frozen by the uncertainty, and if the worse had come to pass, they might have missed an opportunity to stop it.”
Everything she’s saying sounds so right, like everything the logical part of my brain was telling me, and I’m practically swaying in my seat nodding along. “But then, then I got that text from the clinic, and…I just knew, I was so sure it meant something bad. That they were going to tell me I was Positive. And then I’d have to deal with that, my parents would be let down, ashamed by me maybe—” Cal interjects, assuring me they would never react like that, but I’m on a roll again now, “And people would think I’m dirty, that I’m a slut, that I only have myself to blame, and I, I know how cruel people can be, how the dating world can be to a single gay guy who has HIV, I’ve seen it, and I know I’m being a total hypocrite because I know it’s totally possible to live a full and healthy life with HIV, but I was terrified for that to be my reality, that I’d be alone and I just?—”
“Panicked,” Dr Hader again with the winning answer. “Yes, I can see that. Tell me, Jesse, do you often think of the worst case scenarios over anything else?”
“Excuse me?”
She stands up, shows me a grin, as she returns to the foot of the bed and reviews my notes again. “It just seems to me that you’ve got a bit of a habit of going to the worst place before anything else. And that it weighs on you. Makes you anxious. Would I be right?”
“I guess…” I sigh, wondering where she’s going with this. “But I know, logically like, that that isn’t the case all the time.”
“But do you always listen to that part of you?” I make a face as I shake my head. “Do you worry about a lot of things?”
“I guess. I mean, you have seen the news, right?”
She snorts. “Yes, yes, I sure have. And it is a scary world we live in sometimes. But the best we can do is the best we can do. But if that’s not enough to let you get on with your day, then it can make you pretty anxious, can’t it, Jesse. If I was to ask you, on a scale of one to ten, where you would say your baseline anxiety sits on any given day; not when something stressful is happening in your life, now, just generally, all the time. One to ten, where would you say that anxiety sits?”
I think for a moment, worrying for a moment if she means ten is the worst or one is the worst, and would I answer wrong, before swallowing that particular ridiculousness. “I guess I’d say I’m always on a six or seven?”
“So above halfway, then?” Dr Hader tilts her head. “Just a six or seven?”
“Sure, I guess,” I swallow hard as she continues to stare at me. “Probably actually higher.”
“And why is that? Why do you always feel, let’s say, an above average level of anxiety? You mentioned the news, and I know it was a joke, but is that a defense mechanism, Jesse? Do you really worry about things you can’t even control?”
“I guess, a bit. I mean, logically I know I can’t control these things?—”
“But logic is one thing, and how you actually feel is another. Jesse, I want you to tell me exactly how you feel, the majority of the time. Can you do that for me?”
She looks at me with care, and patiently waits for me to reply. I turn to Cal, looking at him wondering if he’s ready to hear how crazy his friend has been all these years. He just smiles and squeezes my hand.
I sigh, and take a deep breath.
“I guess, I guess I feel like I have all these worlds that make up my life, you know? And they’re all buzzing away, vibrating, because that’s how they exist. But lately, some of those worlds have been vibrating a little further apart, falling out of sync, and what once was like a harmony was now just noise in my head. My worlds were falling apart, and I didn’t know how to fix them, but I knew I had to try, but each time I focused on the one I thought was falling out of sync the worst, I’d find another is spiraling away.
“And I try and I try to juggle them all and get them in order, but whatever I do just seems to make them worse, so I’d freeze, you know? I’d just become too scared to do anything about them at all, and just watch them, unable to do anything but dreading what will happen when the worlds spiral out of control, out of reach, crashing and burning.”
Dr Hader nods patiently. “And what do you fear will happen when one of your worlds falls apart? Do you think you’d die?”
“No,” I scoff. “Well, not really. I—” I stop and stare at Dr Hader for a moment, pondering the next thing I’m going to say.
“Go on,” Cal says. I look to him and I see tears in his eyes, but he’s not looking sad, he’s just…there. Present.
