Spelling It Like It Is

by Tori Spelling

  I assumed the sign-up sheets would list each holiday and then give you the option to sign up for food, drinks, dessert, or paper products. That’s how they’d done it at the kids’ last school. To my shock, these sign-up sheets were much more specific. For the Halloween party I had to sign up for grapes, crackers, carrot sticks, juice boxes, or pizza. Those were my only options. I stared at the sign-up sheet, my mouth falling open in horror. There wasn’t even a space for “other.” How could I make something special? I moved over to the Christmas party sign-up sheet. It listed exactly the same foods. An organ struck chords of doom in the background music of my brain. No themed holiday food. The world was ending.

  I shyly approached the teacher.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I love baking and cooking for holiday parties. I went to sign up, but I noticed there’s a specific list. Nothing homemade.”

  The teacher said, “Oh, we’ve just found that it’s easier to give people guidelines.”

  I said, “This list is fine . . . but if I made something homemade, would that be okay?”

  She said, “Of course. We love homemade. You know, if you like being involved, you could sign up to be a room parent.”

  Suddenly it was all clear to me. If I were a room parent, I could control all the parties. If I controlled the parties, I could make sure everything was homemade. Heck, I could make it all myself. I quickly found the room parent sign-up sheet. There were three spaces on it and two were already filled. Just in time! I put my name down. I could see the Christmas party now: A towering tree of homemade red and green French macaroons. A gingerbread house in the shape of the school with sugar stained-glass windows . . . and the wall outside this school would be built with saltwater taffy bricks that wouldn’t be knocked down by a paparazzi-fleeing mom.

  The minute I got home, the e-mails started. Maybe under ordinary circumstances I would have been able to manage, or politely avoid, the influx of e-mails about the various issues room parents were supposed to handle, 90 percent of which had nothing to do with innovative holiday baked goods (note to self: read the fine print). But two days after orientation, I was hit with much bigger problems.

  THE C-SECTION I had for Finn was my fourth. I’d always weathered the surgery pretty well. (Too well, some might say. Thanks to my speedy recovery I now had two babies only ten months apart. You’re supposed to wait until six weeks after the baby is born to have sex, but my husband has never been great at math.) Anyway, Finn’s birth had gone as smoothly as the others, and afterward, in the hospital, I felt great. But soon after I came home, I was in severe pain at the site of the incision. It was far worse than anything I’d felt with the other babies. When I told Dr. J, he said, “You shouldn’t be in this kind of pain.” I agreed with that. Nobody should be in this kind of pain. But it sounded like he was saying “you shouldn’t” as in “you aren’t.” Yet I was. Finally, I told Dr. J that I couldn’t take it anymore, so two days after Liam and Stella’s orientation I made an appointment to come in to see him.

  Dr. J’s office was a full hour away from our new house. It also happened to be relatively close to the Hotel Bel-Air, where Mehran and I were planning an event with JCPenney to launch our partnership with them for our children’s clothing line, Little Maven. So naturally I coordinated the two, figuring I’d squeeze in a quick meeting with the event rental and catering companies en route to having the doctor check me out.

  There was only one problem. My incision hurt so much I could barely stand up.

  No matter. I arrived at the Bel-Air and hobbled down the stone path toward the bathroom. As I slowly made my way there, a man stopped me.

  He said, “Hey, Tori, my wife’s a big fan of yours.” He was middle-aged and balding, wearing too-new jeans, cut high, and a leather aviator jacket, crisp and new. I pulled myself up straight, put on my public face, and thanked him. He asked to take my picture—or if I would say hi to his wife on the phone; my memory’s a little blurry on that. I complied, and then he said, “By the way, I’m Steve Madden, the shoe designer.”

  I said, “Oh my God, I’m such a fan of yours. I love your shoes. I have tons of them!” In my head I was thinking, See? It pays to be nice. I had visions of boxes of free shoes being dropped off in my driveway.

  The man I now knew was Steve Madden said, “Well, thanks a lot. See you around. Keep buying my shoes!”

