So. Welcome to my body! Come on inside. I’ll give you the nickel tour.
Bandages, post-trachelectomy, June 2017, © Deborah Copaken
Skip Notes
*1 Should you choose to google this, which I do not recommend, I cannot be held responsible for the trauma of that image gallery. I looked it up the day after mine was repaired, and now I can’t unsee those photos. Ever. You’ve been forewarned. I promise it will be described if not tastefully herein then with enough comic detachment to get us through it.
*2 I wanted Shuttergirl or Develop Stop Fix, but I was told the decision was not mine to make. Sad, since the book was about subverting the male gaze not capitulating to it, but hey: Here I am, back at my old home, Random House. Twenty years, seven books, three publishers, and one #MeToo movement later. New people are in charge now. It’s all water under sexism’s bridge.
ONE
Fireworks
JULY 2, 2017
I’m crawling around on the bathroom floor, picking up pieces of myself. These pieces are not metaphor. They are actual pieces. Plum-sized, beet-colored, with the consistency and sheen of chicken liver, three of them have shot out of me like shells from a cannon.
I am bleeding out. But my brain, starved of blood and in shock at the sight of so much of it, cannot process this information. Instead, I’ve become convinced that the ordnance sliding around my bathroom floor are my internal organs, which I must rescue so someone can put them back inside me.
I head to the kitchen to hunt for Tupperware. Not just any Tupperware. The glass kind. Heaven forbid my liver and kidney should come into contact with BPAs. It does not occur to me, in my befuddled state, that had my internal organs actually fallen from my body, I would not have the pulse with which to rummage in my kitchen cabinet in search of a container to store them.
It is Saturday night—no, now Sunday morning, just after midnight—of the July Fourth weekend, 2017. Pads and underwear have become useless against these pyrotechnics, so it’s just me and my bathrobe, hemorrhaging. Outside, bootleg fireworks are erupting into the sky. Inside, gravity has forced another palm-sized chunk to plunge—splat!—onto the kitchen floor. And the rocket’s red glare, indeed: Happy Independence Day to me! (Added bonus, I’m mid-divorce.) I scoop up the large mass and put it in the glass container with the others.
With the blobs now safely stored in carcinogen-free glass on the top shelf of my fridge—I’ve seen enough medical procedurals to know about the importance, when transporting human organs, of picnic coolers—I call the answering service for my surgeon, who three weeks earlier had removed my cervix. This post-op emergency, which I’m not yet prepared to call an emergency, is unusual. In fact, of all trachelectomies—that’s the clinical name for cervix removal—performed in the U.S., only a small percentage result in “vaginal cuff dehiscence”: the clinical name for uh-oh, the stitches where they sewed up the top of your vaginal canal have come undone, and now you’re a blood clot howitzer.
I am twelve hours, without medical intervention, from my own death. Possibly less.
At this point, however, I know none of this. Neither the number of hours I have left nor the technical name for what’s happening. I just know I’m exhausted and bleeding profusely. That I’m still deep in the weeds of recovering from major surgery. That I’d already gone to the emergency room near family court six days after surgery, after nearly passing out from pain while representing myself at a custody hearing, but the hospital had sent me home, saying everything looked fine.
I am loath to cry wolf again. But my apartment looks like a crime scene. So I’m crying medium-sized dog, possibly rabid. Alas, no one from the hospital is calling me back, so I’m crying into the void anyway. I call the answering service again. I text them a photo of one of the masses in the palm of my hand for size context. Nada.
I feel like medicine’s needy girlfriend, ghosted by the hospital.
It has now magically jumped from midnight to 1:30 in the morning. Like a Truffaut film. Qu’est-ce que c’est, degueulasse? What is disgusting? I mean, for starters, the bathroom floor.
Part of me can’t help but wonder if all of these bloody missiles are, in fact, metaphor: the expulsion of decades of marital sludge. But while I am grateful for my escape from a toxic, lonely marriage, I’ve recently been as alone as I’ve ever been, as lonely as I’ve ever felt. My eldest has been living with his girlfriend in Bangkok, where he’s teaching English. My youngest is away at summer camp. My middle one has been in the Middle East, so I’ve been walking the dog and doing the dishes and taking out the trash and lugging laundry back and forth from the communal laundry room in the basement on my own.
