by Dawn Davies
KICKING THE SNAKES
Pain and drugs got me into graduate school. Not angst, mind you, but real, true, physical pain, the kind that makes your loved ones look at you with that face, the face that is part pity, part fear, the kind that makes them, quietly, when you aren’t watching, hide the home-defense goods: the oily antique .380 handed down from a relative, the shotgun whose barrel is just long enough to reach your face if you put the butt of it on the ground and use a spatula to reach the trigger. I’m talking about the kind of pain that changes your worldview and makes you into a different person, and I’m talking about the kind of drugs doctors prescribe that ordinary people get hooked on all the time, the kind of drugs that, if you get hooked on them, will make you flush your own family down the toilet. Narcotics are no joke, but without experiencing an intolerable level of pain that required high doses of them, I would never have applied to an MFA program, because I was essentially an anxious coward afraid of rejection.
Quick disclaimer here: I apologize in advance for bringing this up, because there is nothing more annoying to me than writers writing about writing, especially writers writing about how writing makes “the soul sing.” Seriously, if I could bring myself to get on an airplane, I would rather sit in front of a seat-kicking kid with an ear infection for the entirety of a transatlantic flight than read or write about writers who write about writing. But here it comes, my soul-singing desire, spit up like a fur ball: I wanted to be a writer.
It started when I was ten, after we moved to upstate New York in the middle of winter, where the cold weather was physically painful. I stayed inside until spring, huddled up with a blanket in the torn vinyl Barcalounger the previous owners had left behind in our unfinished basement, reading a forgotten box of Reader’s Digest issues from the 1970s. I was thrilled by the humorous bits, and true-life accounts of danger written by regular people. I was thrilled by the idea that I could earn twenty-five dollars writing a “Life in These United States,” if only I could find something funny enough to write about. Back then, especially to me, twenty-five dollars represented a grandiose sum of money. I practiced writing in a little notebook I never showed anyone, hoping to come up with a hit. I never did.
Later, in high school, even though I was uneasy about showing my writing to others, I joined the school literary club. Three weeks in, I was sent to the principal’s office for writing a satire of Poe’s “The Raven” from the perspective of a serial killer who kills all his victims in a shower scene like the one from the film Psycho, which I had recently watched, though I shouldn’t have. (I don’t do well with movies like that.) My argument was that the poem was a copycat exercise intended to improve my writing skills by studying the style of another writer. They didn’t understand. I was expelled from the literary club and rejected by the other students for being too intense.
In college, even though I wanted to be a writer, I studied anything but writing, because people told me it was frivolous, and because I wasn’t sure you needed college to be a writer. I studied printmaking, and literature (also frivolous), and anatomy and physiology (not at all frivolous), with some vague goals of doing something scientific, then I quit college to “become” a writer. I thought that if I just holed up and wrote a lot I would get better. I handwrote three terrible novels about subjects you might find nineteen-year-olds discussing while drunk at a party. Later, I had one of my roommates read my work. He declared it terrible, and when I reread it, I realized he was right. I threw all three manuscripts into a fire. Then I stopped trying to write and got married.
Later still, when I got my act together, I did study writing. I got a degree in it, then went to work doing various forms of professional writing. I wrote Web content for a few different companies. I developed courses for online high school and college programs. I wrote a few academic children’s books, and lots of advertising copy for a scientific publishing house, most of the time from the comfort of my own home, and mostly at night while the kids were sleeping. In a way, I was kind of a writer. When I told people I was a writer, their faces lit up as if they had discovered I was a famous actress and could maybe get them an agent or a part in a movie. They literally leaned into me and gave me all their attention. When I told them I wrote Web content, it was as if I told them I did porn. Web content was no more interesting than insurance adjusting, and they were right.
What I secretly wanted to do was go back to school and get a graduate degree in creative writing, mostly because I wanted to make room in my life to write creative work and that would give me an excuse to do it. I thought that by getting an MFA I would become, with the same earnest desire as Pinocchio, a real writer. I wanted to let my soul free to write the things I wanted to write.
