The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life

by Shankle, Melanie

  I spent that night at my grandmother’s house, and this is where I need to tell you that her house was one of those split floor plans, with the master bedroom all the way across the house from the other bedrooms. And when I woke up in excruciating pain around 2 a.m. when all the local anesthetic wore off, I couldn’t even manage to stand up straight due to all the belly button agony. I had to get on my hands and knees and crawl across the house to beg my grandmother to call the emergency doctor’s line to get me some sort of pain medication. I couldn’t stand up straight for the next three days. It was terrible.

  I know. I am the bravest person you know.

  I first relayed this cautionary tale to Perry before he went to see the dermatologist for a few suspicious spots on his skin. He looked at me in stunned silence. I just knew he was admiring my bravery in the face of such tremendous belly-button agony. He said, “Are you telling me that your belly button hurt so bad you had to drag yourself across the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am so embarrassed for you right now.”

  Whatever. He doesn’t know my life.

  I’d made an appointment for Perry to go to the dermatologist because he’d been complaining about two itchy spots on the back of his neck, and I was a little concerned about the amount of hydrocortisone he was going through every month. It’s not like that stuff grows on little hydrocortisone trees in our backyard.

  There was no doubt in my mind that he probably had some sun damage. All you have to do is look at the color of his feet to know that God intended him to be a fair-skinned person. They are practically translucent! But he is an outdoorsman who lives in South Texas with an occupation that requires him to be outside about 98 percent of the time. Plus, we are from a generation that believed Hawaiian Tropic SPF 2 was legitimate sunscreen along with some white zinc oxide across our noses, but that was more about looking cool than being sensible.

  The night before the appointment, I told him he needed to make sure the doctor did a full check of all his moles, especially one on his neck that looked a little suspicious to my untrained but highly paranoid eye. Something about it just didn’t look right, and it certainly didn’t help that it might have growled at me one time when I got a little too close.

  The doctor looked him over and explained that the itchy patches were just spots that are sensitive to the sun. They see the sun and start to cry and complain that the sun is hurting their feelings, and then they get all dramatic and itchy. The bottom line is that they are similar to a needy friend —harmless yet mildly annoying.

  However, the doctor looked at the mole on his neck and decided to send it off for a biopsy because it was giving her the evil eye. Perry came home with a little Band-Aid and a few comments about how I always send him off to get all sliced up. Which yes, yes I do.

  What else was I supposed to do for entertainment? It wasn’t like summer television had that much to offer. I just told him that I was trying to ensure he stays around as long as possible, because if something happened to him, I’d be stuck with a surplus of Columbia fishing shirts.

  After his appointment, he just sat around the rest of the afternoon since they’d told him he should take it easy. He said he wasn’t sore, but I kept telling him he needed to take some Advil in preparation for when the local anesthetic wore off. Did he need to hear the story about my belly button again? Because I am always willing to tell it.

  But the truth is, I was worried about him. When you’re young and brand-new and say those vows in front of your friends and family, you just throw out the “in sickness and in health” line because it’s part of the ritual. Like when you tell Aunt Nancy you love the sweaters she buys you every Christmas. It’s just something you say without thinking about what it might really mean or all the horrendous sweaters you’re committing to for the future.

  Essentially, you’re taking over this person’s health care. It’s like you’re the government but hopefully more efficient and not looking for ways to cut corners. If your spouse becomes ill, people look to you to be in charge of the whole thing. Doctor visits, medications, and lots of wine. Or maybe lots of whine. It depends on the day.

  And sometimes it’s just fetching Kleenex and cold medicine while your husband suffers from a man cold. Which we all know is the very worst of all the colds. It’s far superior and more serious than any type of flu a wife might contract. It requires chicken noodle soup in bed, lots of “poor baby,” and Xanax. Granted, the Xanax is for the caretaker, but you get my point.

  Perry’s iffy mole turned out to be nothing to worry about, but during the course of our marriage we’ve also had more serious health scares. Although I realize it’s hard to imagine anything worse than the belly-button story.

