Ben, self-portrait
“Oh, Mommy, it smells. It smells.”
Ben rubbed his hand hard into his face, as though the smell would only go away if he wiped his entire nose off. It was early spring in Montreal. And we were in the park, a thawing freezer full of smell. Month old dog crap, maple tree mulch, six month old litter, a flattened dead starling only now starting its decomposition, its tiny soul, hopefully, long gone from here.
The smell disappeared as quickly as it arrived. So, I didn’t think twice about it.
Later that day he complained the same way about the smell in our living room. But our living room pretty much always smelled back then. I’m a very (and I’m being kind to myself here) poor housekeeper. Still, he’d never complained about the smell before. He was three, and stubbornly opposed to toilet training. The source, not usually the diviner of smells.
And he'd never complained about a smell that I couldn’t smell. When you live in a persistent state of low-grade squalor you actually develop a pretty keen olfactory sense for anything new or actually dangerous. Which may be why we were both so robustly healthy (or at least that's the theory that I'm sticking with.)
Maybe this was a new development stage? Learning just how to shame your overwhelmed single mother and her various smells? But before I could start to take this personally, it disappeared. The smell, the anxiety about the smell, the whole problem.
Which was weird in itself. A good couple of years had passed since anxiety was a mood that flashed quickly across my son’s forehead. Transient emotions were for babies. By three, kids have long learned the trick of nurturing a negative emotion into its fullest possible lifespan.
No mother worries about a stillborn tantrum. Not the first time.
But then it happened again over Cheerios the next morning. This smell so intense it brought him to tears, but so ephemeral that after twenty seconds he didn’t seem to remember it.
“What does it smell like, sweetie.”
“Cheerios.”
“No, no, the smell you were so upset about just now.”
“What smell?”
“The one that made you cry.”
“I’m not crying.”
“No, before …” But I knew I wasn’t getting anywhere.
I decided to try a different tack inspired by vague memories of something I’d read, somewhere, once: “Was it a burning smell?”
“Buhning?”
I searched my head for examples of burning, but he was a city kid. We didn’t build fires. I’d given up smoking almost five years before. There were no matches around for him to play with. And it was clear that his interest in this conversation was long over.
It was Monday morning. I brought him to daycare, and then went for a morning run. But I couldn’t seem to get rid of that image of him, forehead rutted with anxiety, tears sprouting out of his eyes and the palm desperately twisting into his nose. And then the sudden and total evaporation of whatever it was that was causing this.
That wasn’t my kid. When something bothered him that much, he didn’t move on. This kind of flash fluid relationship with emotion. Like I said, that was babies, and maybe later, teenagers experimenting with mushrooms. And smell doesn't work that way. Any smell strong enough to cause that level of anxiety wouldn't just disappear, it would linger. And wouldn't I be able to smell it?
So I came home and did what mothers do in this day and age. Surfed the Internet until I found enough information about smell hallucinations to totally freak myself out.
It was possible that I was just looking for distraction. I’d recently handed in the manuscript of my first book, so I had time and a brain that had already started trawling for a new obsession. But it was also possible, according to what I was reading, that Ben had a brain tumor.
I called our family doctor, but she had just had twins, was on half maternity leave and her secretary was referring anything that couldn’t be dealt with next month to community clinics. I didn’t want to spend three hours waiting in a clinic until they did one of two things: dismiss me as a one of those Munchausen’s mothers who were appearing on pretty much every 10 o’clock drama on network television that year--you know the ones who invent faux medical symptoms for their children just for attention--or send me to emergency to wait another five hours so they could dismiss my healthy child and me, as a Munchausen’s mother.
Suddenly I remembered the medical resident I had met online a few months before. Damn what was his name again? And why exactly had I brushed him off?
Oh yeah, because he had shown up at our date with a copy of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, and told me that he’d recently decided to quit med school, three months before the end of his residency, to become a writer. And he was short. Really short. Not a bad thing in my opinion, since he was cute, in an unfortunately Roman Polanski kind of way, but still cute. The last unusually short cute guy I’d gone out with, however, had really broken my heart. And this whole quitting med school three months shy of a degree, while reading a book Musil spent twenty years writing, and which he actually never finished before his death.... it all seemed more like an emotional crisis than an actual life plan.
And at the time I had a looming book deadline and a scary book contract with a big New York publisher. So I decided to, just this once, throw the fish back in the water and forget him long before it all started to fall apart, or undermine my already chaotic life, like these crisis relationships with really short men always did.
And just this once I was doing a really good job of it because I couldn’t even remember his name.
But I couldn’t seem to forget the possible brain tumor. My cousin had been diagnosed with a brain tumor at the age of 18. They fucked up the surgery and now he was a paraplegic. A heroic paraplegic, who had spearheaded the students with disability program at the Montreal University I’d attended and was currently completing a masters in art therapy. I admired him, but despite the good life he'd built for himself, I couldn't take even the possibility of a brain tumor lightly.
So I called Ben’s father and asked him if he had the time to spend the day hanging out with us in Emergency at the Montreal Children’s Hospital. He did, though that didn’t mean he believed that anything was wrong. On the way to the hospital he asked Ben to describe the smell. “Caca!” Ben said proudly with the cute little Quebecois accent he was picking up a daycare. I suspected he was liking the word more than remembering the smell, but his father took this answer as permission to commence what would turn out to be roughly six hours of impatient sighing.
I’m not sure, now, why I thought it was a good idea to bring someone who was going to be so relentlessly skeptical. Oh yeah, because as his biological father, he was the only person obligated to share the responsibility of keeping Ben entertained while we wallowed for most of the day on the low priority list. And if Ben did have a brain tumor that needed immediate removal, but might risk disabling him for the rest of his life, I would probably be obligated to talk the situation over with him anyways. And, frankly, I probably thought that if both parents were there, they might take the situation more seriously.
But I can’t say I blamed him for the skepticism. It was hard to look at our energetic good-humored son, running around the E.R. playspace and believe anything was wrong with him. So after five hours, Ben’s dad had almost succeeded in talking me into going back home.
We were just gathering our things to go when we heard our name being called on the intercom. Ben’s father heaved one final long suffering sigh and followed me though the maze of hallways until we reached the examining room, where we waited another half hour, until the resident who had been given our case entered our room, all confidence and charisma.
And that’s when I remembered his name. “Jason!”
Unfortunately he didn’t look as happy to see me as I did him, and his cheerful entrance soon evaporated into the awkward “Hey… how are you?” you get from a guy whose last e-mail you kind of never got around to answering.
But I remained thrilled, because fate it seemed, had put me in the path of the one doctor in the city of Montreal who probably wouldn't suspect Munchausen's. Though at that point I obviously hadn't thought deeply enough about why fate might want to do that.
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