There was a school I had my eye on, only partly because it was in the city where I lived, and I wasn’t able to relocate. It was a good school. My mother had gone there. Every year, for perhaps six years, I would print out an application, fill it out, prepare a writing sample, be overcome with doubt, and throw the application away in fear. You see, writing Web content and science copywriting had nothing to do with revealing myself, which is what I was afraid of. I was afraid of rejection. I was afraid of not being good enough at what I really wanted to do, so that each time the deadline rolled around, I choked. I could imagine a panel of people passing my manuscript around and shaking their heads, their noses squinched slightly, politely, as if someone in the room had just opened a jar of kimchi. I could imagine getting the form letter rejection, saying that the competition was particularly tough that year and they had many qualified applicants and only a few slots, et cetera. I knew that rejection came with writing, but I couldn’t face the ultimate insult of pre-rejection, that uber-proof that I was not good enough to even get into a writing program. I couldn’t bring myself to apply. It simply made me too anxious.
But then I went surfing on a windy day. I mistakenly let the surfboard act as a sail and rip my right shoulder back, tearing my labrum somewhere deep inside the socket. It hurt and weakened my shoulder, but because I wasn’t enthusiastic about having surgery, I walked around like that for a long time before getting up the guts to have it fixed, because I was also anxious about having surgery. I had read on the Internet that shoulder surgery was particularly painful, but I had not been told that the recovery for this kind of surgery is so terribly painful that most people can’t sleep lying down for several weeks. You have to sleep in a chair. A surgeon will not tell his patients how bad a recovery will be, because if he did, no one would ever schedule surgery; they would walk around all third-worldly, wearing slings and limping and popping pills and keeling over now and then, and surgeons would be renting apartments like the rest of us.
I had had some experience with real pain, in the form of kidney stones. I seem to be able to produce kidney stones the way a chicken lays eggs, and every time I get one it is the worst pain I have ever experienced and my husband gives me the face and hides the home-defense equipment. Kidney stones are demonic, excruciating, worse than childbirth and twenty other clichéd pain comparisons, and apparently, though I walk the planet like an Amazon, I have tiny, delicate, shrinking violet ureters that are not big enough in diameter to pass even the smallest of stones—I have only passed one on my own—so each stone I develop gets repeatedly stuck trying to go down the water flume and slams itself, over and over, into the entrance to my ureter, like trying to shove a golf ball through a garden hose.
When I get a kidney stone, I require the placement of a cruel device called a ureteral stent, which a doctor will tell you is a soft, malleable, harmless piece of plastic, but which is actually a tube with two coiled springs, one that sits lodged inside your kidney and one that floats around in your bladder. The tube that connects the kidney end to the bladder end helps keep the ureter from closing due to inflammation or scar tissue, and, if all goes well, allows the stone to pass. The bladder end of the stent is attached to a string, which comes out your very sensitive flower of a pee hole and gets taped
to your thigh. Stents themselves are terribly painful, and for me, cause severe bladder spasms, sometimes from simply switching positions in a chair. They are so bad I can’t sleep. Every time I feel a spasm, it makes me groan and weep loudly. I can’t get through one without waking my husband up at night, or if it is in the daytime, without making the kids come running into the room, wearing that face … the face they get when they see their mom doing something they should not have to see, like sitting on a toilet screaming in pain, or weeping and begging to be put out of her misery. I usually keep a stent in for nine days or so, just long enough for me to feel defeated about humanity, and all of this requires copious levels of narcotics to get through it. And when the stent is out, and the pain eventually ebbs away, I must get myself off the narcotics, which I grow to enjoy.
In order to remove a stent, the doctor grabs ahold of the string, lies through his teeth about how it won’t hurt very much, and yanks the stent out like he is pulling on a fighter kite. The spring quickly leaves your kidney and travels down your ureter and out your urethra. They don’t tell you how this is going to feel. There are no words. If people knew, they wouldn’t come back to the office to have their stents removed. They would avoid it at all costs, walking around all third-worldly, until they keel over and die from the stent growing into their tissue and causing a deadly infection.
