This piece contains a discussion of death, suicidal ideation, disordered eating, and body checking. Please take care of yourself while reading.
Melodrama
I think I might be dying.
I had this thought after I went to the emergency room last week. They took five vials of my blood and a tablespoon of pee the color of rust and a CT of my abdomen. While I laid in a cubicle with my dad, who was dressed in his funeral/work attire of a black suit and white shirt, I begged whoever was listening in the cosmic realm that they would find something. I’d be gleeful if it were appendicitis. I wouldn’t mind if it were a bowel obstruction. I’d probably cry if it were a parasite, but they can treat those, right? Even a malignant lump on one of my organs would make me crack a grin.
There’s nothing hiding inside my body that’s going to kill me, at least not according to the emergency room doctors or the three gastroenterologists I’ve seen. There’s no diseased organ full of pus that could burst at any moment, there’s no sneaky little tumor hiding inside my stomach, and there’s certainly no obstruction in my bowels—all fifteen feet of them.
I still think I might be dying.
Before I went to the emergency room, I looked at my body in the mirror—all my spindly spine bones and the curvature of my hip bones and also my shin bone that just started showing through my skin & leg hair. My body looked the kind of skinny I relentlessly, recklessly pursued as a teenager and it made me feel like crying. I think the body I longed for all my adolescence simply looks like the body of a dying person.
Sometimes I feel like I have already died. I like to try to disassociate from the pain which usually happens only when I use the shower head to have an orgasm or I take a full dose of my insomnia medicine or I forget to drink water and feel floaty. Just enough like a ghost to think I’ve already died. Most days my pain puts me on a descending elevator to the seventh circle of hell. Once I get there, I try to act very sorry to whatever god-like entity I pissed off but he doesn’t listen to my apology. Somewhere between the third and fourth month of daily pain I decided that god/God is probably a man because only a man with a large ego could so pathologically ignore the pain of someone in a female body. Two of my gastroenterologists were men, one of which had an ego large enough to keep interrupting me when I talked about my pain and the other who told me repeatedly to take a new medicine and call him back in a week.
I’m probably dying because I keep fantasizing about when I will finally get to be admitted to the hospital. I would really like to crawl underneath a white sheet and go to sleep until someone with an M.D. tells me that they believe me and can explain why I’m in pain.
You might be thinking I have an eating disorder. Technically, you’d be right. I have an eating disorder but that’s not what’s killing me, I promise. I’m not purposefully restricting what I am eating (anymore). There is something in my body that makes me feel perpetually full and causes my abdomen to hurt when I eat. I don’t know what it is because I haven’t earned my white coat yet. If I were to ever earn my white coat then I’d be just another man joining the ranks of physicians who studied the bodies of other white men in the name of science. I want no part in that, so I’m stuck showing my body to men who don’t quite seem to understand it.
I’m not sure what to do with my life if I’m dying. There’s only a year left of college. I think it would reflect nicely on the deceased me if I finished college before I died. I know it would make my family proud that I managed to finish my degree, even if I never got to use it. I think if I were dying I might like to do all of the dangerous things that I don’t do because of how expensive medical care is and how likely it is I would do the things wrong. I’d like to go ice skating again and learn how to roller skate backwards. I don’t know if I would like skiing or snowboarding better, but I’d like to go visit my friend in Colorado and find out. I could try hangliding while I’m there. Or I could go South and scuba dive. I wouldn’t care if I broke my fingers or toes or nose doing deadly activities because I wouldn’t need to use them for much longer.
I’d like my death to be easy for everyone involved. I’d throw away the two dicks in my dresser because you can’t donate those, but I can donate a closet full of men’s clothes. I’d pack the remnants of my femininity into a suitcase and put too many books into a box so that when my dad went to pick it up he could curse me another time. I’d leave detailed instructions about the funeral (compost me and plant a tree) so that my family wouldn’t have to sit together and wonder what I would want read and sung. I think I’d want a little Bible verse on my headstone because everyone I know who’s dead has a Bible verse on their headstone and it comforts me to read a verse I forget the moment I walk away. I’d like Christian hymns about death to be sung at my funeral, the kind of songs that make your throat catch even if you’re not singing them at a funeral because they remind you of seeing your childhood pet again or dying without actually dying. I guess if I died I’d probably die to my parents & family a woman and I’d just have to be okay with that. I hope I get a penis in heaven/hell/the afterlife/my next reincarnation.