  Perry has chronic back problems. It started when he was a counselor at a sports camp when we were dating but seemed to get worse after we got married. And so we finally went to see a doctor to explore surgical options. An MRI revealed that he had a bulging disc, and the doctor recommended that he get surgery to help with the pain. That sounded reasonable, and it certainly helped that at the time I was a pharmaceutical sales rep and had some sweet health insurance, which meant it would only cost us pennies. “What? No deductible? Sure, cut away!” I can’t resist a bargain.

  Perry’s first surgery was about a year after we were married. We woke up at the crack of dawn to get him to the hospital in time. I held his hand until it was time for him to go back, and I cried as I sat in the waiting room because I was so worried about him. It’s never an easy thing to watch someone you love with all your heart be wheeled back to have any sort of medical procedure. Have you not seen all those 20/20 episodes where someone dies because a doctor forgot to take out a sponge or something? Good night. It’s enough to make you want to slap a Band-Aid on your appendix, pop an Advil, and call it a day.

  When they finally let me go into the recovery room, I was stunned to see Perry looking so pale and helpless. As much as I joke and as much as I tease him that he totally started falling apart the day we got married, he really doesn’t do sickly. While I look at ill health as an opportunity to watch trashy television and stay in bed all day, he views it as something akin to a prison sentence.

  So I fought back my tears as I stroked his hair and watched him fight nausea from the anesthesia. Ultimately, they decided he needed to stay the night, and he insisted that I go home to get some rest. So I headed home while I prayed he’d have a peaceful night’s sleep and be much improved in the morning.

  I headed to the hospital early the next day to pick him up. By the time we signed all the papers and listened to his post-op instructions, it was late morning. They wheeled him out to the car, and I watched the nurse help him in and shut the door. Then I pulled out of the parking lot and began to carefully navigate our way home. But that’s when I saw a Chick-fil-A.

  Suddenly all I could think about was a chicken biscuit. You know, the chicken breakfast biscuit you can only get before 10:30 a.m.? My desire was fueled by two factors. First, this was back before there were many Chick-fil-A restaurants located outside a mall food court. Second, I was rarely up and out early enough to make the breakfast-biscuit deadline.

  So I gently asked Perry, “Do you mind if I pull through Chick-fil-A and get a chicken biscuit?”

  To his credit, he didn’t file for divorce on the spot. And maybe it was the pain medication, because he just looked at me and mumbled, “Okay.”

  I pulled through the Chick-fil-A line and ordered my biscuit, only to be informed that it was 10:37 and I’d missed the cutoff by seven minutes. SEVEN MINUTES. Dang those nurses and their post-op instructions. And since I didn’t want anything else Chick-fil-A had to offer, I attempted to make a U-turn out of the drive-through line and, unfortunately, jumped a curb. With my husband who’d just had back surgery in the passenger’s seat.

  I am a horrible person. A horrible person who finds a chicken biscuit completely irresistible.

  Did you ever read Cherry Ames books when you
were younger? She was a nurse with jet-black hair and rosy red cheeks who was always on a new adventure wherever she was working —in the army or on a cruise ship or at a smallpox farm. (Not really on that last one, but it made me laugh.) I loved those books and aspired to be Cherry Ames when I grew up.

  Sadly, jumping the curb in my quest for a chicken biscuit with my post-op husband in tow forever disqualified me from being Cherry Ames. There’s a good chance I’m not even allowed to read the books anymore.

  I finally got him home and situated on the couch with a blanket. According to Perry, the Clemson Tigers band marched through our living room to dispense his pain medication at some point that afternoon. Which is weird, because we’re not even Clemson fans, not to mention that South Carolina is a pretty good haul from Texas. So I took this as an indication that maybe it was time to cut back on the meds just a tad.

  Unfortunately, this wasn’t the last of Perry’s surgeries. Fast-forward about eight years and an additional back surgery later, and we decided to try it one more time. The difference was that this time we had a child and bad health insurance now that we were both self-employed. All of a sudden that Tylenol they wanted to charge $85 for seemed highly extravagant.

