galled to death, a year on

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We seem to be entering a time of anniversaries. It’s hard to be in a time of anniversaries, especially when the intervening year has not gone at all as you’d anticipated, to plunge a person into self-reflection.

A year ago today – I think – La Sis Baroque arrived on a plane to come and be Florence Nightingale to my surgical self, when I was having my riddled & raddled gall bladder removed. The joke at the time was that it was the least glamorous complaint you could have, but I’m not so sure now: nothing to do with innards can really be glamorous. Hernias are not. Bladder infections – and, by extension, kidney complaints – are not. Piles are not. I mean, to be honest, the digestive system is our biggest bit and it is a bit infra dig, isn’t it. Basically, we’re just uncool.

Anyway, I had been signed off sick for the two weeks previous, having never managed to quite recover from the choleocystitis (eg where the bilirubin infects the blood) of March, & havng simply woken up one Monday unable to get out of bed. I had had four months on no-fat-at-all and was quite slim, and was taking each day slow. I had gone out the day before in a sort of desperate “eat, drink & be merry ” spirit of displacement (except that I couldn’t eat or drink or really do much) and bought a silver satin camisole smock and a lovely sheer cardigan from Jigsaw, and a handbag which let’s just say it’s still wonderful.

I was nervous and scared but plucky, and everyone was saying OHHHH, the surgery’s a doddle, you’ll recover in no time, you’ll be back at work in a couple of weeks, if that! Glamorous old ladies were saying how, before this surgery, they had wept sitting halfway up flights of stairs (a scenario well-known to Ms B) but afterwards were invincible, could do anything!

So a year ago tomorrow I went in and got operated on, and was sent home – the same day. I still think that’s amazing. A year ago day after tomorrow, there seemed to be something wrong going on underneath one of the bandages (What it was, we’ll draw some sterile gauze over it). So, with my sister and my wonderful friend of the House of Pants in attendance, I was rushed back to the Homerton in a cab. Everyone who looked under the bandage gasped, said, “Oh my God, you poor thing,” and tutted nervously, before leaving me to lie on that slab in the cubicle yet again.

Emergency surgery at midnight. My notes were locked in the day surgery ward. As they wheeled me into theatre at 11.45pm, the cute girl anaesthetist was trotting along beside me saying, “Do you by any chance know what they gave you last time? I mean, were there any problems that you know of? “

“I don’t know,” I said horizontally, trying to be plucky; “I was unconscious. Presuming they’d have told me? I guess it was fine…”

“Oh,” she enthused, “that is GREAT. Now, how are you feeling? Are you a bit nervous?”

“Well it’s not exactly my everyday routine, is it,” I said, trying to sound merely snappish.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s ours.”

An hour and a bit later the wonderful anaesthetist came into the recovery room with a big leather bag on her shoulder. “See? This is the one I was telling you about, off eBay! Great, isn’t it?”

Three days later, home again home again, and there was suddenly no more talk of being straight back into my routine – and to be honest, I’d forgotten the routine after half a year of simply trying to make it to the end of the day. Two lots of anaesthetics. More and different antibiotics after the second op. Painkillers galore. Life was but a dream…*

And then the long, gingerly summer… Everything was loose, and everything was new. Sis went home. I learned to eat normal food again. I had a relapse of some kind and went to a herbalist. Then the States for three weeks, sitting in the nursing home garden with my dad – just the right speed for both of us – then three days in NYC which were an elixir but wiped me out, then the long trip home, and tipped back into something like the old routine – except that everything was still new.

And it still is, in a way. Although it might be getting a bit stale now, thinking about it: I kind of miss the dewy freshness of those weeks. There was even some dewy Promise, but of course there has been death since then, and other things, and I’ve just never got back to the Before. I want simpler things to eat now (though I was subjected to a torrent of derision the other week in a French restaurant: “I need something low-fat, plain, oh, well what can I have, oh I’ll just have the duck, and the mashed potatoes..” But I did HAVE to draw the line at the creme brulee! Just as well: I’m putting on weight like nobody’s business. Why, I don’t know.) My tolerance for external stimulation is lower. (Or is it? There’s been a shitload of external stimulation recently. When I wrote that sentence I meant things like “loud music”, but I think that “things coming at you like a blizzard of two-ton trucks” or “things that are just too much” might fall into the same category.) I feel like I need more downtime. I still have nausea & queasiness half the time. My energy levels are unpredictable. I don’t think I walk slower, but I feel sick from rushing. I still get the shooting pains I got in the weeks after the operation, up where my gall bladder used to be. I seem to collapse every few weeks with some kind of exhaustion & spend a day or two in bed. And there is no let-up. As Lorine Neidecker wrote (of writing poetry as work), “there can be no lay-off/ from this condensery.”

In short, you sort of have to learn somehow, sometime, that you’re not indestructible, that you are in fact not infinite.

But what am I saying? In what useful way could one feasibly apply this knowledge?? No flaming idea. And anyway, they always say it’s the idea of infinity that we can’t grasp; I think it’s finity that’s hard to grapple with. Life, eh. I know tons of people who don’t even work. They somehow don’t really have to. But kids and nearly a grand a month rent leaves no time for minor, long-term changes in one’s internal workings, and the world certainly makes no concessions; and I don’t know how the hell people downsize. I’m already pretty small.

Anyway, off trots Ms B to the docteur to see what can be done. Maybe it’s that other unglamorous-sounding thing, the thyroid. Or maybe it is the result of the moment when the lady-doctor said to her, holding up a thing called a Mirena IUS, no pressure at all, “only one-SEVENTH the amount in the mini-pill!”** “:And it’s localised!”*** She doesn’t think it’s ME; the herbalist just laughed when she voiced her dark fear to him last summer. Maybe it’s just stress. The particular stressful conditions in her life. Or maybe it’s just her. In which case all is lost.

* Okay I did a very short set at a reading seven days after the operation! Well, I had Sis & Ms Rational Self-Delusion – oh, did I say that – to hold me up. And then there was Ms R S-D’s birthday. Nothing like learning where the limit is.

** and why I ever thought adding extraneous fake hormones into the mix might be a good idea I cannot guess, having always had more than enough of my own.

*** Yeah. In your bloodstream. Aaaargh, as Long John Silver might say.

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