New York, NY, July 2, 2017, © Deborah Copaken
None of these tasks are on the list of acceptable activities on the hospital handout they give you when they kick you out the morning after surgery and tell you to rest. But having been recently downsized, I can’t afford the added cost of a home health aide. Or, frankly, food or shelter. Aside from the few freelance gigs I’ve been able to cobble together from bed, I now have zero income combined with an extra $2,314.20 a month in COBRA*1 fees, which has always struck me as one of the more insulting cosmic ironies of losing a job in America: Bye! Have a nice life! Here’s zero months of severance plus an extra rent’s worth of healthcare costs.
The rest of the night becomes fuzzy, as I slip in and out of consciousness, so I’ll just mention the scenes I do remember in the order I think they occurred. This is not me trying to sound postmodern. It’s just the jump-cut way in which I recall them, devoid of the normal transitions that streamline a narrative.
“Hey, sweetie, sorry to wake you…” I finally wake my sleeping daughter, feeling guilty about so doing. She’s just arrived home from Tel Aviv, after many layovers and no sleep. Birthright*2 wasn’t around when I was her age, so my first trip to Israel was also my first assignment as a photojournalist, to cover the first intifada. Rocks and CNN trucks. The boys would always wait around for the trucks to show up before throwing their rocks. McLuhan was right. The medium is always the message. What are these blobs trying to transmit to me?
“I think my kidney fell out,” I say to my daughter, clutching my mystery masses, “so I might have to go to the hospital. But you stay here with Lucas and walk him in the morning.” Lucas is our dog. Like all dogs, he hates fireworks. To self-soothe, he’s been sitting on my face.
My daughter’s bleary eyes widen. She is staring at the contents of my Tupperware container.
The crack of fireworks. Technicolor bursts outside the window. The dog barks. The world spins.
“Mom! Oh my god! That’s not your kidney. If it were your kidney, you’d be dead.” She examines the blobs, unsqueamish. She’s premed, studying neuroscience. “I think they’re giant blood clots,” she says. “We have to get you to the hospital. Now.”
“I’m tired. And no one’s calling me back. Maybe we should wait until tomorrow.”
She gets up and notes the pools of blood on the bathroom floor. In my bed. Down the hallway. In the kitchen near the refrigerator. I did my best to clean up the mess until I ran out of paper towels. “Are you kidding? Let’s go. I’m calling 911.”
“No! Absolutely not. We can’t afford it.” I’m currently living off the remains of my meager 401K, facing a huge tax penalty for its early withdrawal. After months of illness followed by major surgery with co-pays and monthly COBRA fees, I have just under $3,000 in cash reserves left and zero credit cards. I’ve read too many cautionary tales of surprise bills as high as $8,000 for ambulance transport. I’m hemorrhaging enough already.
“Fine,” she says, “call an Uber.”
I remain firm. “No. I’ll take the subway. And you’re not coming with me. You have to stay here with the dog.”
She doesn’t listen. I am being pulled outside by the arm.
Streetl
amps. Darkness. I smell pot.
“No one says pot anymore,” says my daughter. “It’s weed. Call an Uber. Now!” The numbers 1:43 a.m. atop the smiles of my three sun-kissed children on the face of my phone. I search for the white U inside the little black square, remembering that 143, according to Mr. Rogers, equals I love you. Funny how that stuff stays. I=1; love=4; you=3. It took me awhile to figure out the code.
“I love you,” I tell my daughter. UberPool is half the price of UberX, so I choose that. Your driver will be Faraj. How many other passengers could Faraj possibly have at 1:43 in the morning? None, as it will turn out. If I live, I can use the money I’ll save to replenish our supply of paper towels.
My daughter squeezes my hand. “I love you, too.”
More fireworks. It feels like we’re in a movie. I’d rather be in bed.
My daughter to the driver: “Yes, it’s an emergency!”
