Going back to St. Paul’s Hospital now is sort of like going to a college for an alumni weekend. As soon as I walk in the door, people start saying hello to me. I see a lot of faces that look familiar but that I don’t recognize. I nod at those faces. Those faces nod back. I engage in perfunctory catch-ups with the faces that I do actually recognize. Hey, how have you been? What’s new? You don’t say! We display a shared admiration and awe for the facility that we are standing in. Oh sure, this is an old hospital, but it’s still great, you know? They ask me how I’m doing and what’s new in my life. “Didn’t you used to have a beard?” a young doctor in the Cardiac Unit playfully asked me last weekend. I told him that I did not have a beard while I was a “student” at “St. Paul’s University”—not officially, I didn’t—but that I usually neglected my shaving responsibilities, which is probably why he thought I had a beard. I feel comfortable and safe and strangely at-home when I’m at St. Paul’s now. I guess I probably always will. Even the shrill noises and rhythms and aggravating tics of the place—the bright, repeating DOOT-DOOT-DOOT of the blood pressure machine; the bizarre announcements over the P.A. system (“Code Red, Providence, Level One, Code Red”)—are all soothing to me.

I was back at St. Paul’s last Sunday because I’d woken up on Saturday night with “night sweats.” Night sweats are when you wake up and realize that you have been sweating mysteriously and profusely while asleep. Most people have night sweats from time to time. They’re not a big deal usually. I had night sweats every damn night for six straight months before I was diagnosed with endocarditis in early 2014. Looking back, the night sweats were my body’s way of trying to tell me that something was seriously wrong with me.

Though I’ve gotten very good at living alone, this was one of those instances where I felt the void in my life. Cats are lovely, but they’re useless in these kinds of moments. I got out of bed and shivered in the 2 a.m. darkness. The cats woke up, too. They sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me. They blinked impassively. “Idiots,” I whispered, and meant it somewhat affectionately. I tried not to think about what the night sweats might mean, tried not to be afraid—not yet; it was too early to be afraid—and tried to tell myself that there had to be an explanation for this. I peeled off the sweat-soaked T-shirt, then found a fresh shirt in the dresser drawer. I put it on. Then I got back into bed on the far side, away from the still-damp section of the sheets. I pulled the covers over me and blinked in the darkness like a worried owl.

After having my sternum sawed in half, after the installation of my prosthetic heart valve, and after two months (last April and May) of industrial-grade intravenous antibiotics every four hours 24 hours a day, my night sweats had stopped almost as suddenly as they had started.

The endocarditis was gone. Doctors told me that it could return, though it wasn’t likely. I asked the Cardiac Unit doctor in the ER last Sunday (the one who had accused me of having a beard last year) how many cases of endocarditis he’d seen. His response: “Tons.” Almost all of the endocarditis, he said, happened in I.V. drug users. Using needles to inject drugs into your veins is apparently a terrific way to get an infection in your heart. “But in people who aren’t I.V. drug users, like yourself, endocarditis is extremely rare,” he said. Then he said that he’d seen only about five cases of endocarditis in non-I.V. drug users in the past year. Or maybe it wasn’t the past year; maybe he meant in his entire career, which, considering his young age, couldn’t have been much longer than the past year. Either way, his point was that it was rare. A doctor friend told me that me getting a heart infection like the one I’d had was like winning a kind of terrible lottery. And, while it was certainly possible that I could have a recurrence, it was as unlikely as “winning the same lottery a second time.” “And how often do people win the same lottery twice?” my friend asked. “Not very often?” I offered. “That’s right. Not very often.”

*

Within minutes of my arrival I had a newly printed I.D. bracelet on my wrist. Then I found a chair in the communal waiting area that appeared to be relatively clean and I sat down. There was a man sitting a few seats away who was wearing an outfit that he appeared to have stolen off a scarecrow. He slumped in his chair, his long, oily hair hanging in front of his face like a shiny black curtain. I made a mental note to wash all the clothing I was wearing that day in extremely hot water when I returned to my apartment.

A few minutes later I was ushered into the ER examining area by a doctor. Blood was drawn. An EKG was administered. Chest X-rays were taken by a friendly guy named Ray. This is some VIP treatment, I thought. Things happened quickly at the start, though they’d slow down right quick, as they can do in the ER. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was at the beginning of a seven-hour “adventure” in the ER. And I would, eventually, get some news—some good, and some bad.