Bethany Pierce

Home Sweet Home

Because I was hesitant to spend my weekly summer allowance on books that would only weigh down my suitcase further, I spent my last two weeks in Boston surreptitiously reading novels while pretending to browse at local bookstores. I made it halfway through Nick Hornsby’s About a Boy and about twenty pages into Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. 

After going on about how much she loves travel, Glibert admits that she’s actually not very good at it. She is blonde and fair, both features a novelty in many countries that makes her the constant object of gawking. She lacks the physical stamina some people have for living constantly out of a suitcase and boasts a flimsy digestive tract that does not react well to exotic foods. 

Reading that particular section of Gilbert's book, I felt as though I were reading about myself. I love to travel but am not particularly good at it. I’m about as flexible as a cat when it comes to daily routines and have a digestive tract as temperamental. I’m easily homesick and make a terrible tourist—I only like art museums and even then two hours is my max. 

Nonetheless, I frequently get the itch to travel. I love the complete independence travel allows me: freedom from appointments, meetings, work, and social obligations.  Maybe what’s most addicting about travel is the extreme of emotions: one day I’m so devastatingly bored I weep (the saying “bored to tears” is apparently true), the next I’m so excited I can barely contain myself. One day the Boston bedbugs make me want to drink enough Benadryl to sleep through the rest of my little vacation, the next day I’m so enthralled by watching a portrait painter work in the Museum of Fine Arts I vow to give up X-ray paintings and go back to life drawing. 

These polarized extremes of emotion, though not always pleasant, are in the end cathartic. Even the loneliness is therapeutic. In Boston I got to be my own company for a month and while I’m not the first person I would choose to hang out with for an extended period of time, I learned patience with my own faults. In their intensity, the raw emotions of loneliness, excitement, boredom, awe, and curiosity eventually wore down the surface personalities with which I function in society, whittling me to my bare elements. It felt honest to be thus reduced. Like I was nothing but myself with no audience but God. While the emotional drain of being away from home often left me too numb to pray, the quiet felt like its own supplication. 

Of course, for me these kinds of experience only work if they're temporary. In the end, the very best part of travel is coming home. It feels good to be back. 

A little explanation...

If you are a regular subsciber to this blog you'll notice a wonky thing going on with the dates given for the last few posts.  Lately I've been having some technical difficulties with the website. Now that things are running smoothly again, I've been uploading journal entries I wrote during my six week stay in Boston, each posted with the date the entry was originally written as the subject heading.

Enjoy!

June 12th: Don't Let the Bedbugs Bite!

About a week ago my brother and I were on our way to a movie when I complained, “I keep getting mosquito bites.” He looked at me, furrowing his brow as I scratched the back of my knee in mild annoyance. “I’ve never gotten mosquito bites here,” he said. He’s lived in Boston four years.

These “mosquito” bites continued to appear over the week, growing increasingly and suspiciously smaller and migrating to unusual locations: fingers, neck, toes. The fact that they usually appeared first thing in the morning also raised the alarm.  “I hate to say it,” a good friend ventured, “but, honey, have you ever considered bed bugs?”

At that point I mentally ranked the possible sources of my angry welts from least Gross-Out factor to worst:

1. mosquitoes
2. fleas
3. bedbugs
4. scabies

So when I finally confirmed bedbugs by catching three in tape (the only way to catch the rascals is to lay yourself out in the bed, a veritable bug buffet, then set your alarm for an hour before dawn when they are most active, grab a flashlight, and search for the insects crawling on your body and bed-sheets—yes, its as gross as it sounds) I comforted myself with the knowledge that it could be worse: I could have scabies. I mean the bugs could be in my skin. This forced optimism worked until Aaron informed me scabies would have been much easier to get rid of. Thanks a lot, Aaron.

Though he was right. Bedbugs are incredibly difficult to exterminate. Their eggs, which they lay with alarming frequency, are so tiny as to be invisible; they’re only active at night; and the paper thin shape of their bodies allows them to slip between cracks in bed-frames, peeling wallpaper, book pages—even, according to some websites, between zippers.