Warm blood. Lots of it. Under me. On the seat of the Uber, down my legs, pooling in my shoes. An uber pool in an UberPool. I feel awful for the mess my body has unleashed. An apology to Faraj.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “Just go. God bless.” Two decades earlier, when my water had broken all over the floor of a taxi, the driver had spoken those exact words. Don’t worry. Just go. God bless.
I empty my wallet of bills and try to hand them to Faraj. He won’t accept them. I try and fail again.
He brings his hand to his heart.
“Salaam alaikum,” I say. Words learned in Ramallah, while living for a week with a Palestinian family under lockdown. That was the real tragedy of the intifada: not the David/Goliath scenes manufactured for CNN, but the hidden indignities of second-class citizenship, poverty, and home confinement.
A woman’s body is the same. All of the bad stuff happens inside, off-screen. So when you go to the emergency room and say, “It hurts,” as I did two weeks earlier, they nod as if they’re listening, leave you on a gurney in the hallway for hours, hand you two aspirin, and send you home. It’s almost a relief to be bleeding so profusely. To have tangible proof of the pain inside. Doctors and CNN trucks pay attention to pyrotechnics.
No one ever bought my photos of the Palestinian family stuck inside their home. Guns and rocks were my bread and butter.
“Alaikum salaam,” he says.
The twenty-foot distance between car and emergency room seems as unbridgeable as it had after my water broke. My daughter offers me her shoulder to lean on as we exit. I am both grateful and ashamed. How, in the twenty years between soiled taxis, have our roles reversed?
I have absolutely no memory of entering the hospital, but a trail of blood says I did.
Emergency room receptionist, asking my daughter for my name. All of the words are outside me now. Other voices have taken over the task of speaking them. My name? It’s unretrievable.
My name! A brief snap back from the post-verbal abyss. My name: something that should be simple but isn’t. Because my divorce is taking longer than expected—nearly four years at this point, for lack of funds to pay lawyers—I’ve petitioned the court on my own to revert to my birth name pre-divorce, only to be told by a desk clerk that I need my ex’s signed and notarized permission to do so.
“Permission?” I’d said. “That’s sexist.”
“No,” said the clerk, “men have to do it, too.”
“You must be flooded with such cases.”
“Give them Daddy’s last name!” I say to my daughter, one last gasp of cogency before everything goes dark. It has been over a month since I’d handed my ex the name change permission paperwork, on a bench between our two apartments. The exchange had felt tawdry, like a dime-bag drug deal. He has yet to get the papers notarized. I wonder if they’ll insist on using my married name on my death certificate, should it come to that. If nothing else, I must stay alive to avoid that.
The world tilts. My body falls, seemingly in slow motion. This is a thing, backed by science: a perception of time expanding and slowing down during a moment of trauma. Upon contact with the hospital floor, my rib breaks.
The glass Tupperware container flies out of my hand, splattering onto the ground, drenching the sleeve of my daughter’s flannel shirt with her mother’s blood and covering the hospital floor with shards of broken glass. I have no memory of this. I am told it was quickly mopped up.
“It hurts to breathe!” I shout. Is anyone listening?
Overhead lights. Green, fluorescent glow. Voices yelling. What’s happening?
“We have to move her to another stretcher. There’s too much blood.” How long have I been here?
Hands under me. A sleepover levitation: light as a feather, stiff as a board. Air underneath, then, boom, solid stretcher below. The antiseptic stench of the prior one being hosed down with bleach. I peek. Bad idea. A voice: “Get her into a room! Now!”
Darkness.
Irrational anger as the nurse uses scissors to cut off my green yoga pants, now soaked red. “No, please! They’re my favorites!” Too late. They’re in the trash. Relief at having a tangible object outside of myself onto which to misdirect my feelings.
Beeping.
The constant gush of liquid underneath me. Imagine a gallon of milk, turned on its side. Glug, glug, glug. How much blood does a body hold? Tiny droplets of sweat on my upper lip. I am salt. On its return to the sea. I can actually feel my body dying. My brain is less scared of this than I’d always assumed it would be. I feel more like an observer of my disintegration rather than a participant. I take comfort in this, in case I have a future in which that information might be useful.
Darkness. Beeping.
