Note from the Doctor:
Starving, but Robust
9 October 2014

In the old days, I’d have posted a note yesterday saying that I was too distracted by fasting for a colonoscopy to think very clearly. I should have felt it remiss not to acknowledge the reason for my absence by, in fact, being present, however limited the basis. Without feeling the slightest diminishing of my professional commitment to this Web site, however, I recognize that I have outgrown a great many bureaucratic, t-crossing concerns. At the same time, I have never more scrupulously proofread each entry before letting it stand. You might say that I have put all my editorial eggs into that basket.

Anyway, it will be a long time before I regard Jell-O, not only as a food, but even as a substitute for food. Yesterday’s fast came perhaps too close on the heels of the dietary upheaval wrought by last month’s dose of monster antibiotics. Once again, I was hungry all the time, but could eat nothing — except Jell-O, and other liquidy things. The only difference was that I’d have been happy to eat anything. Last month, Jell-O served as a key ballast for the gigantic pills that I had to take three times a day, and that burned a terrible hole in my stomach if it was empty, even as they made food itself thoroughly unappetizing. Yesterday, Jell-O itself quickly became unappetizing, and I drew my sustenance from the laxative solution that I drank by the tumbler for about nine hours. That product has improved almost immeasurably in the more than twenty years that I’ve been taking it, but it still rather quickly becomes too much of a not-so-good thing. As bedtime drew near, I turned to Chablis for nourishment, and not in vain.

The colonoscopy itself went very smoothly. (I’d willingly undergo the procedure two or three times in a row if doing so would spare me the fasting.) So, here I am, with nothing much on my mind except the odd word “triathlete,” understandably unfamiliar in these precincts. Even by metaphorical stretch, I’m not entitled to the “tri,” but only to “duo.” Still, I think that it’s somewhat robust of me to have undergone not only a colonoscopy in the morning but an echocardiogram in the afternoon — in the early afternoon, at that. Aes duplex if not triplex. That’s it for intense doctoring for a while; although, when I got home from the cardiologist’s, there was a reminder from the dermatologist that I have to see her, presumably about the wasting condition of my scalp, which is being eaten alive by pre-cancerous cells. Unless, that is, the blue lights have been effective.

I have reached the stage at which each procedure is somewhat hedged in by, or required to be mindful of, all the others, and it is easy to foresee the time when I or my doctors will have to choose one procedure over another. Which is not to say that it will come to that. But I often think, lately, of the very sick old man with whom I shared the room on the telemetry (cardio) floor of New York Hospital. He was basically too ill for the heart treatment that he needed; all sorts of other things, including a urinary problem that would have maddened me, had to be dealt with first. Deep into his eighties, the man’s grasp of English seemed to be shaky — Polish was his native tongue, and the hospital rustled up, at one point, a nurse who spoke Russian to translate — but I gathered from this and that that the patient understood more than he let on. At one point, I had to sit by in foolish helplessness while he ate a meal that ought not to have been served him, because it foreclosed a procedure that required fasting. I remembered listening to the utterly brainless things that ECT patients would say when asked why, contrary to all orders, they had eaten breakfast before coming in for treatment. They would have to be sent home without it, of course. At the same time, I believe that the medical profession, considered en bloc, and not as a matter of individual technicians and doctors, often treats patients so callously that they have no humane option but to fight back, however impotently and self-destructively.

***

What with constant flights to the bathroom, it took a while to see all of Emmanuelle Bercot’s 2013 film, Elle s’en va, starring Catherine Deneuve. One has come to love the old Deneuve — and why not call her that, if she’s was all but seventy when she made the movie, and will turn 71 later this month? She has made the wise decision to get a bit plump, for this has preserved the soft beauty of her amazing face. She’s lovelier than ever, really, because she’s more human than ever. When she made films like Repulsion and Belle de Jour, she often looked as if she were made out of plastic, which suited the aesthetic of the Sixties but now looks pretty repellent. One has come to love the way Deneuve lets herself go, in movies like Place Vendôme and La Potiche. I’m happy to say, though, that she has outdone herself in Elle s’en va. Never has she played such a fundamentally ordinary woman. It’s true that Bettie, as her character is called, was a beauty-contest winner in her teens, rising to Miss Bretagne and favored for Miss France. But in this film, a pretty face is just a pretty face. Bettie herself has gotten very little out of her good looks. There’s a wonderful moment, early on, when, being flirted with by a young man barely a third her age, Bettie trembles with naked insecurity, as though, were she to take this fellow at his word, she be laughed out of the bar. (What is she doing in a bar, come to that?) Ordinarily, Deneuve trails something of the impassivity of the great diva that she is in real life, always capable of staring someone into giving her at least part of what she wants. That’s completely missing here, and it’s frightening. Even Deneuve is mortal! It’s as though we couldn’t be sure until now.

It goes without saying that the English title, On My Way, is completely wrong. Bettie hasn’t got a clue about what her way might be. If she’s entitled to the film’s mildly sentimental happy ending, that’s because she has come to terms with this cluelessness. The vagaries of life will probably do a better job of guiding her steps than the empty and hypocritical propriety that has dictated her life so far.

This is not to say that Elle s’en va entirely lacks the Deneuve magic. It certainly doesn’t. When Bettie’s grandson expresses shock at learning that Bettie lives in the house she grew up in, with her mother, he exclaims, “You have a mother?” Bien sûr, comes the answer. And why wouldn’t Catherine Deneuve, still very much the regina Cnidus Paphique, not have a living mother?