In Sickness and in Health
Update: I’m thrilled that my story received an Honorable Mention in the Medium Writer’s Challenge. Thank you, judges.
In March 2010, my husband and I found ourselves sitting in a doctor’s office while a pale, rotund surgeon told us that a three-inch tumor was growing in my pancreas. We had discovered it by accident after I had gotten a CT scan for a different issue.
“The tumor isn’t cancerous, but it’s very close to your arterial vein,” the doctor told us. “You could monitor it, but I would recommend surgery in case it grows larger. We might not be able to remove it in the future.”
The reasons for surgery seemed numerous: I was young, only 28 years old, and in good health. There was only a slight chance that I would get diabetes. There was every reason to believe that recovery would be quick and easy. There was only a one percent chance of death.
I understood what people meant when they said they felt the color drain from the room.
The surgeon described the procedure with enthusiasm. It had a tongue-twisting name: a “pancreaticoduodenectomy”, but people usually called it the Whipple, named after the surgeon who’d made substantial improvements to it in 1935. A Whipple involved slicing through the pancreas, the stomach, and the small intestine, removing the tumor and affected part of the pancreas, and then re-stitching the organs together.
The doctor pulled out a piece of paper printed with illustrations of the organs in my abdominal area and drew dark lines to show which parts would be cut through. He scribbled over most of the small intestine, the gallbladder, a third of the pancreas.
“We’ll remove these sections,” he said briskly, waving his hand over the scribbled-out parts as if it were that easy. Like waving a wand.
They would use a robot called the da Vinci, which required two people to operate it.
“It’s the latest technology. It makes very tiny incisions that heal nicely—almost unnoticeable.” He sounded like a kid who was excited to play with a new toy. “We’re lucky that we found it now, before it became cancerous.”
Maybe I should’ve felt lucky, but I didn’t.
Before I found out about the tumor growing in my pancreas, my life was going pretty well. I was attending a prestigious graduate school in Pittsburgh for design and I loved my studies. I had a husband with a good job that supported us both. We lived in a beautiful apartment in a nice neighborhood. Best of all, I was offered a summer internship at a branding agency in New York City, a place I had always wanted to live. Pre-tumor, my husband and I had decided that I should accept it, that we could handle a few months long distance.
But I also had a secret shame that I kept buried inside me. Despite being married and monogamous, I could not stop fantasizing about having sex with other men. I had been doing this throughout my three-year marriage. My latest crush was one of the other students at my university. When I was around him, my stomach bubbled in delight. I memorized the angles of his face and repeated bits of conversations we’d had in my head, analyzing them for any hint of flirtation from him (there was none). After I found out that he would also be interning in New York City that summer, I dreamed that we met up after work, stumbled into the bedroom of my sublet apartment, and tore each other’s clothes off. I woke up with my heart racing and turned to look at my husband asleep next to me. I wondered if this was the summer that I would destroy my marriage.
As much as I wanted to have sex with another man, I didn’t actually want to ruin my marriage. I still loved my husband, and there was nothing particularly wrong with our relationship. Yes, we had the same fights over and over. I was too critical; he worked too much. I wanted to spend money on traveling; he wanted to spend it on expensive electronics. None of this explained my feelings for other men, so I vacillated between ignoring my fantasies and indulging in them. As long as I didn’t act on anything, I wasn’t hurting anyone, I told myself. I was only thinking about sex with other men because I had never experienced it. I was curious—it was only natural.
As a teenager, I’d decided to abstain from sex until marriage. It was a decision I made based on my upbringing in an Evangelical Christian church, but I made it without resentment or questioning because I loved God and wanted to follow His teachings. I hoped that it would make sex a more intimate and special experience between me and the man I married.
My husband and I had sex for the first time the week before our marriage ceremony. It was uncomfortable and anticlimactic. I wasn’t worried—I knew that it wouldn’t be great right away. But for months afterward I found sex difficult, even painful at times, and I began to worry. I loved my husband, but I felt as though I’d been lied to by pastors who had said sex for married couples was God’s incredible gift, by my mom who’d told me my body would know what to do. Even Hollywood had lied to me by creating all of those (implied) sex scenes where the woman orgasmed quickly after the man thrusted inside her.
I began to regret saving myself for marriage. I thought wistfully about the guys I’d dated before getting married. I wished that I had slept with the ones who’d made me weak in the knees when we kissed, the ones I had said no to even though I had wanted to say yes.
“I’m not ready to die,” I whispered to my husband the night before my surgery. “I haven’t done anything with my life. No one will remember me.”
“If you died, I would remember you,” he said. “But you’re not gonna die tomorrow.” He pressed me against him as if he could keep me tethered to the earth.
I’d decided to get the surgery because I didn’t want to spend my life getting MRIs and worrying about whether my tumor would become cancerous or grow too big to be removed. Even though recovery was supposed to be quick and easy, I would need time at home to recover afterward. I wouldn’t be able to climb subway stairs or walk to work. I wrote to the branding agency and turned down the internship offer. The weight of my disappointment felt tangible and heavy, unlike the tumor inside of me.
The day of the surgery, we arrived at the hospital early. A nurse led me to a room with a lowered exam table. I took off my clothes and put on a medical gown, my skin immediately rising with goosebumps. A thin, dark-skinned man came into the room and told me he was my anesthesiologist and would insert the epidural needle into my back. I was shaking — from cold or from fear? I was more scared of a giant needle being inserted into my spine than the nine hour surgery that awaited me.
