The Fingers of Death
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After 20-plus years of having Crohn’s disease, you get used to the bathroom problems. But the way I felt that evening, it was different than that. I had only felt like this once before, years ago, when I was still in college. It was right before the last surgery. That’s how I knew what was going to happen.
I called it the Fingers of Death. It’s when parts of your internal anatomy that don’t normally have any feeling begin to come alive, sending pain signals to your brain. They aren’t intense so much as they are shocking, by way of their novelty and their intricacy.
It is a special kind of pain, one with a three-dimensional shape that is only revealed when the organ is under great stress. It is pain that you SEE more than you feel.
That sensation brought back a flood of memories. In my mind I traveled back to my college dorm room. B-complex at the University of Hartford. It was the dorm building for arts and music majors, even though I had already pulled the ripcord on my own music degree.
The nauseating odor of cigarettes put out in not-quite-empty cans of beer. The residue of my roommate’s recent plaster and dough experiments (he was in the Sculpture department) all over the room, floor to ceiling. Little things that didn’t normally bother me seemed unbearable. I laid quietly on my side and gazed at the stack of Chomsky books on my desk. I thought about trying to read but I was too weak. I looked at my Walkman and thought about listening to that Mogwai CD again, but the mere thought of noise made my insides turn in a terrifying new way.
That’s when I knew I needed help.
