M ostly, walking down New York streets in spring sunshine is the cinematic, euphoric ideal of what it is to be alive. It’s the thing I looked forward to for decades. It meant to me, back then as a kid in Ireland, listening to songs about Lexington and 14th Street, freedom: an almost deranged amount of freedom.
Sometimes, though, walking down New York streets in spring sunshine is agonising in both a physical and spiritual sense. This may be so, for instance, if you have no health insurance and are very stupid. Like me.
That was in February 2023. I had been in increasingly acute pain for days, but because of a stubborn ability to ignore bodily breakdown and also a reluctance to spend money on healthcare in the US when I was only visiting, I kept going until I collapsed into an urgent care centre that I luckily passed one evening as I was dragging myself with manic good cheer to another dinner, despite being barely able to walk. After a consultation and a dash to the ER, I had a minor surgical procedure, was fixed up and back in my bed within 12 hours with the small traditional sack of US opioids I had been sent home with.
I was put on a course of heavy duty antibiotics. I recovered from the original illness within weeks, but the antibiotics caused a dreadful reaction in me, a full-body depletion that meant I completely lost my appetite for approximately six months and lost a good deal of my body mass with it. For the first time in my life, I was losing weight without meaning.