I Told Myself I Was Okay. I'm Not.

On surgery and illness, delusion and pain, cat scratches, and getting on with getting on.

After the procedure, when I was coming to—groggy from the anesthesia, Percocet, I was told it was nothing scary: just an ulcer, just esophagitis.

The following week, at St. Francis Hospital, the radiologist handling my barium swallow eased my lingering fears: no, there didn’t seem to be herniation. And he couldn’t see the ulcer, which was good. If an ulcer even existed, he said, it was surface level. It would heal.

I told him, then, without being asked, I had made my peace with my failed procedure. I was taking the PPIs prescribed to me. I had cut out alcohol. I had ordered Tyler’s acid-free coffee. I was taking Gaviscon Advanced at night. And the pain, though different, was only as painful as it had always been. I was as I always was. In a word, I was fine.

For years, I have lived as fine, which means I have lived with a pain level of 6—which, for those who have never had to circle a number on the pain scale, is closer to the sad, frowning face than to the happy, smiling one.

At pain level 6—acid scratching my throat like a razor, I went to pitch clients in Silicon Valley and advised CMOs on their brand strategy. At a pain level 6, I went back to school for three years, graduating in two. I wrote four manuscripts through that 6. I ventured through a pandemic and survived that pandemic—the acid coming up and into and blocking my ears, but still very much a 6. I had gotten married on a wet October day surrounded by dahlias as big as dinner plates at that 6. We bought our first home at that 6. I had a baby girl at that 6. I suffered through nausea, migraines, agoraphobia, intrusive thoughts, memory loss, and mania in the months before and after my baby’s birth at that 6. I ran two half-marathons at that 6, biked to pop hits and silly aphorisms at that 6, skied down mountains at that 6, swam at that 6. I went on vacations, on boats, to beaches, and distant islands at that 6. I took art classes with my elderly neighbor, I watched movies in the dark of night, and I read books—hundreds of books—at that 6. I said fuck you to that 6 and I drank and occasionally smoked and sang and danced and karaoked at that 6. I laughed and feigned happiness at that 6. I laughed and felt real happiness at that 6.

Several days after my barium swallow, at my GI follow-up, the nurse practitioner walked into the room while I was jotting down this pain—my pain—on the provided scale: a level of 6.

Just as I put the pen down, she said, “So I wish I had better news…” and the room shifted, hollowed, became something other than the room.

There was no evidence of my past procedure, which means my reflux was unchecked.

I was beginning to herniate.

I would not get better.

The esophagitis would not improve but would worsen.

It was so bad it had been graded—a 2 on a scale of 1 to 4.

It would become a 4, and then there would be cellular change.

I needed surgery. Soon.

Or, maybe soon.

Either way, I needed a surgeon.

There was one…in Macon.

Seeing I was still frozen, she added, “The images of your esophagus were not great.”

A pause. Then: “The acid damage—it looks like cat scratches. All throughout your throat.”

It was this—not the diagnostic lexicon, not intact, herniating, esophagitis, Grade 2, Grade 4, ulcer—but this one image that made the tears accumulate, blur my vision, fall flatly from my face. They felt overwhelmingly warm, but the warmth felt a feeling separate from me, something once belonging to a body I was only loosely tethered to, had faint recognition of.

Not my own.

Here.

In this room.

The pain I had cried about for the first three years, then got tired of crying about. The pain I was made to believe was not there, or was there but not damaging, or at least not damaging in the near term. The pain I noted as a number. The pain I patently, actively ignored—the pain I said was fine, was now anything but fine.

I had been gaslit. I had fought the gaslighting. And when I lost—when the pain didn’t go away, I had gaslit myself.

“Delusional,” I spat to my parents when I got home, closed my bedroom door, took two Klonopin, and cried some more.

“Deluded, deluded, deluded,” I hammered aloud, into myself,—texted to my friends with the same desperation I had when I hated Her. The Her in a mirror in my studio apartment on the edge of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The Her I had slapped, punched, bruised while staring into that mirror. The Her that had hijacked my body, taken my happiness. The Her that stole my “normal” life.

After the news, crying in my room, I couldn’t let it go: the image of being clawed, mauled from the inside out.

I came back to it again and again in a deep mourning.

It was a reckoning, a realization that the 6—the thing I had learned to endure, to tolerate, to live outside of—was real, was worsening, was never going to get better. I felt I needed time and space to come to terms with the inevitable.

And, yet, I couldn’t have that—not fully.

Even with the knowledge of a looming and very complicated surgery, life does not pause. Work and writing and babies are indifferent to any diagnosis.

And so, after a few hours of compartmentalized sorrow, economized grieving, I did what I always do.

I got on with getting on.

I continued to live at a level 6.

At a pain level of 6, I watched the latest episode of Severance. Harmony Cobel in Salt’s Neck, the blue on blue of a seaside town, the weathered siding of the old homes, the weathered skin of the people.