  Perry had to be at the hospital by five thirty in the morning. I still haven’t really figured out why you have to be at the hospital so early for surgery. Especially since the doctors don’t seem to breeze through to draw those Sharpie cutting dots on your body until sometime around nine. Inconveniently, this surgery coincided with Mimi and Bops leaving on vacation and Gulley already being on vacation, so I was left without anyone to help me with Caroline until after eight in the morning. And that’s how Perry ended up taking a taxi to have back surgery during our ninth year of marriage. Old Love!

  That’s what happens when you’re on your third back surgery in four years. It’s like having your fourth baby —you’re lucky if anyone even shows up. And they sure aren’t bringing flowers or food.

  In fact, Perry told me I could just stay home and he’d take a cab back home when the surgery was over. I told him there was no way I was going to let him do that. Cab rides aren’t cheap, and we have a perfectly good city bus system.

  I finally arrived at the hospital around eight thirty or so and then proceeded to wander the vast medical maze for the next twenty minutes searching for Perry. Helpful hospital employees directed me to the fifth floor, and then the ninth floor, and then to the sublevel basement in the north tower. Finally I spied him lying in the pre-op room and recognized him in spite of the sweet hairnet on his head.

  They wheeled him off and sent me to the surgical waiting room. I asked how long the surgery would take. They said about an hour, so I headed over to the food court because my stomach was in knots and needed the comfort that only an egg, bean, and cheese breakfast taco could bring. Oh, and a Grande latte from Starbucks.

  (Do you see how I eat during these situations? There is no tragedy too big for food.)

  It puzzles me that some hospitals have food courts because, while I completely understand why friends and loved ones wouldn’t want to eat in the hospital cafeteria, going to grab egg rolls with a side of fried rice at Zing Tao’s China Hut while Grandma is in surgery seems a little irreverent. Of course, those of us who eat tacos in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

  I finished my taco and then headed to the surgical waiting room. To say that I was the youngest person in there is the understatement of the century. Apparently the neurosurgery day ward usually caters to a much older crowd, as evidenced by the fact that The Price Is Right was being shown on every available television while various conversations were held about how handsome Bob Barker was when he was a young man. How old do you have to be to have any recollection of Bob Barker ever being young?

  I also was able to witness a catfight between two of the elderly Blue Bird volunteers, which honestly was worth the price of our insurance deductible. It seems that Myrtle, who wasn’t a day under ninety-seven, hadn’t been doing the job of surgery waiting-room hostess well enough to meet the standards of Gloria, who was a spring chicken at around seventy-eight. Gloria was quick to tell Myrtle that the only way to do things was the way Gloria wanted them done.

  Honestly, I didn’t see much difference between the hostessing methods of Myrtle and Gloria, other than a little salesmanship. Gloria pushed the waiting-room coffee like a Juan Valdez drug lord. Anyone who came within a two-mile radius of the waiting room was offered “the best cup of coffee you’ll ever have! Ever! The best coffee ever!”

  Call me a skeptic, but I seriously doubted this claim. In my vast coffee experience, I have found that free coffee that has been percolating for hours isn’t usually the best use of my taste buds. I did, however, take the bag of Oreo cookies that Gloria offered because I needed something to settle my stomach after that breakfast taco.

  When Perry’s doctor came in to let me know he was out of surgery and doing well, Gloria was quick to come and check on me. She was thrilled to tell me that her sources confirmed that my husband, “Mr. Perry the Eighth,” was doing well. Now, Perry is a III, but I had no idea where the VIII was coming from. Gloria said it with a certain reverence in her tone, as well she should for a lineage that long and proud. It’s like we were descendants of the English monarchy all of a sudden.

  Then I got a glimpse of her clipboard and noticed that what she was seeing was Perry’s name followed by III, which happened to be right next to his doctor’s name, which starts with V. So what she actually was calling VIII was, in fact, IIIV. I’m not much on Roman numerals, but I feel fairly certain this is not the sign of any number that the Romans came up with back in ye olde Roman times.