The anesthesiologist squatted so that he could look me in the eye. He took my hand reassuringly. “I have done thousands of these,” he said, “It will be ok. I promise you won’t even feel it.”
My memories after that are fragmented and clouded. Lying on a bed next to many other beds in a recovery room, my husband’s worried face above me. A kind ER nurse propping me up as he gave me ice chips to moisten my dry lips and mouth. Being rolled down a hall and in and out of elevators, then sharp daggers of pain as I was lifted onto another bed in a room with beige walls, a small TV, a chair, and a window overlooking a grassy hill.
The surgeon had told me I should only spend four or five days in the hospital. In the end, I spent nine days there. They developed a monotonous rhythm as my body healed itself, so sluggish that it seemed as though it wasn’t happening. I was impatient to leave my new home, with its constant beeps and people in and out of the room at all hours.
I cried often from the pain. The pain in my belly, the pain when my catheter was changed, the fear of pain when a nurse told me they were removing my morphine drip. I was ashamed of my tears. I was young and healthy; I was supposed to be strong.
It was supposed to be a quick, easy recovery.
The worst were the nights, endless and gray, as I trudged between my bed and the chair, trailing a rolling stand alongside me which contained a bag of my own urine. I would doze off only to be woken up by a nurse coming to draw blood and then would panic about not being able to fall back asleep before the residents came in a few hours later.
“How is your pain on a scale of one to ten?” they would ask me, smiling, as they poked and prodded. If I were very polite, if I smiled back, maybe I could go home sooner. This didn’t make sense, but nothing made a lot of sense at that time.
I listened to an audiobook of Eat, Pray, Love and wondered what it would be like to get divorced and meet a sexy man while traveling the world. As I listened, my mind drifted away to the first time I had lusted after a man who wasn’t my husband. It was February 2007, two months after our wedding. We had flown to Florida to vacation with my family and the weather was glorious. Warm sun kissed our skin as we walked on powdery white sand.
I lay on the beach reading my paperback novel, half-listening to the steady roar of waves interspersed with shouts from my brother and the two friends he had brought along, Nate and Ryan. The three guys tossed a football back and forth. Nate was a good looking guy: 21 years old, with the muscular chest, sandy hair, and blue eyes of a Ken doll. I caught myself looking at his calves and shoulders. I imagined what it would feel like to have his strong arms encircle me, throw me down in the sand, and—
I cut off my thoughts.
This wasn’t how I’d expected to feel just a few months after getting married. We were still supposed to be in our honeymoon period. That night, I tried to initiate sex with my husband, hoping to use my feelings from the afternoon to fire up our lackluster love life.
“I’m too tired,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow?”
I tossed and turned, unable to sleep, wondering whether I had made a serious mistake.
On the day of my release from the hospital, my husband pushed me in a wheelchair to the hospital’s exit door, eased me into our car, and drove me home, avoiding the bumps in the road that made me grit my teeth as knives stabbed my insides. He helped me up the stairs and into our apartment.
The silence caressed my ears like silk. It was an idyllic May afternoon, and the scent of freshly mown grass from the open window was the most beautiful aroma I had ever inhaled. How had I never noticed the extraordinary beauty of the sun dappling the wood floors?
I shuffled to the bathroom. I didn’t recognize the alien who looked back at me in the mirror. I had lost 15 pounds while I was in the hospital. My time there had turned my legs into hairy insect sticks while swelling my belly into a tender balloon. I still had plastic tubes that went into my stomach on each side to let fluid drain out into dangling pouches. My unwashed hair was plastered to my head, and there was a rainbow of green, yellow, and purple bruises covering my arms and hands.
For months after my surgery, I woke up in my own bed with a sense of dread, thinking I was back in the hospital. It took seconds for my eyes to adjust and for me to realize that no one was coming to take my blood. No one would wake me up in the morning, smiling and poking and asking me about pain levels.
My husband treated me with the tenderness one would show a hurt puppy. I was afraid to look at my stomach where the robot had cut into me—eight small holes and one larger incision, I later counted—but he changed my bandages when they became pink and wet every few hours. He unclipped the plastic bottles from their tubes and poured my body fluids down the drain without flinching. He cooked me easily digestible food that a child might eat: toast, pasta with butter, rice.
He held my arm gently but firmly while we crept down the sidewalk as if it were covered in ice. We made it one block, then two blocks, and by the end of a week I could walk four blocks down the street to my favorite yard, the one that smelled like sweet hay and honeysuckle.
Instead of working in New York City, I took a month of recovery time and then started a local internship. I was heartbroken, but I tried to believe that there was a silver lining to the trauma. If I had gone to New York, I reasoned, it was highly likely that something would have happened with another man. Maybe I would have had sex with my crush. Maybe I would have had sex with someone else.
Instead, I observed the fierce way my husband cared for me and I loved him anew. How could I have thought that marrying him was a mistake? Here was a man I could depend on. So what if our sex life wasn’t as exciting as I’d hoped it would be? Here was a man who would always take care of me.
I vowed to be a better wife, worthy of the care he had given me. I would stop lusting after other men. I would become kinder and less critical.
I wanted desperately for the tumor to mean something, so I decided that it signified a crucial turning point in our marriage. I decided that the Whipple surgery had saved our marriage.
Later I wondered if it had simply delayed the inevitable.
Author’s note: this is a true story based on my own experiences as I remember them. Names have been changed or omitted to protect people’s privacy.
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