by Natalie Mead
The tent is gray and orange—gray like the color of my face after a long bout of vomiting, or of my favorite wire-free bra after years of abuse and few washes. The orange is the sturdy International Orange of the Golden Gate Bridge. This is the same orange my friend Vivian wants to paint her house. The light coming through my living room window makes the gray tent fabric glow yellow, like the rotten-banana bruises in the crooks of my elbows.
My husband Cory set up the tent silently, prodding our living room walls with the carbon fiber poles as he wrestled it into shape, finally moving the desk before sitting it flat on the floor. The tent domes so high that it blocks the view of the TV. This is something he gingerly noted, but knew better than to complain about, just as he knew better than to mention that tents aren’t meant to be in living rooms.
After I settle in the tent, my phone gives off a two-tone bubbly noise. Vivian’s noise. Her circular photo sits at the top of my texts. In it, she’s wearing a brown polka-dot dress—a dress she recently gave me—and an all-knowing half-smile.
Vivian: You have your phone on warm light and very dim right now, right?
Vivian is concerned about the headache that’s snarling its way across my face. So far, it has overpowered ice, opioids, and the emergency room.
Me: Yes, mother.
Vivian: Just making sure! I was hoping THAT was the root cause of all the pain.
My headaches began at around the same time as my friendship with Vivian, in October 2019. I was twenty-seven and late to deliver a big project to my manager at Facebook. I’d gone to bed with a headache, but it wasn’t until the next morning, when I was awakened by invisible stabs to my temple, that I decided to go to the ER. Had I known then what I know now—namely, that I was about to spend two weeks in the hospital, that I wouldn’t go back to work, and that I had already been hurled over the cliff of chronic pain—I wouldn’t have had the strength to keep going.
A true crime marathon played on the TV as I sat in the ER waiting room with a white plastic bracelet dangling around my wrist. My eyes were closed—why were the ceiling lights so unbearably bright?!—and my hands pressed hard against my face in a futile attempt to reduce the stabs. I had brought nothing with me to pass the time, because I hadn’t expected to wait for hours. I’d been texting Vivian throughout that week. She and I first met at church a few months earlier, and we were in that awkward stage—closer than acquaintances, further than friends. I’d texted her that I was in the ER to test the waters. She immediately responded, offering to keep me company until Cory got off work. To this day, I don’t know why she offered. Who meets a not-quite-friend in the emergency room? Who walks willingly into so much suffering?
Vivian held my hand or rubbed my shoulder whenever the stabs got worse. At one point, the narrator on the TV mentioned a knife found at the scene of the crime.
“How ironic!” Vivian exclaimed, her eyes alight. “You’re both stab victims!” I laughed, surprised by her sense of humor.
When the nurse finally called my name, I felt Vivian’s hand in mine. “Keep your eyes closed,” she said. “I’ll lead you back.”
Later that night, Cory arrived. Cory, my best friend. Cory, who feared intimidating strangers with his six-foot stature and dark beard. This is why I’d nicknamed him Boogle, back when we were first married. It seemed a suitable name for a gentle giant.
I’d been deposited on a bed with no chair nearby, then pumped with Benadryl and painkillers. Cory sat down on the edge of the narrow gurney, where Vivian had been a few minutes earlier. His face was panicked and his eyes were wide.
“Owww get off!” I screeched. “You’re on my IV!”
“Right. Okay. Sorry. I’m just not sure where I’m supposed to sit.”
I sighed, then bent my knees to make room for him to sit at my feet.
“The problem is, she wants to go to the ER again.”
Four months of not much improvement led Cory and me to a dimly-lit office with shelves of books about sex, parenting, and love languages.
“Talk to your wife, not to me,” the therapist said softly.
Cory sighed. He hated nothing more than being told how to express himself. His polo shirt was wrinkled and his jeans were visibly dirty from weeks of wear. He often used his pants as a napkin, a habit which had become more noticeable now that we were doing laundry every few weeks at most. His hair had grown out into a scraggly mullet and there were dark bags under his blue eyes.
“Okay, fine,” he said, exasperated, while turning toward me. “You want to go to the ER again. But I don’t want to take you.”
“Why won’t you take her?” the therapist asked before I could.
“Because it’s not worth it! We’re there for hours, all for her to be in pain again the next day.”
