White Room

The Other Annals of Medicine

Often angling down towards us as we jostle along on the T,
propositioning us in boldface as we riffle newspapers in our kitchens,
advertisements for medical testing are commonplace. Everyone has
probably considered, however dimly, the prospect of participating. For
some perhaps it is the psoriasis research that beckons, for others the
anxiety studies, for yet others the chance to get to try new drugs. For
me, being of decent skin, run-of-the-mill anxiety, and merely suburban
depravity, the ad for the sleep studies always struck surest.

We all might not effervesce at the thought of spending 2 weeks in a
stark room, submitted to the unbending will of science, but for me
there was an attraction. I welcomed the concept of ready-made seclusion
and eyed one circadian rhythm study with a perverse curiosity.
"Circadian Rhythm" meant little to me, but it sounded nice, putting to
mind a summer dusk thronging with cicadas, and the rhythm of their hum.
The researchers corrected me, explaining that they were hoping to get
at my body's internal 24 hour cycle and tamper with it. I did not
concern myself much with the details and procedures, focusing instead
on the promise of utter calm. I figured that given two weeks of serious
and undiverted sobriety, I might well stumble across my own secreted
brilliance or burnish my powers of telekinesis, or find the sliding
door to the over-soul. I envisaged hours of furious creation, mental
lark and luminosity fuelled by the absolutely quiet and luxuriously
hermetic room. I had, I suppose, some easy sense of Proust's cork-lined
quarters. Kept from the world, I'd make free with my excellence, pen a
memoir, cultivate creative hobbies, anneal myself in the room's white
and silence.

Armed with this kind of sanguine misapprehension, I contacted the
study, gave of my bodily fluids, adopted an ill-fitting straight-edge
life. What started as a whim born of impoverishment and gameness, sped
quickly towards enlistment. Having passed the psychological screening,
suffered an exploratory physical exam, pledged a frighteningly
toxin-free life and boastfully told virtually everyone I knew about the
study, I could not renege. I was given a small wristwatch-like device
to wear for the weeks leading up to the hospitalization. This device,
not an unattractive accessory with its clean lines and basic boxy
black, apparently recorded my sleep and exposure to light. It bothered
me that the medical industry hadn't the ingenuity to slip a small
digital watch on the device; I consulted it vainly and habitually
throughout the day. Civilians would ask me the time, to which I would
have to tell them lamely that my "Actiwatch" was not a timepiece. I had
a suspicion that the thing really housed a small camera that allowed
the doctors to monitor and survey my behavior, studying me adrift on my
seas of herbal teas, surrounded by rented movies, quietly in the throes
of heavy-duty quietism. I imagined a roomful of white-coated and
bespectacled doctors arching their eyebrows and jotting on clipboards
as I paused longingly outside a caf? or sniffed a friend's beer. All
along I masked my nervousness with nonchalance and privately assured
myself that the life of the bedfast anchorite was the best for
me.

After weeks of docility and sobriety, I was called forward to the
hospital to start my two weeks of lab-rat life. I had planned with
uncharacteristic thoroughness and came with a large arsenal of
"essentials" for my private pitched war with derangement. These
consisted of a considerable library with books ranging from the
pictorial to the dryly historical to the engrossed and fabulous and
even the didactic - "How to Tie Knots". I also saw fit to bring a paint
by numbers tableau (kitty cats in mid-romp), a brace of guitars, a box
of recording equipment, enough books on tape to outlast a biblical
flood, watercolors, a gorgeous Smith-Corona Coronet Super 12
typewriter, knitting needles (11-gauge, manly) and yarn of silken and
milky characteristic, clothing of assuring and streetwise snugness, a
pipe for mouthing, the length of rope for knot-making, my somewhat
unclean bedding, a donnish cardigan, a tasseled Turkish carpet, a
twirling baton, and a pot-holder loom. I was absolutely going to rock
this study, essentially wranglin' me my cash-cow while earning my spurs
in a variety of cultivated fields. I was willing to bear the derision
and alarm of a good many invalids, convalescents, doctors, and visitors
as I made my entrance to the hospital and was greeted by the willowy
leader of the study.

