Let me see your scar (Day 9)

When I was 32 years old I got sick. It wasn’t flu sick, and it wasn’t cancer sick; it was the kind of sick that strikes like lightning and nearly kills you on the spot with no advance warning whatsoever.

I was on a business trip to a conference in Baltimore, and had become increasingly aware of a deep ache in my abdomen that worsened over the course of a few hours. I was at a company dinner, and all I wanted to do was climb into a hot bath.

Which I did, later that evening, but that didn’t do squat. I woke up the next morning, hours later than intended, feeling sicker than I’d ever felt, and things had gotten worse. The pain was no longer a tiny, aching seed, but full grown. It had stood up inside me and assumed full height.

So I did what any sensible person would: I called my doctor and asked her to phone in a prescription.

“You are sick, have a fever, and abdominal pain that’s gotten worse? Get to the ER. Stat.”

I almost went back to bed, and instead I called a cab (which ultimately saved my life). “Where would you take your daughter if she was sick?” I asked. And the driver dropped me off at the entrance to University of Maryland Medical Center.

I spent the requisite half day in the ER before being admitted. I’d rather not drag either of us through the battery of tests in the eternal flourescent daytime that is a hospital. A series of nurses and doctors came to my bedside to put me through a gentle interrogation, asking me the same questions, so much so that I wondered if being sick was a crime I had committed. As if they were waiting for me to break and finally come out with the truth.

Fact is, they just didn’t know what it was. They canceled out one diagnoses after another: pelvic inflammatory disorder, appendicitis, syphilis. And in the middle of the night, my blood pressure dropped to something like 60/40, which is like an entire river slowing to a stop.

They rushed me into surgery and I was relieved to leave the scene, to pass into that dark sub-celestial waiting room while they did what they had to do, the doctor telling me later he was sure I was on my way out for good. He unzipped me stem to stern, took out each of my internal organs and turned them over in his hands like fruit, looking for the bruised spot. There was nothing to see. Whomever had perpetrated this mess had vacated. It was, as my mother said, a case of “who did it and ran.” 

I had sepsis—gone “septic,” as it were, which is when something gets in and turns your whole body against you. The antibiotics are what saved me, drew me back to shore on a chemical tide like a red rescue boat. I came to in the ICU, fully intubated and disoriented, as if I’d woken up inside of someone else.

My mother was there, hand on my forehead, whispering to me that I was ok, even though she wasn’t sure I was. I squinted against the relentless daylight of those shadowless flourescents, before falling back asleep.

I was there for a week.

It wasn’t the sepsis that I spent weeks recovering from, but the surgery itself—I had a nine-inch scar that started right in the middle of me, hung a left around my navel, and then continued straight down. A fresh road cut through a field, laddered with staples like railroad ties. A door that had been forced open and just as quickly shut. I couldn’t sit up or lie down or do anything on my own, pinned at the center like a butterfly.

I made a full recovery, but the scar is mine to keep. It’s gotten both tougher and softer with time, the way anyone does. It’s no longer red and angry looking; it’s blended into and yet defines the landscape. I’m not ashamed of it. I often forget it’s even there, except for when a new lover runs a curious thumb along the edge. And during yoga, when I’m hovering above the mat and arc into a long, yawning stretch—I can feel the hem of it tightening, a single stitch pulling toward the earth.

 

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