Cory was right. Since the first ER trip, I’d met five different neurologists, but was still miserable. I also hadn’t received a meaningful diagnosis of any sort, nothing other than “migraines.” IV drugs were the only things that took the edge off, but they had no lasting effect. It was the law of diminishing returns, but these were the only returns available to me at the time. Pain had claimed everything else for its own, including my affection for my husband. Our marriage was what kept me fed and my medical bills paid, nothing more, nothing less. My previously tender thoughts for Cory had been replaced with near-constant demands: brew the coffee stronger, turn off the lights, rescue me from this grief.
“Isn’t it worth taking me if it means I can sleep?!” I spat, bringing one hand up to my temple and rubbing furiously. “Besides, it’s not like you’re really going to be there!”
Cory’s eyes widened in rage. “What do you mean? I’m there for you all the time. 24/7. I’m married to you!”
And yet, I couldn’t help but notice Cory relying on Vivian more and more for ER trips and doctor appointments. Whenever he did accompany me, he read or worked on his laptop while I endured mounting pain.
“If your wife wants to go to the ER,” said the therapist, “then it’s your job to take her.” Cory groaned.
Three years and one pandemic passed. My migraines improved, to a point. I went out on disability, though managed to avoid more visits to the ER. I spent my days learning the contours of Vivian’s living room, which was bigger than mine but somehow felt smaller, safer. The scratchy blue couch, the yellow blanket folded over the chair, the vintage roller skates on the mid-century bookshelf. I took video calls with doctors while she worked remotely for a law firm. Whenever I felt too sick to drive home from Vivian’s, Cory would travel an hour by bike to retrieve both me and the car. I remember often noticing with distaste how sweaty he was when he arrived, and feeling frustrated that he hadn’t made arrangements for dinner.
During the pandemic years, Cory and I got into many arguments. One of them started when I asked him to sit with me during yet another bad migraine. Can’t you just be here, maybe try to distract me?
“You really have no idea, do you?” he replied.
“About what?”
“How hard it is to see you suffer. I can’t watch anymore, I just can’t.”
This explained Cory’s aversion to my most difficult moments, our many arguments, and his waiting on me hand and foot without sparing a kiss or a smile. But this realization didn’t make me feel any better. How could it have? My suffering had made me ugly to him, and there was no end in sight.
We both ceded the argument—I out of shame over how unlovable I’d become, he out of guilt over having told me the truth. Could Cory really keep this up for years, for a lifetime? Could I? Could we?
The relapse occurred in February of 2022. Despite swallowing twelve different pills—every drug I had on hand—my face felt bloody and bruised from hours of unrelenting, invisible beatings. On Valentine’s Day, after trying to ride out the migraine at home, I decided to return to the ER.
“Please don’t go,” Cory begged. “What do you expect them to do?”
“It’s an ER!” I groaned. “They have to do something!” I had been admitted to the hospital for migraine treatments before, through an outpatient clinic. I’d never tried to get admitted for these treatments via the ER, but it seemed possible.
“But will they actually help you?”
“Tell me what to do instead!” I didn’t look up, just stayed in a fetal position on the bed.
I heard a sigh, and imagined a head hung in defeat. “Okay, I’ll pack your things. But have Vivian take you.”
Vivian came by after dinner to pick me up. It will be a date, she said. The same Benadryl and painkillers they did years ago, the same Benadryl and painkillers they gave to anyone in the ER complaining of a headache. Then they sent me home without even a mention of the hospital.
Three days later, same ER, even worse headaches. I’d come back twice since Valentine’s Day. I was screaming and convulsing on a gurney, certain my limbs were shattered beneath the blows of an invisible hammer. A bad reaction to a too-strong drug. My vision was a slideshow of purple patterns, dots then squares then lines then dots again. Cory was at my left shoulder, pinning me down.
I heard him whisper, “Hold on. Please. I can’t lose you. I just can’t.” This was, he later said, the first time he’d feared for my life.
The next morning, Cory helped me gather my clothes and toiletries from a makeshift room of pleated paper curtains. I’d figured my deteriorating condition was a one-way ticket to the hospital, but a few hours earlier, a doctor told me to leave and never come back. Admitting me for further treatment was, according to her, an impossibility. Against protocol. Insurance nightmare. No doctor could take on my case. And besides, she said, you’ll be better off at home.