It’s the least god could do for me.
I’m not really sure what the etiquette for writing about chronic pain/illness is. Do I sound whiny, complaining about my tummy for n godforsaken pages? I don’t want you to think I’m imagining or overexaggerating my pain. I’m really not looking for sympathy. I don’t think I’m dying, I just wish I were.
I think if I were actually dying my brain would scream something like this: WHY ME HOW CAN THIS BE HAPPENING TO ME I’M TOO YOUNG TO DIE I’M TOO HEALTHY TO DIE BUT IT’S NOT FATAL I KNOW THERE IS A TREATMENT CAN’T YOU SIGN ME UP FOR A CLINICAL TRIAL PLEASE PUT ME IN DEBT AND CUT ME OPEN AND DIG DEATH OUT OF ME.
My brain right now sounds a little more like: WHY DOES MY BODY HURT LIKE THIS I DON’T KNOW HOW I CAN BE SO YOUNG & SO SICK I AM TURNING 21 AND I DON’T FEEL LIKE DOING ANYTHING EXCEPT SITTING HERE IN A GODFORSAKEN PAIN I CANNOT EXPLAIN.
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A History of my Dying
The first time I died was when I was three or four years old and the church preschool made me sit with the teachers during recess because I misbehaved. I tore up my nap mat and got pee-shy about the toilet between two adjoining classrooms and probably hit a kid or two. Even after I changed schools, I kept misbehaving and sitting out and being alone.
One April when I was about twelve we drove home from school and there was a green funnel cloud in the sky. The tornado got bigger as we drove towards it, towards the home that lived right by the tornado. I wanted to cry or throw up or shit all at once. When we got home the trash cans were spinning in circles on our driveway and I tried to drag them up the driveway to where they belonged until my dad screamed at me to stop.
The school guidance counselor called me once, on summer vacation. She wanted to talk to me in person about her concerns about me and from the sound of her voice I knew it was about my being gay. Christian women take on a certain air of disappointment when talking about someone like me—hushed tones and long pauses and lots of thinking before they speak so that they don’t say something wrong. She said a lot of wrong things anyways and I lied & died.
On Sunday, I went to church where Lauren died and Lucas was born. That death didn’t feel so bad.
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In Case I Live
In case I don’t die, I still brush my teeth twice a day and put medication on my acne and take the trash out when it stinks and leave the penny I dropped four weeks ago on my floor because it’s lucky now. I refill my medications and schedule appointments with my therapist and go see my dentist twice a year even though I hate the dentist. I put on lotion after my showers and do breast exams as often as I remember and make an appointment for my Pap smear. If I live to see twenty-two, I wanna have all my teeth in my head and a clean bedroom to come home to.
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When Hurting Starts to Feel Good
Sometimes pain takes me in its arms and I don’t fight it. I don’t employ any coping mechanisms or beg it to go away. I don’t cry about the way my body feels or contemplate going to the emergency room. I just lay there and bask in the feeling of hurt and count down the hours until sunset. I stare at a cup of water two feet away from me and do not get up to get it because I don’t want to disturb the feeling of hurt. Sometimes pain gives me an excuse to step away from living, especially scary things like:
– seeing my friends &
– going to church on a wednesday night &
– going to Nebraska to be a woman in STEM &
– breaking up with my therapist &
– being un-hurt
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On My Female Body
I think a lot about being a woman when I’m sick. Questions like: is the answer to my pain hiding in my uterus and how has my body stored the trauma of being a woman and why is being a woman traumatic and why are so many young women in pain and mostly just why am i a young woman in pain or why am i a woman at all
IBS isn’t associated with an increased mortality rate but I’m wondering if maybe the researchers haven’t looked that hard into the ways women die.
Stress is a trigger for IBS and there’s another question I have: why are young women so stressed out and the answer to that is simple, at least for me. It’s got something to do with the fact that my dad doesn’t know how to use the dishwasher or fold his own underwear and probably a lot to do with the fact that I’ve been grocery shopping for my family since I was in elementary school and cooking dinner since I was fourteen and sometimes the only way my dad can say he misses me is that he’s hungry and wishes I were there to cook.
Valentine’s Day
On Valentine’s Day, I drive to the pharmacy to pick up an antidepressant because I’m a young woman in a lot of pain.