Soon, a strong-backed group of technicians and nurses played sherpa
with me as we hurried through the mazy corridors and double-doors to
Suite 4. The room was flecklessly white. With an agitated bonhomie I
raved about my new quarters (while noting its lack of a white piano and
white tiger rug) and thanked the numerous orderlies, failing to tip. I
set about unpacking. I stacked all the books, put my sullied sheets on
my future nemesis, the bed, filled the sterile room with the genteel
and pacifying classical music I had bought that day, and unfurled my
rug - how it blazed and roared against that white like a woven parade.
I started eagerly on a thick book about the Civil War. I thought that
the transports offered by war's monumental miseries would gird me in my
austerity, and enhance the relative luxury of my stay. Compared to the
ravages of syphilis, grapeshot and gangrene, the sleep study could only
shimmer. I put on my reading cardigan and slippers and curled up in the
chair, pantomiming comfort.
I was presented with the rectal thermometer - a pliable plastic wire -
that was to be my most intimate monitor during my stay. I made away
with the thing into the subfusc of the bathroom and gingerly fed it,
agonized inch by inch, to my core. The action was new to me, but in the
oddest way it seemed intuitive, mechanically unproblematic, as if
guided by a phantom instinct.

Once the sensor was in place, I started my life as a cyborg. It was a
life whose birth-cry was a shudder rather than a lusty wail. In the
next several hours I was to have other wires laced, affixed to and
inserted into my flesh. For the first couple of days the sight of me,
the shuffling ur-cyborg, with the tangle of electrode wires, I.V.
blood-line, and rectal sensor was disquieting. I came to savor,
however, the care that my body's new components demanded. There is
peculiar comfort to being handled routinely by a parade of strangers. I
would lapse into a lotus-eaters reverie, happy to hear and smell their
breaths, the latex gloving their sure hands, the crepitation of gauze
and tape, the pinch of the tourniquet and the tug on the tapped vein. I
never tired of watching the magenta thread of blood advance along the
tubing as it was drawn and noting its brightened cherry-red color as it
again returned down the length of the line like a sinuous 9 foot
Twizzler. My arm felt chilled where the blood was reinfused.

The care I received wasn't prurient per se, but it stands somewhere on
the wintry and still borderlands of affection. When I would sit for the
nightly gluing of the electrodes on to my scalp, with its painstaking
measurements, patient hands and pencilling, I began to feel the lulls
of contentment the groomed ape must feel. The intimacy provided by a
stark white room, a solicitous nurse and a blood catheter on the fritz
is something I will long cherish. I delighted in the professional
litany of comforts - "this is an antiseptic. I 'm now going to use the
hemostat?. It might be a vasospasm" - peppered with sincere words and
glances of tenderness. The magic was in the touch, in the caring of
expert fingertips, in the way that these people intently handled my
head or swabbed my chin or delicately tested a vein. Cozened and dozy
under the omniscient gaze of the Institution, I felt protected from all
vagary, vice and chance.

When it was bedtime and I was fastened by wires to the lowered
mattress, the lights went out. My white room went dark. There was an
unearthliness, a galactic enormity to that dark; it was a blackness
that you felt; its entirety was pressed upon you, like the pitch of
blindness or the black of the ocean floor. The abrupt shift from the
room's exaggerated brightness made me quite jittery at first, but I
managed to suppress panic, taking deep breaths in my mess of wires,
thinking about cabins, woods, crackling stoves, and other hokey
joys.

My battery of "essentials" proved largely unnecessary. As routine
quickly asserted itself, I realized how mistaken I had been about the
study. I was being paid as a research subject. As such, the bulk of my
time was taken up fulfilling the subject's duties - primarily testing.
I was not being paid to frivol and play diarist and pore over books. I
realized, with a whimper and a scowl of disgust, the greater part of
all my waking hours were spent taking the same detestable test. It
consisted of a series of very basic cognitive tasks - reaction time,
arithmetic, identification. This repetitiveness was the source of
anguish. It is unspeakably trying to spend hour after hour taking the
same test, pressing buttons, hearkening to beeps like a talented
monkey. The benefit to the grinding tedium of the hospital life with
its inflexible arrangement of tests, blood-draws, urinals, meals and
electrodes is that the routine is anaesthetizing the panic of my early
days was soon drowned in the dim tides of custom. Furthermore, my
knitting yarn and batons and books on massacre/knots/tape were nixed as
I was kept in very low light, more of a gloom than an illumination.
After several days, I began to feel like a stowaway on a ghost-ship,
below decks. I craved motes to dance in the air, or a shadow to slant,
or a light-bulb to blaze hysterically.
If you do choose to forsake life's diurnal joys for money - or in the
hope, as I did, of widening the light of human knowledge against the
dark - understand that it is not a handout. Torture, not donated urine
and blood, pays best. There were times in that binding bed that I
understood what the hapless Venetian must have felt crossing the Bridge
of Sighs. The torture came in the rather dutiful guise of scientific
procedure, and was given its sterilized terminology. At three separate
occasions in the course of my stay, I was to undertake the "Constant
Routine", which is to say that I would be awakened as usual by the
flicker of the lights and the raising of my bed, and then would stay
there unsleeping for 30-70 hours. Done outside the halls of science
this would plainly be called "Horrification". I had a chance to
thoroughly explore the sere terrain of mental exhaustion. I cannot say
that I discovered very much. I did master a few things during those
delirious days in bed, like how to finesse a bedpan I also learned the
brutish art of staying awake. My greatest ally in this battle proved to
be desire. I would keep myself from collapse by thinking about sex and
literally passed my wooziest hours by trying to telekinetically
stimulate the technicians' crotches for sport, whose short shrift
landed them in Suite 4. My powers of telekinetic suasion are
puny.