Cory angrily disputed the discharge. I was so bad off now, neither of us wanted me to leave. But when all was lost, we rode in silence the whole way to our claustrophobic flat, both of us wondering how we would survive this. The DEAD END sign at the corner of our front yard looked down on us as he parked outside the house.
The next morning, I woke up too early hoping it was all a bad dream. But then a wave of pain crashed across my forehead, and my limbs grew heavy as the reality crept toward my consciousness: My pain wasn’t stopping, would maybe never stop, and no one was going to help. I pictured the next forty, fifty years of my life and saw nothing but pain. And I knew I could not do it. I would not do it. If this was how my story was to end, might as well end it now.
So I screamed, louder than I’d ever screamed before, I want to die! I want to die! My skin stretched and cracked as the pressure within me grew and grew, but I did not fear the explosion. On the contrary, I hoped for the sweet release of total annihilation.
Cory awoke with a start and hugged me tight. “I’m here,” he said, “I’m here. And I’m not going anywhere.”
My breathing slowed at Cory’s approach. A first.
The tent is Vivian’s. She lent it to me without hesitation or question, as if I’d asked her for nothing more than a stick of butter or shoes to match the brown polka-dot dress. The tent soothes neither my pain nor my desire to die. It brings no answers, no peace. Though it does make me feel like I’m hiding alone in a hollow of a tall, knotty tree, and this is a nice feeling.
“Am I allowed in?” Cory asks that evening as I arrange two cushions on the tent’s floor.
“No,” I say. For the first time since my pain began, isolation is my preference. Perhaps by being unseeable, I will be erased.
“Okay,” Cory replies, trying but failing to hide the hurt flashing across his face. “Well, you know what to do if you need me.” He is referring to texting him a poop emoji. This has been, ever since my headaches began, my shorthand summons for his services.
Days pass slowly in the tent while I revisit the same memories on a loop. Memories like that of a doctor younger than me, but with hair like mine, long and sandy. Though her hair is neat and tied back, while mine is messy and greasy from lack of showering. Above her mask are eyes that do not know pain.
“I’m going to shine a light in your eyes, okay?” she asks. This is my second ER visit of the week and far from my first neurological exam.
“Uh, do you have to?” I know she doesn’t. Migraines never show up on neurological exams.
They don’t show up on any scans or blood tests, either. But they have to test for something.
Otherwise, insurance won’t pay. I also know that a bright light will push me over the edge. I was, just an hour earlier, convulsing in the hallway.
“Well, what sort of doctor would I be if I didn’t do a thorough exam?” She pulls a pen light out of her pocket. My jaw clenches. She turns on the light next to my ear, preparing to wave it in front of my right eye. “On the count of three. One. Two…”
My phone chirps and I snap back to reality, to the tent. It’s Vivian in a brown polka-dot dress.
Vivian: Do you want to hear a funny story?
I’m in the tent and Vivian is at home, because on the day I got exiled from the ER, Russia invaded Ukraine, and Vivian’s law firm is somehow involved. As I understand it, Vivian is snatching foreign stock options away from Russian oligarchs while personally guaranteeing the employability of every single Ukrainian refugee. I live for her lunch break, her dinner break, her late-night snack break, when she texts me to blow off steam.
Me: OK.
Vivian: Friend went out of town right after moving into new apartment and getting a cat to deal with mice in new apartment.
Vivian: So I went over to feed cat, and when I was done, I couldn’t find the keys.
She draws the plot line out over many messages, and embellishes as much as possible.
Vivian: Anyway, I found the keys…in the cuff of my pant leg.
Me: Such a funny story!
We both know it’s not, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Vivian: Can you try to sleep now?
“Could you put the phone down for just a minute?” Cory asks softly from across the kitchen as he slices a Digiorno pepperoni pizza. He has been staying home every day to take care of me, and there have been no arguments. But then again, I only leave the tent for dinner. He spends most of his time working within earshot.
I set the phone down, but see the messages coming in. I frown at Cory as he sets a plate with two slices in front of me on the table.
Later that night, from inside my cocoon, I hear him ask, gently, whether I need anything. He asks this every few hours whenever I’m in the tent. I request more migraine drugs, even though I’m already on my last refill. He does not mention this fact.
“I love you very much,” he says after reaching his hand through the tent’s zippered door with the pills and a glass of water.
