Lovely Inheritance
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I eat my Cheetos out of the bag over the kitchen sink in my apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, while I google “psoriatic arthritis and pregnancy.” I’m not pregnant but my youngest sister has announced that she’s expecting her second child. To that, Mami asked me when I was going to “hurry up” and “give her grandchildren.” I want to shout but I don’t. Instead, I tuck my grief into my bones. I ask my doctors about getting pregnant. They suggest I lose weight and maybe that’ll help with the chronic pain. I’m fat, but maybe being not fat would help. I google “psoriatic arthritis and skinny people.”
I wander around the Target in Elmhurst after getting my diagnosis from a rheumatologist in the area. I don’t want to go home, to be by myself. Target is crowded, as usual. I like being surrounded by people and not being expected to speak to anyone. I had chronic pain for about a year before I knew what to call it. My younger sister and Mami also had psoriatic arthritis for years before I started developing symptoms. In 2018, when I woke up with my ring finger curled into itself in the fetal position, I suspected that’s what I had, too.
My body never felt like mine. My body never felt like it belonged to me. I grew up feeling unsafe in my body. As a young girl, I wanted to walk around shirtless like I saw my father do. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t show off my body, too. I developed curves early. My parents’ fear of the dangers my body might expose me to made me ashamed. I was scared at first at the ways boys and grown men would try to make my body theirs. As I got older, I’d become more afraid of how easy it is to leave my body behind and let whoever do whatever with it.
Now, I feel betrayed by my body. It was already difficult to want my body. And now my body throbs in pain to remind me, whether I like it or not, that I’m in this body. My husband, says it frightens him when I make comments about not wanting to be in my body. There are days when getting out of bed are harder because I’m trapped by the pain. He loves my body, but my body and I are in conflict.
In the spring of 2019, Dr. S., my rheumatologist, suggested I reduce my stress and take up walking as a form of exercise. My weight has always been a cause for concern for doctors. My weight is what doctors see first. I developed psoriatic plaque several years before the joint pain but doctors insisted they were rashes due to my fatness and friction. When Dr. S. tells me to start walking, I already have discernable joint pain.
I walked on my street for a few blocks until I hit the park on Skillman Ave with the farmers’ market. The streets are lined with brick apartment buildings and trees sprouting green leaves and white flowers. The 7 train rumbled overhead. I found an empty bench and within seconds of sitting I’m weeping. My body aches. My hands, my knees, my feet—they throb. I can’t remember my body without the pain. I wake up with my wrists drumming, beating like I’m holding my heart in my hands. My knee pain sometimes keeps me up at night. I’ve run out of ways to say I’m in pain.
A doctor didn’t tell me I had “trigger finger.” I googled it and decided that’s what I had because my finger matched the images. When I woke up with my ring finger making its own fist, I took the Q60 on Queens Blvd to my primary care physician in Elmhurst. The traffic on Queens Blvd was heavy but expected. Cars honked and swerved in and out. The bus got packed with every stop, passengers pushed past each other, all looking for a bit of reprieve from the rain outside. My first mistake was showing up to the clinic without an appointment. There wasn’t a doctor available and urgent care wouldn’t be open until the evening.
“What am I supposed to do about this?” I showed the receptionist my bent finger. The finger didn’t hurt, but I couldn’t move it, couldn’t force it to expand, to open, to let go.
“Make an appointment or come back for urgent care,” the receptionist said and called the next person in line.
My second mistake was googling my symptoms and looking at the images on my way back home. The Q60 basically stops at every block—that’s a lot of time to look at images of knotted joints. After a while, arthritic hands on my phone screen turned into gnarled tree roots twisting and turning in different directions.
The earliest appointment with my primary care physician is weeks away. By the time I make it back to the doctor for my 15-minute appointment, my ring finger has unfurled, and I have no physical evidence of my pain to show the doctor. My visit lasts less than 5 minutes. She takes my hands in hers, looks at the tops of my hands, looks at my palms, and prescribes anti-inflammatory pills, tells me to lose weight, and sends me on my way. I didn’t even have time to explain the numbness in my hands. I couldn't remember the words to describe the tingling sensation in my hands. I couldn’t describe the prickling that woke me up in the middle of the night. I’m questioned if the pain I felt was really that bad. I rode the bus back, deflated. My hands got heavier with every stop the Q60 made.
About a year later, Dr. S. suggests that the development of the arthritis symptoms is likely triggered by the stress I experience due to my career.
“Stress can cause flare ups. Have you been under a lot of stress lately?”
“I’m a CUNY professor,” I say holding my breath waiting for some accusation about what a nice cushy job I have. My immigrant guilt starts to show as my eyes water, afraid of getting scolded for how ungrateful I must sound. I start to think that maybe I’m making up the pain, that maybe the pain is not real. Instead, the doctor makes a note on her clipboard and says, “No job is worth getting sick. What about your family life? Is that stressful?” I can only see half of Dr. S’s face but the tenderness in her soft brown eyes makes me believe she really cares. Tears pool on the edges of my face mask.
