Post-Cholecystectomy
Last month’s workshop was cancelled because I had to have my gallbladder removed the next day. My surgery, while routine, was significant.
The pain that preceded my surgery was some of the most intense physical pain I have experienced. I struggled to eat and mostly did without. Even water began to cause discomfort and struggle. I lost a significant amount of weight in a short amount of time.
In short, I suffered.
But I am aware of great privilege in what I suffered. My sister, who had driven me to the emergency room, and I waited less than ten minutes to be called back after we arrived. I described my symptoms, first to the nurse and then the doctor who quickly followed behind her.
“Do you still have your gallbladder?” the doctor asked. I affirmed that I did.
“I don’t expect you will for much longer.”
This wasn’t news in the strictest sense. I had Google. There’s a Reddit forum dedicated to gallbladders. Even though the likeliest culprits of gallbladder troubles are “fatty foods” and my diet didn’t resemble that, the symptoms themselves were textbook.
As the nurses began their tasks, prepping me for blood draws, setting me up on an IV and pain medicine, I began to shake.
It wasn’t in my head. I wasn’t making it up. They’re going to help me.
To my great embarrassment, I began to cry, a mix of anxiety, fear, and relief crashing through my willful insistence on holding it together. The nurses who watched me offered warm blankets and reassurance, patting my arms and legs and letting me know it was okay to cry and that they would take care of me.
I believe that this should be everyone’s experience when they report their suffering, but I know that it is not. It has not even always been my experience with doctors. My pain was believed and validated, but even before that, to get to go to a safe hospital a short distance for my house, this is a privilege too.
To have been driven by someone and able to leave my young daughter with yet someone else, so that I could attend to my pain without being tied up in my motherhood, this is a wealth my bank accounts cannot measure.
Following some tests and imaging, the doctor concluded what he’d initially diagnosed, and I was referred to surgery for scheduling. When my pain and troubles had started, removal seemed unthinkable and undesirable, but sitting there then, it sounded like a welcome answer.
I had my surgery scheduled as quickly as they could get me in. Another blessing, because I didn’t have to argue with my workplace, I didn’t have to find childcare. I knew who would take me and pick me up and make sure I got my medications. I could take off as much time as I needed, I could hand off the responsibility of getting my daughter to school and home and fed without needing to worry. I had more hands than I needed.
These are simple things maybe, but that doesn’t mean that everyone has them. These are things that I have not had to worry about in my lifetime, but I can see how easy it could be to end up without them.
I got to have surgery and then come home and sleep and sleep and sleep. That was three weeks ago.
I feel so much better! Is my answer when anyone asks.
And I do. I do feel much better, but I am not wholly well.
On the other side of my surgery, the intense pain has subsided, but there is a lot of pain and much more discomfort that remain. I continue to struggle with food, bouncing always between hungry and nauseated. I do not feel like myself, still, and I remain very tired, the regular lengths of my days becoming unbearably long as I move through them.
For weeks now, my mind has been penned, circumscribed to the size of my body. Each minutia of physical feeling I turn over and examine. Is this normal? Should I be worried?
Will this end? There are whole minutes where I become lost in a place where I cannot recall not feeling this way. It is like falling down a well, a deep place where the light is somewhere I will never be able to reach again.
It’s not that bad. I think of the scale of grimacing faces at the doctor’s office, how the nurses would ask me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. How would I rate this pain?
I have seen this scale before, though not in my surgeon’s office, somewhere else, a version that haunts me. Ten, it said, meant unimaginable pain.
Unimaginable.
It’s not ten then, not even at it’s worse was it ten, it can’t be ten. A number I cannot reach no matter how big my imagination is.
Not nine either then, because I can imagine worse than this. The square pole of a stop sign through a kidney, that would be worse than this. Orbital sockets shattered by concrete stops.
Then there are the things I have seen in pictures, a genocide half a world away, and the things that are done to bodies during them.
Not eight either, because there’s so much that I’ve seen here too. I think of the limp body that dangled the wrong direction when they pulled it from the other car, whatever that was would be worse than this.
Not seven, my mother’s cough after the chemo and the way it shakes her whole body, how it takes her somewhere else. Two years since the diagnosis and she goes to school every day, a portable oxygen tank on her arm, the size of a large handbag, the plastic cord of it tethering her as she teaches.
Couldn’t be six, because I know cures can be as bad as the poison. The pins and rods of a re-constructed ankle. The screw, as long as my two hands stacked together, that put her hips back together.
Five then? Not hardly, that only on the worst days of all, when my abdominals insisted on the birth or eviction, or perhaps evisceration, of that organ.
Four though, four makes it seem so small.
So, I look into my closet and shed some tears, the thought of getting dressed, avoiding the press on my incisions internal and external, and then putting on a brave face I do not quite feel too exhausting, too impossible.
There was a time, after my car accident, when the pain was worse and my mobility still bad, something stuck in my spine that had changed the way I moved. I complained to a friend about the things I was afraid I would never do again.
“Isn’t this what aging is though? Collecting chronic pains until we die?” he said. I froze.
I don’t know. I hope not.
Four then, but mostly not. A three maybe, maybe less. My whole world only as big as my body, as small as my suffering. I remember being young and believing that our goals should be something along the lines of ending suffering. Removing pain.
I pick the slacks with a stretchy waistband, a long sweater the color of a Christmas tree, and I find the face I need. I am alive. There are not alternatives.
