Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: doctor

  • disembowelled

    For weeks after the diagnosis I was still having episodes of shock as deep as flashbacks, every single day. Every day at some point I went into a dazzled fugue of confusion and horror, while the same words whirled around me like three birds. I have cancer.

    Then the welter. Cancer? What? What do you mean, cancer? How could — No. That can’t be.

    Meanwhile I had been through a colonoscopy, and then an interior tattooing to guide the surgeon’s hand, I’d met with the surgeon who made breezy mention of maybe ‘whipping out the uterus’ in order to ‘have a look’ — been driven to hospital before dawn and woken up disembowelled. I woke up pegged out like a goatskin with six tubes leading into or out of me, and five holes in my sweet and private belly. I had not let that breezy surgeon get his knife into me, naturally: found a second, younger, doctor who did not say, ‘Don’t worry, I can do these in my sleep.’ I asked myself, which is going to cut me — in my sleep. The older white guy from an establishment family with photos of his kids in ski suits framed behind the desk? Or the young Asian Australian woman who’s had to work twice as hard to establish the same career. I had persevered when the referring doctor’s receptionists tried to shame me out of ‘wasting time’ with a second opinion and when one of them told me, it seems crazy to delay surgery at this point, I told her, round the knot in my throat, what seems crazy to me is: committing to this major surgery without getting a second opinion.

    This adventure turned out hilarious as well as just devastating. It felt overwhelming, colonizing, and grim. I did not lose myself. I told the gastroenterologist she ought to call herself “a colonoscopologist, cos it just has such great mouthfeel. It’s fun to say.” “It is!” she said, though her smile was wry.

    “And when you reach that point, which surely must arrive at some point in every day, where you find yourself climbing out the bathroom window at the back of the building going No more! I cannot stick anything else inside anyone else’s bottom! — why, then — you’re a colonescapologist.” In the hinterground of all these panda escapades the daily panic ran on and on. Ten minutes a day, utter annihilating shock: in which I woke up right back at the start like a terrible dream, unable to receive and to process the news. Meanwhile I had already been given an enema at six one morning, my first, and the nurse explained to me, very kindly as I lay naked on her table, “You must roll on your side and draw your knees up to your chest” and at the prospect of imminent anal penetration and the rapey feeling of being pierced against my will, thus losing this only form of virginity or intactitude or control remaining to me I started to shudder and shake and sob before I knew what I was doing, and I had to take hold of myself, as she was approaching with the implement. I told myself you need to really deeply relax and you only have a few seconds to do that — or this is gonna hurt.

    I somehow found the calm inside myself and took hold. I took a deep slow breath in and very slowly let it out and I did not turn away my mind, but paid attention where attention must be paid, breathing out slowly, letting it in. The nurse was gentle. I had told her my history, which came bubbling out in sheer terror as the moment of intrusion approached. Her name was Lisa and the other nurse was Lisa too and my gastroenterologist was called Leisa and they stood around me cheerfully as I began to cry and they all wore the same expression, it was a kind of puzzled helpfulness, and I wondered out loud, what is the collective noun for Lisas? My valour was in tatters but I flew it wide and high.

    After the ensuing procedure I woke up in a hospital, sporting my first and only tattoo. I’ve never pierced my ears and feel strongly protective of the body’s entirety. Three years are leaving that chaotic punker city I was finally a Berliner, sleekest of them all, submitting to this marking that was so far inside me no one ever would see it beyond the surgeon who would guide her blade by that mark, and then cut it out. “Make no mistake,” she said. “This is a very major operation. It’s going to take you some three months to recover.”