I don’t like walking as a form of exercise for my physical or mental health. I don’t like taking walks without knowing where I’m going. I need a destination, an end point. Fatigue is a common symptom of many chronic illnesses. Because of this, I need to rest. I can’t tell the difference anymore between depression fatigue, chronic illness fatigue, burnt out fatigue, and covid fatigue but I need to sit down occasionally. I’ve mapped routes that include benches along the way. There aren’t many places to sit. The further I get from my apartment, the fewer spaces there are to rest.
The air smells like burnt bread as I walk past the Burger King and Korean coffee shop on Queens Blvd. I’m waiting to take the bus to meet a friend in Manhattan. Although it’d be much faster to take the 7 train, my knees can’t take the four flights of stairs to the platform. On good days, when my body is strong, I can manage the stairs if I take my time. But going slow on subway stairs isn’t really a thing in NYC. The 7 train stop by my apartment doesn’t have an elevator or an escalator. Because I’m afraid of falling, I opt for the bus, when I can help it. On the bus, a half hour might take an hour or longer, depending on traffic.
“See you soon!” I text a friend, knowing quite well it definitely won’t be “soon.” Taking the bus means I’m rarely on time. The view from the Queensboro Bridge is beautiful. The bus’s dirty windows give the Manhattan skyline a filter that mutes the bright blue sky. The bus is crowded but I tuck myself in the corner next to a one-seater and the back door. As I exit, I need to climb over a small shopping cart blocking the door. I trip and stumble outside, holding on to the door handles for dear life. My wrists pop like bubble wrap. I ask the aunty whose bag I’ve tripped over, and whose contents are now on the bus floor, if she’s okay. A man holding the door open says, “She’ll be fine. Are you okay?” I nod and realize I’d been crying.
Dr. S. reminds me that I need to reduce my stress. She says this in an ongoing pandemic as Roe v. Wade is overturned. I don’t leave my apartment for days after the Supreme Court decision because I don’t know how. It’s been a month since the Uvalde mass shooting, it’s been a month and a half since the Buffalo mass shooting. “How do I reduce my stress?” I message her. “I am afraid to be alive,” I say that part to myself and whimper. About a third of my students have stopped coming to class. I keep getting work emails about filling out this form and about using this system and that system and all the systems to contact students who’ve ghosted. Soon, students will return and I’ll get more work emails about all the illnesses—physical and mental—about all the deaths in the families, about all the grief and pain that’s made it difficult to complete assignments on time and they’ll ask for extensions and sob in my office and ask for more time. “Where do I find more time? To reduce stress?” I want to ask my doctor.
I don’t leave my apartment for days and I play Mario Party Superstars for hours. I set the CPUs to “easy” because I need to win. Someone smokes below my apartment window and they might as well be smoking in my living room, sitting on my couch, watching me press the buttons on the controller over and over and over again because I don’t really know what I’m doing.
I can hear the 7 train whistling in the distance. I can hear the train. I don’t hear cars honking, children screaming, aunties cackling, doors slamming, dogs barking, or scooters speeding. I can hear the train—where is everyone? I wonder. Maybe they don’t know how to leave their apartments either.
I listen to audiobooks as I walk around Sunnyside. As the world gets louder so do the thoughts in my head and apparently only a louder voice in my ears can quiet them. I listen to Daphne Palasi Andreades’ Brown Girls as I walk to the post office to drop off a package for my sister in Chicago. I’m holding on to the tote bag so hard that my hand cramps but I don’t realize it until I have to let go of the bag. I was in a workshop once where the writing instructor told us that grief lives in our bones. In that post office, I wondered if that’s why I hadn’t noticed my clenched fist ache—I was in pain all the time, pain lived in me, what difference did more pain make? I walk east to Queens Puppy to look at the dogs in the display window. I want a dog, but I don’t want to take care of a dog. I walk by the plant store on Greenpoint Ave. and can’t stand by the window because the street is getting more crowded with children and young people rushing to get as far from their school as possible and with señoras with their grocery carts squeezing by to catch the bus. I haven’t been walking long but I need to sit down. I’m hit with a wave of fatigue and it’s now taking every ounce of energy I have to not let go and collapse on the ground. I sit on a bench next to an Asian elderly woman underneath the Sunnyside arch. She’s rubbing her knees and I want to do the same but I’m afraid it’ll look like I’m making fun of her or worse, she’ll want to make small talk.
I’m fighting back tears on the corner of Greenpoint and 48th Ave as I wait for the Q39 bus. In my ear buds, the narrator of Brown Girls says: “A desire to escape, to run far away, overcomes us. But we are good girls—we force ourselves to stay. Because we’re the ones who’ve made it, haven’t we? We’re the ones who have worked so hard…But for what? And for who?” I’m on my way to work but I want to go home. When I’m overwhelmed and lonely like this, I want to go home to Mami. I want Mami to rub my bones, to carve them out of me, soak them, repair them, and assemble me anew. I haven’t run home bawling for Mami since I was a child. When I text Mami that college is hard, that I’m broke/n in graduate school, that the professor life I thought would save us all isn’t it, she tells me, “mi’ja, regresense.”