  No free shoes? No family-and-friends discount? Oh, well. “Bye, Steve,” I chirped, and resumed my slow stagger to the bathroom.

  By the time I came out of the bathroom I was walking doubled over in pain, hand on my incision site. A voice came from across the courtyard: “Hey, Tori.”

  It was Steve Madden. He must have reconsidered. The new fall combat boots I’d been eyeing would be mine.

  Seeing my awkward, desperate, incision-clutching hobble, he asked, “What’s going on down there?” and waggled a finger in the direction of my crotch.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I just had a baby, Steve. C-section. Recovering.” I waved him off and kept hobbling.

  The pain was definitely escalating. When I got back to Mehran I said, “There’s definitely something wrong.” He pulled up a chair for me. I sat down and took a deep breath. Then the concept for the Little Maven party came to me. In a rush, I fired off ideas. “It’s Camp Little Maven. There’ll be a campfire, roasted marshmallows.” I was on a roll. There would be interactive stations where the kids could make friendship bracelets and pet rocks. We’d have pretend fishing in a man-made pond, where the prizes would be jars of gummy worms resting on crumbled chocolate-cake soil. Across the whole campsite would be clothing lines with old-fashioned clothespins holding the samples so people could see the collection as they walked through the party.

  As soon as I finished brainstorming, the pain came surging back. My friend Jess drove me to the doctor. I lay back on the chair and Dr. J untaped my incision.

  He said, “Now I understand why you’re in so much pain. It opened up.”

  It was open? I’d never heard of this. Dr. J said this complication wasn’t common, but it could happen. While he was still examining me, I handed Jess my phone and said, “Could you take a picture for me?” I love gruesome stuff, but when I saw the photo of my incision I wanted to throw up. I guess I figured just the top layer of skin would be open. A little open. But no, it was two inches wide and two inches deep. I could see my insides. Instagram, eat your heart out. This image would definitely knock Kim Kardashian’s ass off the popular page.

  Dr. J said, “The good news is that it’s all clean, there’s no infection. But I can’t sew it back up. If I do, we’ll trap bacteria in there. We have to pack it with gauze. It will close up all on its own.”

  That was all. I had to take it easy. A nurse would come to my house daily to repack the wound. We’d keep an eye out for infection. I’d come back in a week. There was nothing to worry about. What, me worry?

  At home, the nurse came every day. A couple of days we couldn’t schedule the right timing with the nurses, so Dean excitedly stepped in. He put on glasses with a light attached and gloves and packed my wound. He said, “I’m not a doctor but I’ve played one on TV.” I didn’t have a choice. I’d have to trust him.

  I said, “Is this gross? Do you think less of me?”

  He said, “Are you kidding me? I love every part of you, insides and out. And besides, right now I can say my wife is a four-hole girl. I’m a lucky man.”

  Oh, babe.

  Meanwhile, the room-parent e-mails for Stella’s preschool class kept rolling in. “Hey, guys, how about Wednesday after drop-off we grab coffee and discuss the harvest festival?” We room parents needed to set up the pre-K booth at the festival. We needed to man the pre-K booth in shifts throughout the festival. We needed to clean up the pre-K booth after the festival. Also, there was something called a class roster list that had to be distributed. There was a daylong e-mail chain about that. Plus the room parents had weekly meetings, which required a zillion e-mails to schedul
e.

  Oh my God! I didn’t have time for this on a normal day, much less with a gaping, probably infected wound. Man, this involved-parent thing backfired on me every time. But at least right now I had a good excuse. Things really weren’t going well. I was running a fever and the pain level wasn’t decreasing. Eventually, Dean took me to the ER, where the doctor diagnosed me with an infection and, upon learning I had four kids, asked me if I was a Mormon. Because there is such a big Mormon population in the San Fernando Valley.

  Even with a megadose of antibiotics, I just kept getting worse. On Saturday, September 15, just two weeks after Finn was born, the home-care nurse came in to see me at three P.M. She repacked the wound as usual. It looked fine, she said, but she didn’t like that I was still in so much pain. She said, “Let’s keep monitoring it. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Then she left.