    10 days later, discharged from the hospital and sleeping in a friend’s bed while he slept on his foldout couch I was even still descending into the same panicked fugue at some point every afternoon. What, cancer? Who, me? Whaddaya mean… cancer. I had been into hospital, with the friend who drove all the way across town to pick me up at 5 in the morning, and sat with me until they checked me in, and then the surgeon greeted me at the theatre doors and they asked me would I get up and walk in, and I’d woken up in a beeping bed with five different tubes at various orifices some of them new coming out and going in, unable to move, too afraid to cough, with part of my bowel and one entire artery cut away forever. I finally had the caesarian scar I’d never found through childbirth of the baby who never came covered over close to my pubic bone, my belly was seeded with holes, one two three four five of them, one had a drainage tube spooling out to hang over the bed and the nurses came in to empty it. I learned all of their names, one of them the first night tried to drag me from my bed after I vomited violently right across the bed and I lay shivering with terror and pleading, please, it’s mostly water, I have eaten nothing in five days, can you just… mop me up a little and let me sleep, please don’t make me get up, I’ve just had surgery. This nurse said, “You’re going to have to pull your weight, my girl,” and I phoned my girlfriend and made her stay with me on the line by way of witness so nurse could not tug the painful umbilical line filled with yellowish and reddish fluid which after her too rough ministrations began to hang and the bandage holding it in filled up with blood, like a sac, and the stitch the surgeon had made to keep the drainage tube in place was nearly out. Even at this point, I was still reeling with the unreal, and though this news and its attendant traumas had progressed so very sharply that I had now left hospital and was creeping around my friend’s house learning to manage painkillers, a technology nearly entirely unfamiliar in my life — still at some point in every exhausted afternoon, panic descended with its highly focused sense of confusion and my mind flapped its big wings. Oh my god, I have — what? How can this be? In my own sweet and healthy body.

    On the last day in the hospital a kinder nurse arrived and told me, we are going to take that drain out now. She explained it does not end just under the skin, oh, no! of course, it goes clear down across my body to the bowel. I began to shake. And then — somehow, and I’ll never know how, at the end of everything, I found a strength that in my life I had never known. I who am unable to gouge a splinter of glass from my mother’s horned sole said, I will watch. And I decided to film it. And though I had to ask her to stop so I would not black out, after a few moments I could go on again, and let me tell you there is nothing on earth like the sensation of a thick tube being dragged out of one’s own body, it is a foreign object and feels so wrong and at the same time it resembles the feeling of a part of the self being dragged away, inch after inch, vomitous and painful. I watched and I listened and I asked her questions, and then it was gone.

    The collective noun for a Lisa is, it turns out, a decency. The decency of Lisas ensured that while I was under, which I had been so frightened for, there were only females in the room. Between the tattooing and the surgery I went back to painting class one last time. I made a self-portrait, in honour of my diagnosis. I told people. I published a story about it. People began to flock around the C-word, relieved and marveling. (There, but for her, go I!) I was carrying it for them and we could feel it. Every time somebody said, You got this, you are strong, what I wished they would say instead was, What do you need? I am thinking of you. Do you have someone to hug? How can I help?

  • walloped

    I went to have my hearing tested. This became necessary because a man had walloped me across the face: a man I loved. Needless to say, no man has ever hit me before and I’m damned if any man will again.

    Needless to say, I no longer love him.

    It was my fault as well. Not the blow, which remains inexcusable. The overheated situation in which it came. He had told me, all of a sudden over our omelettes at my place one summer morning, he thought he was falling in love with someone else. I refused to discuss it, threw him out within ten minutes, wouldn’t take his calls. So he went out on the fuck.

    The girl he’d found was married already yet carried condoms in her wallet. She was the kind of girl who rings a guy she likes very early in the morning to say, Hey. I just noticed I’m actually right in your street. I bought an extra coffee by mistake. What you haven’t had breakfast yet? Shall I drop round?

    Within three weeks it had run its course and she had dwindled to an obligation he still felt he should commit: he wanted to ferry her to drug therapy to make sure she would go; he felt if he cut her off, she might hurt herself. All that dreary jazz. He and I began to talk, gingerly. I was outraged and so hurt. One day we met on the riverbank and each brought a beer. We talked searchingly. Then he made a remark about her which I won’t repeat. It stung me to the bone: about her beauty. I threw my empty bottle at his feet and stalked away. He threw his empty bottle at me.