I’m terrified that having left home in the first place was for nothing. I can’t come home empty handed. I’ve been away for so long, missed so much. I need to atone and can only come home with a fix, a solution. As the eldest, I was sent out to gather information, to report back on what I’ve learned, and to tell them how to make it. But now I’m lost, so I’ve stayed away. How do I come home only to report that I don’t know how “we make it”? I stay away because I’m a good girl, I am good, and I don’t know for what or for whom.
The Q39 bus is cramped. I grip the pole above me—my fingers and wrists throb. If the bus driver slams the brakes, my hand won’t be able to hold me. The voice in my ears echoes, “Brown girls, brown girls, brown girls.” We drive past the elementary school, past the high school, past the view of the Empire State Building wedged between the Queensboro Correctional Facility and LaGuardia Community College.
I see on Twitter that pharmacies are refusing to fill some prescriptions of “abortifacient drugs.” Shortly after, I get a text from CVS saying that my medication is “not available at the moment.” I do a google search to learn if my medication is considered an “abortion causing” drug. According to google, a scary amount of prescription drugs can cause a miscarriage, including the one I take twice a day. I worry about having to get off my medication if my husband and I get pregnant. I can’t comprehend the possibility of being consumed by joint pain while simultaneously growing life inside me. I panic that I’ll pass on this pain to another person. Minutes later, I receive another text from CVS notifying me my prescription is available for pickup and I don’t know how to feel.
“Que bonita herencia les he dejado,” Mami texts after I tell her my body aches all the time. I’m on my walk to LaGuardia Community College, which is about a mile from where I live. I’m practicing going on a mile walk and not looking like a hot mess at the end. That last part is important because I have to go back to in-person teaching soon. I’m afraid of getting COVID because Psoriatic Arthritis is an autoimmune disease. I convince myself that I can walk a mile a day, no problem. But, actually, lots of problems. I still get fatigued—not the assumed “I’m a fat person with no stamina” fatigue but the “living with chronic pain requires my body work overtime all the time” fatigue. Direct routes to work don’t have many places to sit. If I walk alongside the more residential streets, there are some stairs where I can rest. A lot more ledges have spikes now. On good days, when my body is strong, I can walk to the C-Building on Thomson Ave., no problem. On more challenging days, it’s a physical and emotional battle. On those days, I walk alongside the much busier Queens Blvd. so I can rest on the benches in bus shelters.
My husband often accompanies me on longer walks. On good days, the walks are nice. We talk, we laugh, we stop at the bodega for a cold bottled water, we walk further into Long Island City to the bookstore and the salad place next door. On tougher days, I’m like a child throwing a tantrum when he pushes me to walk a little bit more and I blubber that “I don’t want to, and you can’t make me.”
I don’t understand my doctors insistence that I lose weight to see if that’ll cure me. But I get that my age and existing health conditions can complicate pregnancy. My husband and I walk together, toward the possibility of growing our family.
I used to pride myself on having a high threshold for pain. I grew up in a household with shared trauma and great individual needs. With everyone hungry for so much without sometimes having the means for the basics, it became increasingly easier for me to carry my pain, tuck it into the cracks and crevices within, to absorb it in my bones—forcing them to expand to fit the pain I didn’t know how to release.
When Dr. S. asks me how much pain I feel, I don’t know how to categorize and measure the ache that lives inside me. She asks me to keep a log of the pulsing, the thrumming, the fire in my bones so we can begin assessing and then managing the pain. I’m afraid that if I let myself feel the full force of the pain, I will shatter and won’t want to put myself back together again.
My husband is a kind person. He plants sunflowers in buckets and lines them along the fence of our concrete front yard in Sunnyside. He flies butterfly kites at Rockaway Beach along the Atlantic Ocean. He fusses over me—holds my hand when we walk down the streets, walks in front of me going down subway stairs in case I fall, insists on carrying all the groceries even when I argue I can help, massages my hands at night before we drift to sleep.
We walk and we walk until Sunnyside has become a maze but I don’t lose the weight and we don’t get pregnant. With every passing day, I’m having more trouble lifting and holding jars. “How am I supposed to hold a baby?” I shout and bury myself in my husband’s chest. We cry.
We’re both learning to live with my psoriatic arthritis disability. We argue and make up when its tough and neither of us know what to do. I want to make him my home, make him bigger than the world so I can hide inside him. He begs and pleads with me to tell him how to fit all of me in his arms. I retreat because it’s not fair, it’s not right, it’s not healthy to demand this from him. He squeezes my hand and asks me to “come back” so we can go on a walk around Sunnyside.
Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez (she/they) is a writer and educator living in Queens, New York. They are a Mexican immigrant, raised in Cicero, Illinois. Their stories have been published in Newtown Literary, Strange Horizons, The Acentos Review, Longreads, Okay Donkey, Reckon Review, Mixed Mag, HAD, and elsewhere. Sonia’s writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fiction, and Best Microfiction. Follow them on Twitter @RodriguezSoniaA.