  Unfortunately, even after three surgeries, Perry’s back still bothers him from time to time. And surgery is no longer an option unless he wants to spend the rest of his life moving like Joan Cusack does in Sixteen Candles and, let’s be honest, it hasn’t proved to be very successful in the past.

  So the next time he started complaining about his back, I suggested he try acupuncture. I have two friends who rave about the effectiveness of acupuncture. Plus, it seemed like everywhere I turned, I kept hearing about its miraculous effects. (Granted, most of this information was gathered while watching the summer Olympics in Beijing, so it could have just been NBC creating culturally relevant filler between Michael Phelps’s events.)

  (This is also where I learned that Chinese people eat chicken feet.)

  I asked my friends for the names of their acupuncturists. The first one’s name was Lupe Gonzales. For some reason, Chinese acupuncture practiced by someone named Lupe just didn’t feel very authentic. Something tells me Lupe’s ancestors weren’t practicing ancient Chinese medicine.

  When I called my other friend to find out who she went to, she told me she couldn’t pronounce his name but it started with a T. Perfect. That was the kind of alternative medical credentials we needed.

  Perry told me that if I’d call and make the appointment, he would go. I called Dr. T.’s office at one thirty the following afternoon and explained that my husband needed to come in for a treatment. Dr. T. said he could see him at two thirty and asked if we knew where he was located.

  No. No, we didn’t.

  Dr. T. is located right under the Wendy’s sign. “Look for Wendy’s Hamburgers!”

  Aww, honey. Good news! You can get acupuncture and then stop for a Frosty on the way home. What says medical professional like close proximity to Wendy’s Hamburgers?

  Except for maybe a medical degree purchased through an institute of learning that advertises on television.

  I called Perry to let him know he needed to be by the Wendy’s Hamburgers in an hour, and meanwhile Caroline and I were headed to the pool. Have fun and enjoy your nice, relaxing acupuncture.

  Truth be told, I felt a little envious as I headed to the pool loaded down with various swim paraphernalia. Perry was probably lying peacefully in a candlelit room while basically getting a massage. Maybe I coul
d come up with an ailment that required acupuncture followed by a delicious Frosty.

  By the time Caroline and I traipsed in from the pool later that evening, Perry was already home sitting on the couch. I walked through the back door and asked, “How was it?”

  And at that moment I saw the look in his eyes.

  He looked a little like Jack Bauer after that season of 24 when he was tortured by the bad guys. Of course, technically, that was every season of 24, but you get what I’m saying.

  I looked at him and asked, “Did it hurt?”

  “It was the worst pain I have ever felt in my life.”

  “Seriously? The worst pain? Worse than when you had that deviated septum and your nose was packed with cotton?”

  “Yes. It was torture. I’m never going back.”

  “Wow. Kristie and Heather didn’t say anything about it hurting.”

  “Did you ask them if it hurt?”

  “Um. Well . . . no.”

  “Call them and ask if it was supposed to hurt. I knew we should have gone with Lupe.”

  I picked up the phone and called Kristie and Heather and found out that, yes, acupuncture can sometimes hurt. Especially when you’re dealing with chronic pain and nerve issues. That probably would have been a good question to ask BEFORE I scheduled the appointment for Perry.

  Oh, hindsight. You are funny.

  Thankfully, we can laugh about it now. And truth be told, I kind of laughed a little bit about it then. Not because my husband was in pain, but because I fancy myself to be some kind of pseudo medical expert since I sold cough medicine for ten years and didn’t ask what was probably the most important question.

  I was much more concerned about an unpronounceable last name that seemed to scream credibility, and a Frosty.

  Dr. T. told Perry that for the acupuncture to really work, he’d need to come in for about four or five sessions. I think that’s how long it takes to unblock your chi.

  Needless to say, Perry’s chi remains blocked.