I believe there is a level of fundamental purity you maintain, no matter how tainted you are by pornography, or crime, or cruelty, or poverty, or violence, when you haven’t experienced a certain level of physical pain. I believe some people are able to avoid it for a lifetime: careful people, or lucky ones, or people with congenital analgesia, who walk around with this type of innocence, and it is a rare gift. Though I have had three babies three separate times without anesthesia, which does sting the hoo-ha mightily, the day I go to have my first stent removed is the last day of my true innocence. The doctor, whose name is the same as a brutal founder of a famous empire, greets us like he has had a wonderful weekend. He is tan and rested and acts like he wants to get this over with because there is a nice club sandwich, or maybe a high-class call girl, waiting on the desk in his office. He shakes hands with my husband. I have worn a skirt so I wouldn’t have to change into a paper robe, so I lie back on the table and hike it up self-consciously, in front of this slightly wolfish man, while my husband watches.
“This might sting a little bit,” he says.
“What do you mean sting?” I ask.
“I mean you might feel a little pinch.”
“Okay,” I go. “Whatever. I’m ready to get this thing out.” I am not worried at this point, because I am an innocent, an innocent doped up on narcotics. While we are talking the doctor spreads my legs and aims a bright light on my hoo-ha.
“You might want to hold her hand,” he tells my husband. “Here we go.” He rips the tape from my thigh, causing me to remark, in my innocence, “Wow, that did sting,” and then grabs the string and begins to pull out the stent, the coil stretching out and putting pressure against the tender things that should never be touched by anything, pressing against my ureter, and out my violated urethra. This takes perhaps seven seconds, but in those seven seconds, the universe implodes behind my eyes. I see the corruption of all mankind, Adam raping Eve in the garden, children suffocating puppies, my grandparents wading through a landscape of vomit, my daughters pole dancing on a stage of snakes and skulls, Aretha Franklin’s backup singers humming generations of lies brought to life in an echo of falsetto. My eyes roll back in my head and I nearly lose consciousness. There is a white sheet in my field of vision and I start crying hard.
“You sonofabitch!” I shriek. “That wasn’t a pinch! You are a damn liar!”
“They always do this,” he says to my husband. “I have to lie. If I told you how bad it was, you would have worried about it. But now it’s over.” He peels off his gloves, turning his back to face the sink, which was when I first realized that doctors lie, and also, that life is very, very short. It got me thinking about all the things I had been too afraid to do, but should have, because stupid things like war or infection or crank-ass random accidents can finish people off without them doing what they were put here to do. That one stent was enough pain for a lifetime.
So, when it was time to have my shoulder repaired, I was uneasy enough to want to get the truth out of the orthopedic surgeon.
“What’s the pain level going to be like after this?”
“You’ll be uncomfortable.”
“How uncomfortable? Because usually when you guys say ‘uncomfortable’ it means I end up crying. And besides, it’s Christmas. I want to make sure we have a good Christmas.”
“Define ‘good Christmas.’”
“I mean, we have kids at home. I want to make Christmas cookies, wrap presents while drinking cocoa, go shopping, and decorate the tree.”
“Yeah, it won’t be your best Christmas,” he says. “But your kids are old enough to understand. Look, it’s a surgical procedure. You’re going to be uncomfortable, but I’m going to give you pain medication, so you’ll be fine.”
“So, some pain meds and I’ll be fine?”
“Everything has a price. You’re an active girl. You want the shoulder fixed for the rest of your life, you’re going to have to go through a little discomfort.”
I wake up from surgery with blood all over my face. It is dripping down from my eyes, down my cheeks, and into my neck. I am in excruciating pain, right out of the gate. I hear a voice.
“How’s the discomfort, sweetie? Give me a number from one to ten.” It is the recovery nurse.
“Eleven,” I whisper. “My face is bleeding. Why is my face bleeding?”
“It’s tears, sweetie. You’re crying. I’ve never seen anyone wake up crying from surgery before. Congratulations, you get morphine.”