“I love you too,” I say, because I still do, I think. I’m just not sure what love becomes when tainted by such immense sorrow.
Two weeks into my solitary living room expedition, Cory needs to go into the office for something, but is adamant that I not stay home alone. Vivian invites me over, but with one caveat: she has to work, no time to talk. Russian employees of American companies are unable to access their stock options, and just yesterday, Vivian’s coworker went on unexpected sick leave. I say okay, because what else can I say? That I want her to hug me tight all day long? She sits at her desk near me, wearing her husband John’s orange sweatpants, typing up emails and legal briefs.
Vivian’s living room seems bigger than I remember—too big—and too bright. I find the extra space overwhelming, so I slide from her couch to the floor, to anchor myself. My forehead sinks into my knees, my eyes close, and my hands make a tent around my face. But I don’t say a word. I’d promised not to bother her.
I hear John, who is also working from home, stomp into the living room—John has always been a loud walker. “Viv,” he says.
“What? Oh…” I hear Vivian’s slippers shuffle quietly to the kitchen. Then the sound of the sink, and then the feeling of a cool glass nudging my leg. But I stay still. My mind demands I stay in this tiny, handmade room.
Vivian returns with a straw, which she puts gently to my lips. I manage a sip, then stop. She lets out a defeated sigh, then sets the cup down beside me. The pitter-patter of her fingers on her computer keyboard continues.
My butt starts to hurt from sitting motionless on the gray shag rug. I eventually find my way back onto the couch, but Vivian does not notice, despite being within earshot. I see headphones in her ears, and her hair is dropped like a curtain between us. Please. I don’t mean to be like this, I think in her direction. But I don’t say anything, because of the deal, and the headphones, and because I support her having boundaries. In theory.
At this point, I want to text Cory a poop emoji, but think better of it. I don’t want to rob him of his undistracted day. But when he comes that evening, I am, for the first time in years, excited to see him. Because he sees me. Though my pain keeps on erasing me from the world, Cory keeps penciling me back into it.
After getting home that evening, I go not to the tent but to bed. Cory follows me there.
“Welcome back! I’ve missed seeing you around these parts,” he says with a smile.
“If you say so,” I grumble, holding my throbbing head in both hands.
“I do say so,” he says, more seriously.
Loving me is one thing, but how could he have missed me? The possibility warms my insides like honey.
I’m taking an antipsychotic for its pain killing properties. One of its side effects is vivid dreams. “I had a really weird one last night,” I tell Cory over dinner a few days later. We’re eating frozen pizza, again. The tent is still pitched, though less utilized.
“Mmm?”
“We were at Vivian’s, and we decided to have sex on her couch.”
Cory laughs, for the first time in months. I realize I’d forgotten what his laughter sounded like. “I’m so relieved,” he says.
“What? Why?”
“Because, I wasn’t sure if you remembered what sex is. I’m glad you do.” He smiles, and suddenly the dining room feels safe, small. Like Vivian’s living room used to feel, or like the tent. “Do you want to watch TV? I know it hurts your head, but I figure it couldn’t get much worse, could it?”
Cory prepares me a bowl of ice cream and we together peer over the tent to watch The Daily Show. But I keep missing the funny parts, because I’m texting Vivian, something I will continue to do far too often over the next two years.
“You know,” Cory says, reaching for my hand, “she’ll be there when we’re done.”
Back on the Valentine’s Day night when Vivian took me to the ER, I found a card in the top of my backpack.
On the front:
Roses are red,
Carnations are pink,
I hope your Valentine’s Day doesn’t stink.
Inside, in Cory’s chicken scratch:
But if it does happen to suck a whole lot, Just know that I love you, headaches or not! Love, Boogle
I turned my phone facedown, then let it go.
Natalie Mead
Natalie Mead is a disabled writer who lives in San Francisco with her husband and two dogs. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Nonfiction at Goucher College and working on a memoir about salvaging love from the wreckage of chronic pain. Read more of her work or subscribe to her newsletter at nataliemead.com.
Roger Camp
Roger Camp is the author of three photography books including the award winning Butterflies in Flight (Thames & Hudson, 2002). His documentary photography has been awarded the prestigious Leica Medal of Excellence. His work has appeared in numerous journals including The New England Review, American Chordata and the New York Quarterly. He is represented by the Robin Rice Gallery, NY.