  An hour and a half later I was lying in bed. Patsy was sitting at the end of the bed, holding Finn. I said, “It shouldn’t be hurting this much.” Then I looked down. The incision was supposed to be packed with gauze. But the packing had pushed out. A red ball was sitting on top of my skin. It looked like a shiny, hairless scrotum. Holy fuck.

  “Pats, something’s coming out of me!”

  Patsy came over to take a look. Infinitely mellow, Patsy always talks me off the ledge, telling me everything’s fine. But this time she just said, “We’d better call Dean.” Carrying Finn, she left the room.

  I stared down at this red golf ball on my abdomen. It was just sitting there. What was it? I was starting to freak out.

  Dean is absolutely the best person to have around in an emergency. He came into the room, looked at me, and calmly said, “It’s going to be fine, but we should get you to the hospital. Let’s head there now.” He started to pick me up. I panicked.

  “Please don’t touch me! I can’t go to the car! I’m scared to stand up!” I said. I was afraid that more of whatever it was—something that clearly belonged inside my body—would make its way to the outside of my body.

  Dean said, “Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

  I said, “Yes, call an ambulance, please. Hurry.”

  Within minutes, two emergency units arrived, both with lights flashing and whirling. The EMTs wheeled me on a gurney through the house and out the front door. Liam and Stella were playing on their scooters in the front yard. Now they stood and silently watched me roll by. I waved at them.

  “Hi, guys!” I said. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back soon.”

  They said, “Bye, Mom!” and went back to playing.

  They had seen me go to the hospital so many times it was like, Okay, will you be home for dinner? Just another day in their lives.

  At Los Robles Hospital, when the ER doctor came in, he confirmed what Dean, Patsy, and I had all suspected. What we were seeing was part of my intestines. It was life-threatening, and it had the not-comforting term “evisceration.” I would have emergency surgery at midnight.

  So they pumped me up on pain meds, and I waited for surgery. Meanwhile I could hear a gurgling sound as . . . well, let’s just say that within a couple hours what was emerging from my incision was no longer the size of a golf ball. Now it was a grapefruit, sitting on my belly. It was alarming. The doctor came back in and said that instead of waiting until midnight, I was going into surgery immediately.

  I could see the urgency, believe me, but, as always, I asked a million questions about every aspect of the situation. Even so, I can’t say that my questions make me an informed patient who understands the situation. They’re just a hopeless attempt to quell my hysteria.

  “For the surgery—do you do light sedation?” I asked. I’m terrified of general anesthetic.

  No, he told me, it would be general for this surgery.

  “But I had a bowl of chicken noodle soup!” I said. “I thought you said I couldn’t be put under if I’d eaten in the last five hours.”

  The doctor told me that general anesthetic was protocol for this surgery.

  “But why do they tell you not to eat? What can happen?”

  The doctor explained that with general anesthetic, if you’ve eaten, there’s a chance that you can throw up and aspirate. If this happens while they’re inserting or removing the breathing tube, you can die.

  I said, “But that could happen! I ate! I don’t want to die.”

  I understood that I might also die if I didn’t have the surgery right away, but I really thought these doctors should think outside the box. I started trying to negotiate.

  “Technically, this is like having a C-section. Can’t you just give me an epidural?”

  “No,” said the doctor. “We always put people under for this.”

  I could see that the doctor was trying to be patient. Dean was at my side, ready to convince me to go through with it. But I was thinking about my dad, and the story he told about when he was shot in the hand in World War II. The doctors were going to amputate two of his fingers. He said he went straight into storytelling mode. “I told them, ‘I’m a pianist. It’s been my lifelong dream. My parents had no money, but they found a way to send me to music school. I can’t lose my fingers.’ ” Somehow my father convinced them to do surgery instead of amputating. They saved his fingers. They were crooked his whole life, but at least he had fingers.

  My father had kept his fingers by sheer force of will. I was fighting for something much more important—my life! (Or so I saw it.)