The technicians, seeing my anguish, hearing my prayerful mumbling,
tried to revitalize me with conversation. Often, it was a failing
enterprise as they introduced conversations of such rote dreariness and
insipidity that I could only stare at my feet and pulverize my molars.
Other times, when I summoned myself, I would launch into mildly
unhinged inquisitions about preferred cereals, juices. A reliable
conversation piece turned out to be the ever-provocative, "If you had
to live above a fast food restaurant, which would it be?". There were
of course the moribund hours when my brain felt front-to-back in my
head, and I could only sit and struggle with my 38th hourly square of
peanut butter and jelly sandwich and concentrate on cohering the world.
I had some trying times convincing myself that the wall behind me had
not in fact vanished, and that the Elysian breeze caressing my neck,
the sunlight flooding the room was a figment. Those hours were the
pits, when I would fall through the world's rotten barn floor and
plummet instantly into the racing, shivered coma of "microsleep."
Consciousness was a greased watermelon. I would fall time over into an
abysmal, abrupt sleep and wake up 5 times in half a minute. At one
point I remember having the distinct and errant impression that I was
behind the scenes of one of Elvis' risible Hawaiian movies, smoking a
cigarette. Then the technician, the soul of congeniality, would
cheerily suggest a round of "Uno", to which I could only slap my face,
mutter imprecations, and refocus on my guttering telekinesis, or
telestasis. I once got caught clumsily huffing the antiseptic
towelettes - a resourceful way to startle the senses closer to
alertness, but a conspicuous infraction. At some point when
exasperation was subsumed to a pure almost Buddhistic hopelessness, the
mind would find some homeostatic balance. Eventually, however, as
always, the end would come. I would meet it with a teary and misshapen
joy, close my eyes and fold headward into a sleep, careless of the
thousand sharp crumbs or the damp from the bobbled urinal.

I was granted my walking papers sooner than I expected. Judging by my
meals and the number of times I had shaved during my stay, I thought
there remained another day and a half.
Now that I am out, I can play with recollection, liken my two weeks to
spa stay. I slimmed to a magnificently ribby 138 lbs., really got in
touch with my body, had many ruminative trances and found out, under
those cruel lights, how mulish the spirit really can be. Most
importantly, aside from the rent money, is the alchemy of the release.
Exit from the hospital transmutes the dross day into gold.

I am not nostalgic for my time on the inside. I could relive it easily
enough, if I wanted, reeking in my bed, gaping at the wall. For all the
obvious and ulterior unpleasantness, I did find a strange tonic in the
institutionalized life. To some extent the concerns of the hospitalized
life freed me from worry. I exchanged the distress occasioned by
poverty and living for the distress engendered by sleepless captivity.
I have been tempted to aggrandize the whole exploit by trumpeting my
endurance, my indomitable spirit. In the end, however, I did little
more than successfully suffer for money. I will appear undamaged,
masking my lopsided mind in gloriously new pants, peacocking with the
knowledge that I was "an excellent subject." I failed to inquire just
who contracted this study, for whom I had tolerated all the sensors and
torments. Having just recently read about the inmates of Guantanamo Bay
and the Army's use of sleep and light deprivation in interrogation,
however, I have my hunches.