    Oh, we were unadmirable. Toiling in our longterm pain and both of us tipped by this turn in events into our oldest, most dysfunctional patterns. Fear of abandonment. Fear of violence. We argued that night, having followed each other down the street to his house, shouting like sailors, and then I stormed out and went tramping down the street with my hands stuffed in my pockets, muttering with rage. I fell in with a beautiful, soulful gay guy who was walking ahead of me. He said, Are you ok. I said, I’m not. Something horrible has happened and I feel furious and hurt. We started talking as we walked on and he went into a late-night shop and bought a two-euro bottle of vodka and we sat in the doorway of a Lebanese restaurant on the main road after they had closed and smoked a joint, my first ganja in five years, and drank our vodka. We went to an infamous dance club and talked and danced. Then I went back round my betrayer’s house, stoked up on alcohol and rage. I let someone let me in at the street door and jogged up the stairs and terrified him by pounding on his inner, apartment door. He opened it and I barged in. Where is she? I know she’s here.

    He was saying, She’s not here, Cathoel, I told you. I’m not seeing her anymore. But I wouldn’t listen, I couldn’t hear. I stalked about his tiny one room apartment spewing out my rage and pain. He was saying, You have to go, you can’t just come shoving your way into my private space. We can talk tomorrow. But I wouldn’t go. I wanted to make him as angry as I was. And I succeeded. He took my by the hair and tried to drag me towards the door. “You have to go!” This was more or less what I had wanted: vindication, proof, a release of the intoxicating vigour we all know, the most dangerous drug, that which fuels every mass shooting: righteous indignation. Oh, how dare he touch me. Oh, how he was a man.

    We began to wrestle. I imagine we woke the neighbours. I couldn’t stop from goading him but when he got goaded I screamed, almost triumphantly, Let go of me, let go, you brute.

    I remember in the delirium and loss of every control of this powerful night the tiny mouthfeel of the satisfying word ‘brute’ fat and meaty in my mouth.

    I said something about his bed, the bed he built for us and had now illegitimately shared. He pushed me onto it. I wouldn’t fall and he pushed me so hard I later found cuts along the sweet inside of the backs of my knees, that private, tender cave whose name I have so long loved to wonder about. Why is there no word in English for the inside of the elbow, the back of the knee? Do other cultures have a better way to love themselves than we do? The cuts took weeks to heal and then I had angry, flame-red welts for months. I flung my hands up in terror. He had gone into the stratosphere at last, this bullied child whose father whistled for him as though he had been a dog, this long-legged stranger chased through the village schoolyard for his sensitivity and height by his entire class all at once. “They hunted me,” he had told me, on one of the few occasions we talked about it. Now he drew his arm back and walloped. He hit me across the face. He hit me! Across the face! The signature that I am me. He hit me so hard a bruise rose up days later and stained me purplish green for several weeks. I wore it with an angry kind of prideful shame. I felt marked: a woman, after all. I was incensed. I got up and grabbed the most precious thing he had: his laptop computer, on which everything he’d made was stashed. I hurled it out the window and it came crashing into the parking lot below. He left me then. Ran outside and began peering over the edge. I locked him out. I was cold with terror. I thought he might kill me. I had that thought. I locked the balcony door behind him and this gave me the time to gather my things and get out of there. The man who had hit me was wringing his hands, he was crying, for his fucking computer, my ears ringing and my head on fire, I left him there and ran away and ran home with my cotton trousers torn across the front as though I had been raped, I saw people looking at me in the dark and then looking away, I was saying to myself, I will never forgive you for hitting me, I can’t believe you hit me, I’ll never forgive that you made me an object of desperate pity to all these strangers, I will never forgive.

    When I was gone the man whose computer I had destroyed had to climb down the scaffolding on the building and knock at a neighbour’s window, and the neighbour let him in, and he had to get a locksmith before he could gain access again to his own apartment, and I suppose he was carrying the smashed computer under his arm, but at the time, I didn’t care. Not that I didn’t care: I felt vindicated, I was glad.

    This was two years ago. We slowly tried to recover, we built on our inimical love, we tried to comfort each other: but it could not work out. That and the baby we had lost and some other griefs had stained us to the marrow so that like a series of transparent microscope slides you could have sliced our love thinly and seen the mark of these traumatic events in every cell.

    Now I had noticed my hearing was fuzzy. I wasn’t sure if this was just the flu. The Berlin flu this autumn that doesn’t go away. It lingers. I noticed because I was dating. I met men in bars and struggled to hear what they were saying. I was always leaning in, forming my hand into a trumpet like some old warhorse chaperone in a turban and lace in a country house in England before the Great War.