At a 6, I read my baby Room on the Broom in the deep corner of our L-shaped couch—Aoife pulling herself up onto the soft cushions like the ledge of a pool and me gathering her in my arms. As I read, I punctuated every word, caught every rhyme (hard, soft, end, internal). I pointed out the key actors: the cat and the hat, the frog and the wand, the witch and her broom and her bow. Especially her bow.

For Aoife, I named the inanimate: See Mrs. Sun? Here, this is Mr. Moon. For her, I brought to life the wind.

At a 6, I took on a naming project—excitedly, only to learn it was for a tech solutions provider. The names I created soon depressing me: Aptimal, Evervest, Monumence.

At a 6, I wrote a darkly humorous scene for my memoir-writing workshop. Then I worried I was not funny enough, that I could never be funny.

At a 6-bordering-7, I crept outside to photograph the baby saucer magnolia in front of our neighbor’s yard blooming at the fore of spring, its faint pink blooms. The same neighbor whose daughter is also sick and haunts the home’s windows. The one who knows our daily routine and who followed us in our costumes on Halloween—photographing us as we trick-or-treated. The same one who came out with her camera after the first and only snow of the season, just as we arrived home from Atlanta—my parents in tow, my parents’ luggage in tow. The snow then like Christmas, the street lamps salted, our home lightly sugared. The daughter photographing everything, but also us.

At a 6, I walked to the river for exercise, dodging the carpenter bees drifting in and out of the sun, heavied.

At a 6, I helped M to write to prospective host families and strategize communications, advised her on how to weigh pros and cons of cities, home environments, family dynamics.

At a 6, I got Aoife to try on a new rash guard—a pale yellow suit with ruffled shoulders, patterned with teal-tipped flowers, much coaxing involved.

At a 6, I marinated chicken.

I cut Romaine lettuce.

I grated Romano cheese.

I fried potatoes.

Then I typed in a Google document titled Running Diary about my marinating of chicken and cutting Romaine lettuce and grating Romano cheese and frying up potatoes.

At a 6, I read about Bernie Sanders’ roadshow, about a photoshoot involving a Tesla Cybertruck in front of the White House, about the stock market’s steep weekly losses.

I watched a documentary on Vietnam and was taken by Hanoi Hannah, North Vietnam’s chief voice of propaganda. Her job designed to chill and frighten, instead charming and seducing the American soldiers. The young men who stumbled across her on the radio unable to turn away. Hanoi Hannah—a siren on the waves, her smooth voice booming, “GI… Why is the poor boy the one that must die, while the rich boy is at home? Is everyone equal in America?”

At a 6, I bookmarked a post about melting wax mannequins in a heat wave in Britain in the 1920s, feeling it was oddly important.

At a 6, I played a bootleg video of the New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker for Aoife and watched her stomp and stomp, duck and turn to the cascading score. Later, she turned to me, wrapping her chubby arms around my calves—asking me to pick her up, for me to hold her as I myself sautéed, spun.

When I finally did, her hair lifted with static—her eyes wrinkling into two tiny raisins, her mouth widening. Pure gap-toothed glee.

At a 6, I watched The White Lotus with T and M, and M told me, after the scene of Parker Posey fumbling for her Lorazepam prior to getting a massage, that Parker’s character reminded her of me.

The voice. The pills. The carriage.

At a 6, I jostled my PPIs into my mouth like jimmies, sipped water, then spooned globs of Gaviscon Advanced into my mouth in hope of preserving something within me.

I made Tyler’s Acid Free Coffee, pouring it into a beaker-like pitcher, putting the pitcher in the fridge. The cup numbers (2, 4, 6, 8) precisely etched into the glass making me feel somehow clean.

At a 6, I scheduled an appointment with a surgeon in Atlanta, only to learn I was “out-of-network.”

At a 6, I finished Beautyland, a novel about an alien raised as a human girl, who felt oddly like me. I took a screenshot of one of its final passages—the protagonist Adina reflecting on her human life: “…designed to be brief but to at times feel endless. A set of years that pass in a minute, eternity in an afternoon.”

At a 6, I woke up early to a restless baby. I let her run around me in the dark with her stuffed kitty Mango and an empty milk carton in tow. When she tired—and I tired of her tiring, I played her a short clip of a Balanchine ballet—her crawling, curling into my lap, as the sun began to rise.

When the clip ended, another video streamed before us and a handful of little girls in white tutus appeared on the screen dancing to Frozen’s “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?”:

I never see you anymore
Come out the door
It’s like you’ve gone away!
We used to be best buddies
And now we’re not
I wish you would tell me why.

At a 6 and with the dance concluding, the girls taking a bow, Aoife leaned her little skull against my own—warm.

At a 6, I realized I thought I could go on at a 6 like I had always done, but I couldn’t.

At a 6, I, instead, began to cry.

The lyrics, Aoife’s temple, the warmth of her in my arms, the feeling of my arms something brief and endless, ten years and one minute. An eternity—and an afternoon.