A Holiday Moment

I awaken, floating out to sea. The sticky salt water is lolling me in its drunken waves. As my mind heaves into consciousness I am propelled with pain and nausea from sweat-drenched cotton sheets.  Swiftly crossing the room my very essence seeks the safety of white porcelain. The air on my dripping skin is chilling. Evaporating perspiration enfolds me with such intense cold that I gasp to the very depths of my being.  I am fire alive inside of ice. Nausea runs in deep bass notes up and down my torso.  Into my head, a flood of disorder and desperation and then down into my bowels where it gnaws and grips like hands from a recurring nightmare.  I need to dispel the poison but I cannot stand up.  My vision in the darkened room clouds to further shadows and I crumble onto the floor. Ironically, out of the fog of squeezed and tortured sensations, I make a clear mental note that I am lying on the carpet that disgusted me four years ago when I rented this house.  It’s fibers rust and orange feel greasy and repulsively receptive to my limp body. Hot and cold continue to surge through the night. Occasionally I crawl to the bowl to spew bile, foam and juice that pour out of my throat with heaves and burns into my air passages.

In the morning the pain in my abdomen has settled to the right side.  It is a silver knife stabbing so deeply so that the sharp jewels on the hilt sink into the wound as well; a mere throb, however, of the former night’s hell.  I am back shivering in the primordial swamp beneath my bedcovers. When Daniel awakens I relay my distress to him and he suggests the Internet for a prompt diagnosis. Google pops up. A white screen with the familiar logo entwined in candy canes and mistletoe created from some artist’s party hangover.  I enter the words; abdomen, right, pain and receive my verdict. Classic appendicitis. In the Wikipedia site under treatments there are several links. It offers a surprising option. >Home Remedies<.  Intrigued, I click and the electric text comes up, black against white, always an irritating contrast.

“Who are you kidding”, it chides. “Get thee to the hospital.  For God sake what idiot tries to cure appendicitis at home?”

I navigate my pointer to the upper right of the monitor and click the little “x”. The browser disappears and I push back on the couch.

“Damn!”

The attending physician, casual in his trend setting surgical greens, explains how an ovarian cist is formed. The love he holds for his field is obvious. He eyes shine as he conjures the beautiful image of a full and ready egg hanging, fatefully, just over the edge of the fallopian tube, inexplicably stuck and unable to pursue it’s intended future. I am rapt. Doped with pain medicine, and having just survived a barium enema and a radioactive intravenous injection, I am somehow able to follow him through the unhappy egg’s dilemma. Wedged and immovable it begins to swell, filling with fluid, stretching and bulging into the lower intestines and colon. Eventually it will be reabsorbed by my forgiving anatomy or it will burst, traveling upward to be uncomfortably cradled beneath my ribs. Scribbling a prescription for percoset and patience he tears a slip of white paper from his pad and hands it to me. His eyes are shining with emotion and pleasure that I assume is derived from our satisfying doctor patient relationship.

As we drive home an image of a crystalline fetus in a translucent white plum hanging from the ragged branch of what was once a passage to my womb forms in my mind.  The virgin fruit swells, transforming into a Christmas snow globe as the embryo grows; white flakes shimmer and swirl around its unripe body. Is it attached to me yearning for the love and nurturance of my missing uterus or am I emotionally linked to it, the unlikely offspring of my now infertile womanhood.