“I don’t really fear dying, doctor. I don’t think I ever have,” I say, and my head bows down to my chest, and I watch tears stain my shirt. “Because I think there’s something so much worse than being dead.
“I’m scared that when I ruin it all, when I fuck it all up by either trying too hard or not trying at all…I’m scared I’ll be left alone.” I look to Cal, tears streaming down my face, “I can’t bear the thought of that. I’m terrified of being alone.”
There’s a beat of silence in the room, like the air just got sucked out of it. The only noise the faint scribbling of pen on paper.
Dr Hader writes something in my notes, then slaps her hand to the board before replacing her pen in her breast pocket. She smiles at me again.
“Okay, Jesse, I’m going to make some suggestions. Don’t get upset about them, because we are all here to help, and they really are not the end of the world, but I think I’ve got a clear picture now. I think, Jesse, that what you may have is generalized anxiety disorder.”
My heart sinks. “Generalized anxiety disorder,” I repeat dumbly.
“Yes, it’s surprisingly common, honestly, and when people are very good at masking their feelings, which I suspect you are, it can go untreated and unmanaged for a long time. Until something happens that makes that person have to take stock or, well, wind up here.
“All it means is your brain is a little overzealous in trying to warn you about dangers and threats, so much so that everything starts to feel like a threat to you, your safety or your happiness. Your body can struggle to sustain that level for such long periods, and it can lead to, you guessed it, panic attacks.”
“Oh,” I mutter. I never thought I could have a disorder. I thought…well, I don’t know what I thought.
“So, for now, all I’m going to prescribe you is some bed rest and to take it easy for a couple of days. I’m also going to get some information for you on how to manage stress and panic attacks. But lastly, I’m going to suggest you see our psych eval team to confirm my diagnosis. They may suggest a therapist or medication to help manage that baseline anxiety. See if we can’t get that seven plus down to a three. Obviously, you may want to look into your own therapy in the long term, but for now, let’s just confirm it all, and go from there. Sound good?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I mumble, before kicking myself for being petulant. I jump up to my feet and rush over to Dr Hader. “I mean, yes, sure, thank you, Doctor. I really appreciate it. And thank you for, well, for not judging me.”
Dr Hader smiles in that way she has, brushing a loose hair behind her ear. “I’m not here to judge, and honestly, for all the ‘freaking out’ as I’m sure the young or ignorant might say, you actually did a lot of the right things. Maybe a lot of dumb things too, but I think you have this. And if I’m right and it is GAD, you’ll take that in your stride too, with all the help you have in your life.” She says that last part looking over my shoulder at Cal and I feel my cheeks flush warmly.
She shakes my hand, short and firm, and wishes me well on my next steps and leaves the room. Leaving me and Cal alone.
I take a few lingering seconds facing the door before I finally turn, head bowed, unable to look at Cal. He heard it all. He knows what I did, he can probably guess what I did after, or what I thought. I can’t imagine he’d want to hang around with an overly dramatic mess like me now, knowing that.
“You…you don’t have to be here, you know. I know you must think I’m the world’s biggest jerk and lowest scum now, and I wouldn’t blame you?—”
Before I can finish my sentence, I feel myself enveloped in those surprisingly iron-like arms, like a vice around me, his head burying into the crook of my neck, black curls tickling at my face as his eyelashes dance across my skin.
“I am going nowhere, unless you want me to go.”
Hesitantly, I raise my own arms until I’m returning his hug, just as hard and fiercely. “Please don’t,” I sob.
We stand like that for minutes, until finally he pulls back, and bumps my shoulder with a fist.
“What you are is an idiot. An idiot who should know better and that he can open up to me about anything, and that I will always be there. Always. You will never be alone.”
“Even after what I did?”
Cal guides me back over to the chairs and we sit again.
“I’ll admit, I can understand the getting lost in your worst fears, even when you know better. I can understand how heavy that secret must have felt. What I don’t understand is what happened next, exactly. But I’d like to. If you’d let me.”
Cal squeezes my hands, and I can’t help but think this will be the thing that definitely makes me lose him. And I don’t know if I can survive that. But he deserves the truth, all of it.
So I tell him.