More enormous clots flying out. No. Not a thousand, my daughter corrects me. She’s been counting. We’re up to sixteen. Her voice: “Oh god, oh my god…” Then, into the hallway: “Someone please get in here! Now!” She’s five foot zero. Her voice sounds much taller.
The eighteenth giant clot emerges. My daughter’s face, the one she puts on when she’s trying too hard to seem okay. I see your fake composure, young lady, and I raise you fake levity. “A chai!” I say. Chai is the Hebrew word for eighteen. But also for life. It’s one of the first things they teach you in Hebrew school. My daughter laughs.
Religious Jews don’t believe in cremation. They bury the body the next day. I’m not a religious Jew. I’m more of a bagel Jew. I want to remind my daughter to cremate my body and sprinkle the ashes into the Seine if I die, but now’s not the right time. Plus we’ve talked about this already. She knows my wishes. And I’ll be dead so what do I care if she actually carries them out? It was just a plan, to have one. Seems silly, now that it’s real. Find the nearest tree, I want to tell her, and call it a day, but I’ve lost the ability to turn thought into speech.
Darkness. Beeping.
A nurse shoves fist-sized hunks of gauze up me: “This is not going to stop it, but we have no other solution until the surgeon gets here.”
Pressure. So much mounting pressure from the gauze plugging up the hole where my viscera are trying to escape. Ow! Ow! Eject!
I leap off the bed to relieve the pressure. Voices are yelling at me to lie back down, but I can’t. My need for gravity overrides their desire for obedience. The cork is already halfway out of the bottle. “It’s coming out! It’s coming out!” I yell. The blood-soaked gauze shoots out of me and lands with a splash in a bedpan held out by a nurse like a catcher’s mitt. For a too-silent moment, all of us are in shock. Did that just happen? Was that…thing actually inside me? The clot-covered gauze ball looks monstrous, more like a prop from a horror film than a real object. “Score!” I say. My daughter laughs. Score, indeed. Levity is all we have.
Darkness. Beeping.
My child’s voice, finally breaking, as she leaves the room and whispers into her phone. “Jen? Jen? Oh my god, Jen! It’s awful. When can you get here?” Jen is my sister,
a choreographer who lives in the Bay Area. She is in New York this holiday weekend, unusually, for some R & R with her family but also to research footage from the original Fiddler on the Roof in the Lincoln Center archives.
A Fiddler earworm: Is this the little girl I carried? Horror, once again, at the thought of putting my twenty-year-old daughter through this ordeal. Simultaneous gratitude for her poise and ferocity. I gave birth to my own savior out of the canal trying to kill me. My brain bends in on itself, pondering this.
One time, when she was thirteen, she said she was going to hang out with a friend. In truth, she met two friends who’d shared an entire bottle of vodka and had called her in a panic. She got there just in time. Contacted both of their parents and an ambulance. Spoke to the paramedics. Saved two lives.
The girls’ parents were furious. At their daughters’ poor choices, yes, but more, I had the impression, at the cost of the ambulance.
The surgeon’s flip-flops. Tiny grains of sand. I’ve interrupted her beach vacation. “I’m so sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be,” she says. “It’s my job.” She’s faceless. My only memory is of her legs, moving around the stretcher, and of her voice, after she does the pelvic exam and gasps: “We need to get her into the OR now. I don’t care. Bump someone if you have to. Yes, now!”
We are still waiting.
Lisa, my friend and literary agent, is now in the room. Cool. How did that happen? My daughter texted her, after having searched for allies in my phone. Lisa’s my rock. She hosted a fiftieth birthday lunch for me the previous year, against my protestations. Lots of talk about what to do with the dog. There’s an app on the phone. “Wag!”? No, I don’t have it. Another problem I can’t solve.
Darkness. Beeping.
My sister has arrived. After Lisa, I think, but I’m not sure? The soothing chatter of three women at my feet. Beautiful women, all of whom look as if they come from the same shtetl. Even Lisa, who’s not related to us. I half expect them to break out into “Matchmaker.” I have a team! I’ve been alone all my life, in ways large and small. In marriage, most of all. Their laughter masks worry. I hear its undertones. What time is it? What are we waiting for?
Ladyparts Page 2