  I said, “I don’t want to go under! I’ve eaten! I’m scared! Can you try an epidural? If there’s a problem, you can put me under.” The poor anesthesiologist couldn’t take it anymore. He gave in and agreed to do the epidural.

  The doctor had to take my intestines out, wash them off, and put them back in. As soon as he started tugging at my internal organs, the pain was intense. I felt like my insides were being pulled out of me. I started screaming. The doctor said, “I can’t do this. You’re moving, and you’re screaming. If you keep screaming I’m going to put you under.”

  I clenched my fists so hard that my nails cut into my palms. I bit my lip and forced myself to stay silent. It was really, really awful.

  Yeah, that epidural was a big mistake. Afterward, the doctor said, “That was bad.” He admitted that if I’d been under general he would have checked around to make sure there was no other infection or issues to address. He said, “But I couldn’t do that with you screaming and moving around.”

  I said, “I’m the patient! You let me talk you into it!” If he’d told me he couldn’t do everything he needed to do, I would have let him put me under! I must have been more persuasive than I intended. Maybe I should’ve been a lawyer.

  Sometime later, when a doctor at Cedars was looking at my records, he said, “You had an epidural for this surgery? Why did you have an epidural?”

  I said, “Um . . . I convinced the doctor?”

  He was shocked. He said, “It’s incredibly dangerous that you were awake through this surgery. If I were doing the surgery I wouldn’t have given you that option. It’s not okay.”

  Oops.

  VIP Fail

  I was in Los Robles Hospital for ten days after the surgery. During my recovery, they gave me a Dilaudid drip, which had a button that I could push when the pain was extreme. The dose is controlled so that you never get too much, but I was still worried about taking an opiate, so I tried to get by on as little as I could. The nurses would come in and ask about my pain level. I’d say, “Pretty bad.” They’d say, “Well, push the button!”

  When Liam and Stella came to visit me, Liam thought that the drip button was some kind of video game. He pushed the button. I said, “Don’t push that! It’s my medicine!” Stella thought this was pretty funny and started pushing the button too. I knew it wouldn’t give me extra Dilaudid, but even the unfulfilled requests for meds were monitored. I was embarrassed that the nurses would think I’d been hitting the button like a desperate addict.

  Then I felt a dose of the medicine hit me.
It instantly helped the pain and made my eyes feel heavy. Liam said, “Mom, why do you go like this?” He imitated me, rolling his eyes back into his head, his tongue lolling. I was horrified. How many friends and nurses had seen me like that? The next time a nurse came in I made sure to tell her the kids had been the ones to push the button. She said, “Of course they did,” and I could tell she didn’t believe me.

  Liam, Stella, and Hattie all came to visit, but I was apart from Finn for that whole time. That was the hardest part—they change so much in those first few weeks. I had to stop breast-feeding him, and I knew that even when I went home I wouldn’t be able to pick him up, much less Hattie (again!), for a long time.

  The nurses drew blood every day. Though I had many lovely nurses, for some reason the ones who were responsible for taking blood had no bedside manner. They would shuffle in at the crack of dawn, grab my arm without so much as a hello, and start probing for a vein.

  One morning a nurse flew in at the end of the morning shift. At some point I had a complication with the incision—an abscess—and two nurses were in the middle of explaining something about it to me. The nurse who’d come in to get blood was obviously in a rush. She snatched my arm.

  “Can you wait a minute?” I said. I started to sit up, but she pushed me back down with all her might.

  “You’re fine!”

  I gasped. The two nurses, shocked, said her name sternly.

  “Whatever,” she said, throwing my arm down and storming out of the room.

  Now, at the hospital there was a woman in the admissions office, part of whose job seemed to be handling PR and VIP stuff. When I had arrived, she had checked in on me to make sure all was well and to reassure me that this hospital was completely discreet. To drive home her point, she had made sure to tell me that when Heather Locklear was hospitalized after a 911 call, this was where she had been admitted—and none of the staff had leaked anything. She was proud of their security . . . so why was she telling me this? Was it because all celebrities were in some elite club where secrets were safe?