    The ear, nose, and throat specialist was Russian. He spoke careful German. I confessed my foul story. “Es tut mir sehr leid für Sie,” he said, courteously: I am very sorry this happened to you. I said, I’m not sure whether the blow might have damaged – my hearing (it was hard to get the words out, hard to let this thought form in my mind) – or whether it might just be age. You know?

    My Russian doctor widened his eyes. Sitting in his white lab coat he said, “But you are young! You are a beautiful young woman!” He drew his stool between my knees and separated them with his own. He leaned in on the pretence of examining me and said, “Sie schwitzen!”

    You’re sweating.

    “Yes,” I said, shrinking back but already questioning myself. This must surely be normal? His assistant behind us gave no sign of dismay when he put himself between my knees. “I rode here on my bike,” I said, helplessly explanatory, almost apologetic: “It’s warm, once you get moving.”

    The Russian doctor took a clean handkerchief from his pocket. He padded it tenderly up and down my neck, behind the ear. Then he returned it to his hidden, inner pocket, carrying my DNA, and leaning in to prod his old-fashioned steel devices into my left ear and then my right, one device after another, while I sat there with my knees parted for him unable to say a word.

    There’s nothing wrong with your hearing, he told me, later in the hallway. I was sitting under a Turkish carpet on a loom which spelled out his name, with the prefix, ‘Dr’, in wool. His assistant had put me in headphones and tested which tones I could hear, and – as they grew louder – how soon. He showed me his chart. “This is normal hearing. And this is you. I think you just have some inflammation from your cold. Actually your hearing is very good.”

    Thank you, I said. I could not wait to get away. The trees outside the surgery window were shifting in a silent wind. The doctor twinkled at me. “A pleasure,” he promised. “And if you need to come back again, for any reason at all – dann zahlen Sie gar nix. Then, you pay nothing whatsoever.” And so I had to thank him again.

  • jet laggard

    I wonder if anyone else has trouble adjusting after travel, it would be reassuring to me to hear about it if you have. It’s more than just jet lag. Arriving in Brisbane I was paralysed for days with a kind of deep-down soul sickness that made everything strange. The familiarity made things seem stranger. When I first got to Bangkok six weeks later, on my way back, I felt felled like a tree. Spent two days asking myself why on earth did I want so desperately to come here, where I am a stranger, where I speak only three words of the language, where I know nobody. Then when it came time to leave I cried all the way to the airport, my throat stinging. I had fallen in love with the dense tropical world in the rainy season that is familiar from Jakarta in the lost land of childhood. Berlin unfolds its sweet insouciant self, the guy in the topless gleaming car who drove by awfully slowly, his back-seat passenger a giant stuffed elephant, its velvet trunk resting familiarly on his shoulder. The man trundling past in a wheelchair by shuffling his feet rapidly forward on the ground, a beer stuck lewdly upright between his thighs, tattoos all up the sides of his neck and around under his ears and he was singing in a thick accent, absently to himself as he went past, “I did it… myyyy wayyyyy.” Yet the salty parks and shifting low green German trees hardly reach me, I feel estranged and alienated, the apartment in which no one has now slept for two whole months smells of masonry and dust and I can hardly leave my door, not even when the sun shines, not even when I know this won’t any longer be very often the case and that though a Brisbane winter is a winter in inverted commas I have actually by staying away so long let myself in for the nightmare that makes me want to lie down and cry: a year of continuous winter. My dislocated finger which was unattended two weeks while I was in the tropics has begun to sting so badly it wakes me out of my jet lagged sleep. I wonder if I’ll ever play guitar again. I wonder where I’ll live. I wonder what would have happened to a homebody like me if my folks hadn’t moved me from the town where I was born (Melbourne) to the desert on the far edge of Australia (Dampier) when I was eight months old. I learned to walk there, on the sand, and there is somewhere a picture of me and my Dad walking away from the camera side by side, my hand reaching right up and his reaching from his tall shoulder all the way down so we could hold hands. It was hard to leave him when I left. I felt the tearing in my chest as I stood up and walked away.