I'm doing a lot of walking lately. It's the only thing that works when it's late at night and The Motherfucker decides to dig in, reminding me of its presence with a sequence of sharp stabbing pains that light up my left flank and occasionally napalm my gut for good measure. It's not unbearable, this pain, but its language is an infuriatingly irregular morse code that grits my teeth and clenches my fists.
So I get out of bed and I walk. I walk around the suburban community in which I now live, my route as random as The Motherfucker's reminders. Not that you'd notice; suburban apartments, suburban cars, suburban joggers and dog-walkers - it's all a little too Lynchian for my liking, a little too reminiscent of my time in Southern California. Every blind undrawn seems to present the same tableau - the back of the couch and the flatscreen TV, blue light flickering on uninspiring interiors.
Christ.
I'm not entirely sure how I got here. Metaphysically speaking, I mean. My life has always lacked agency (to the point where it may well be my defining characteristic), but what always seemed to me an ongoing series of mostly happy accidents fueled largely by whiskey and an impish desire to see what happens next has begun to feel swayed by entirely the wrong kind of momentum.
There's plenty I won't go into here out of a desire to protect the privacy of people I care about and avoid the horror of my son someday reading this before I've had the chance to explain, but those of you who are in my life know well enough that it had not been a good year even before The Motherfucker, so perhaps He isn't solely responsible for this feeling of ennui. All the same, though...
It started back in April. I was laying in bed one night when I began to experience discomfort in my left side. It felt like gas at first, but quickly intensified into what was probably the worst pain I've ever experienced. I ended up spending that night pacing around the apartment, unable to focus on anything but my next breath, wondering if I should get myself to the Emergency Room and engaging in the uniquely American activity of weighing my need to get medical attention versus the potential cost.
By the time dawn rolled around, the pain had eased off somewhat. I took the day off work to recover, and spent most of it on the couch, wondering what I'd done to myself and again considering my options if I wasn't feeling better by that evening.
I dislike doctors and hospitals, and with reason. My three overwhelming memories of that environment are the weeks preceding the deaths of my father and grandfather, and the last time I - as a very young boy - had an issue with my works that involved a great deal of blood and screaming and stitches in the absolute last location you would ever want them.
I share that in the hope that it - along with the financial burden - explains why I didn't go to the ER when The Motherfucker's Concerto reached a sweating, vomiting, agonizing peak that night, culminating in your narrator passing out from the pain, and why when I woke up several hours later to find that said pain had departed as suddenly as it arrived, I breathed a sigh of relief, went to sleep, and returned to work the following morning.
The Motherfucker went dark for a while after that first assault, but I had doubt to gnaw at my guts in His absence. I'd already lost a decent amount of weight at that point, and I was sticking to my diet and getting to the gym regularly. For the first time in my adult life, I felt as though I might actually reach a place where I could feel good about my body and my health.
But what about the damage already done? I've never eaten well, and the whiskey that fueled all those happy accidents mentioned earlier had no doubt wrought havoc on my insides. I lack the commitment to be an alcoholic, but I've been a drunk since the age of twenty-one. My flank didn't hurt at that point, but my insides felt wrong somehow, arranged in some fashion that wasn't normal.
What if I had liver disease? What if it was Cancer? My imagination, both best friend and worst enemy since I was very young, began constructing worst case scenarios. It's inoperable, the doctors said. Daddy has to go away now, I told my son.
And then, very much outside of my imagination, I started pissing blood.
That got me to the doctor, who referred me to a Urologist, who stuck a tube with a tiny camera on it into the last place you'd want someone to stick a tube, and I got to watch on a monitor as he took a look around my bladder until we came upon The Motherfucker, nestled snug and happy in a burrow of His own making, a little flesh Hobbiton.
As for doubt and worry, I decided to get a precautionary CT Scan on that whole area of my body, for my own peace of mind if nothing else.
So here we are. The Motherfucker, a kidney stone too big to pass, will be broken down via some improbably futuristic internal laser surgery next Friday. His last hurrah will be the pain eliminating those pieces from my body will no doubt cause me. Until then, and until I get the results of that scan, both He and my imagination will be doing their best to give me a few sleepless nights.
I'm hoping that's the best they've got.
posted at 11:22 AM