So I go home that day with a prescription for some hard-core narcotic pain medication and Ambien, a powerful sleeping pill.
“Trust me,” the nurse says. “You’re gonna need these. Patients who have this surgery find it difficult to sleep for a long time.”
“I think the doctor lied again,” I hiss to my husband on the way home. I sleep through dinner, the children’s homework, two soccer games, and all three remaining kids coming in to say good night, but after that, I didn’t sleep more than four hours at a stretch for the next two months. I would take an Ambien around nine, fall fitfully asleep and dream of monsters, things with triangular teeth in red, angry gums biting me, only the teeth were loose, they stuck in my skin, left a poison in my shoulder that streaked red, up to my brain. Or I would dream of being led on a tour around a gracious old house, when all I really wanted was the bathroom, opening door after door, looking into closets, bedrooms, studies, libraries, shops, and finally seeing a door marked “toilet” and opening it to find one of those dreaded windy air bendy giant nylon sock people that used-car dealers put in front of their lots popping out at me, making me wet my pants in front of the dangerous, desperate president of an economically unstable nation. It was his house that I was touring, I found out in that moment, and I was some sort of ambassador. A lot rode on how I carried myself through this tour.
I would wake up to pain, soaked with pain-induced sweat, yet be unable to change my nightgown because my shoulder hurt so much that I couldn’t dress myself. I would ease myself out of the recliner I slept in, take more narcotics, and walk around like a ghost in my wet nightie, billowing it around me until it dried out, sitting on a chair for a few minutes, then when the pain got too bad, moving to the couch to watch infomercials until the meds kicked in. I watched so many tantalizing infomercials that if we had had any money, I would have spent it all on their promises. Then I would do a few slow laps around the dining room table, then amble outside to the front porch, then back inside to wrap a Christmas present with one hand, then over to the computer to surf for something to distract me. Anything to keep moving, because sitting still is what made the pain build unti
l it made me cry. I did this for weeks while my husband’s and the children’s lives went on without me.
There are two things to mention about narcotics here. The first is that, like postsurgical shoulder pain, the strength and power of narcotics should not be underestimated. I am sensitive to drugs of all kinds, and I don’t like them. I don’t even drink alcohol anymore. I get a taste in my mouth the moment a Tylenol hits my system. I have uncommon, often severe side effects to medications, and prefer to not take them. Still, I was sucked into the allure of narcotics. They do something to the brain that makes you crave them, and once you no longer need the drugs, you still want them. You love them and you want to be loved by them, so your brain tells you that you must have them.
Another thing is that narcotics are the only things I have found to date that have taken away my anxiety, which I had enjoyed for most of my life. I didn’t know how badly anxiety affected me until I no longer felt it. On Percocet, I did not give one flying fork about what anyone thought about me, I did not overexamine the things I said or did, and I stopped worrying about things that would never happen. I became a different, more neurotypical person when I was taking them, and I loved every bit of how they made me feel. I could think about driving to the grocery store without getting a knot in my stomach. I could answer the telephone without butterflies, I could imagine my kids growing up without getting leukemia. I could picture my daughters’ wedding days without seeing my own tombstone. Narcotics did what Valium and Xanax and Bach Flower Remedies and homeopathy and psychotherapy had never been able to do for my anxiety. They hobbled my personality, but made me, in a way, into a better, more functional person. The only anxiety I felt was when I thought about living without them.
A few nights before Christmas Eve, when the rest of the house was sleeping, my meds wore off and I couldn’t sleep. I popped my pills and went online while I waited for them to take effect. I checked on my eBay motors watch list … I was watching a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle, a 1978 Volkswagen Westfalia camper, and a 1982 Ford Bronco II, because I always watched old cars. Then, while I was checking my e-mail, I started to really feel good. I went through my Facebook feed, looked up an article on shoulder pain, and by the time I thought to check the writing program Web site, which I did every year in December, I was plotzed out of my gourd. I realized I only had a few more weeks left if I wanted to apply.