For the last week of been systematically dismantling the apartment in effort to rid myself of the creepy crawlies. Harder said than done, considering half the pestilence is psychological. I spent childhood camping and have had my fair share of poison ivy and mosquito bites. It’s not the itching that’s bad—it’s the knowledge that these bugs, by the dozens, come feeding on me at night. It’s a real psychological thriller, let me tell you.   

Thankfully, the woman I’m apartment-sitting for has been fabulous about it all, helping me schedule exterminators and doing research on how to keep my suitcase bedbug free for my upcoming flight home.We’ve taken, sardonically, to ending our e-mails with the now macabre valediction: “Don’t let the bedbugs bite!”

Friday, June 13th: Wedding Dress

My sister arrived Monday, following on the heels of a stifling heat-wave. After dinner with our brother (who lives in the city) we trekked the hour up Beacon street to my summer apartment where we sweated out the night in front of a six inch fan. She slept on the futon, I slept on the floor with the cat. All three of us avoided the bedroom where I’m beginning to suspect the luxurious, inviting Queen mattress is hiding an insidious infestation of bed bugs.

The next morning over breakfast my sister says, "We're really not going wedding dress shopping?" Though that had been our original plan, I'd nixed the idea considering all bridal salons in Boston carry exclusively designer label dresses, meaning they only deal in gowns that cost more than my honeymoon and ceremony put together.  My sister looked so disappointed when I said I'd decided against Boston wedding shopping that I went online and found a discount bridal warehouse on the periphery of the city that just happened to have a three o'clock appointment open that day. Three hours and three trains later we found ourselves shuffling, heat exhausted, through a dusty strip of shops as desolate as a saloon row in an old western. The bank marquise announced a temperature high of 102 degrees. We meandered through a Walgreens just to enjoy the air conditioning, buying our third drink since we'd left the apartment.

The bridal salon was as run-down as the town, a gray nondescript building with a ramshackle window display of leaning, headless mannequins. The ladies behind the counter were fantastic, so kind they sat with us half an hour just talking to us about the heat and how awful it was, the wedding and how beautiful it will be.  Then they dressed me in some of the most gorgeous gowns I have ever seen. Found *my* dress in five tries. It's so fabulous. Very Grace Kelly meets Jackie Kennedy. I cried, my sister cried, the clerk cried.  I thought people were lying when they said you ended up crying over things like that. 

 Of course, I now owe my sister for life. And if there’s anyone who knows how to nurse a favor….

But now I must set daydreams of wedding dresses aside and bag the apartment for the coming exterminator. 

Monday, June 2nd: A Day in the Life

I just finished watching four episodes of Scrubs in a row. When I asked Aaron and a few attendings at UMass hospital which hospital drama best represented intern life they unanimously favored the quirky television series over Gray’s Anatomy, ER, and House.  It strikes me as odd that they would choose the one show I’d have considered the most far-removed from anything resembling reality. I suppose night float does things to a person’s view on life.

For the past week I’ve gotten an inside look at the life these physicians lead in the hospital.  Aaron and I toured four residency programs in as many days: two in Boston, one in Providence, another in Portland. I sat in on grand rounds at BU to hear a lecture about an AIDS patient who suffered a severe stroke, sat in on the daily presentation of patients at Maine Medical Center, and watched a team of family doctors at an out patient doctor’s office in Worcester save a man’s life with no more excitement than any employee gives a typical day’s work.

Doctor’s live in their own time zone. They don’t sleep much. They wear pajamas to work every fourth day. When they walk they walk fast, even when there’s no (apparent) hurry. They talk fast, spinning numbers, information, meds, and histories with nonchalance, almost bored with the breadth of their knowledge.  Sitting around the residency room tables listening to these men and women talk, I felt bested. I thought of all the year’s spent in library cubicles and windowless labs that their fast-spinning conversations represented. Couple that knowledge with stomachs of steel: they don’t wince they drain the abscess, slice the skin, or remove basketball size tumors.

Medicine is a bizarre mix of expertise.  On one hand you must apply yourself for a lifetime to the memorization of cold, clear-cut knowledge. On the other hand (radiologists, cardiologists, and similar specialists aside), you have to dirty yourself to the elbows in the messiness of flesh and blood and aging bodies.

Am very glad I studied painting in school where they gave me A’s for drawing bananas.