Furiously Happy (19 page)

Dr. Morales was over eighty, spoke English only when he had to, and had been doing gallbladder removal since before my mom was alive. He was odd but brilliant, and after a look at my chart he told me that my gallbladder was lingering and was diseased. I explained that it wasn't really “lingering” so much as it was “loitering” and that I wanted it removed. I wondered if you could file a restraining order against your gallbladder for loitering since it's not wanted and it's also trying to kill you. Then you could call the police and have your gallbladder removed and never have to pay for it because it was creating a public nuisance. Unless you have to pay the police to remove people who are public nuisances. I don't know. Frankly, I've never actually been on the complaining side of that scenario.

Dr. Morales said he'd fill me full of carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide (whichever one is not poisonous) and yank out my gallbladder through a hole in my belly button, but when I asked if I could keep my gallstones (so I could make a necklace out of them) he said that he couldn't do that because the new regulations are assholes, and he said that he couldn't even give people who'd been shot the bullets he dug out of them because they're considered “medical waste” once they've been pulled out of your body. This seems a bit hypocritical because my daughter came out of my body and they totally let me take her home. And some people even bring home their placenta and make their family eat it (seriously … that's a thing) and no one ever complains about that. (Except for the people who have to eat placenta, probably.) I explained that I was pretty sure that wearing my gallstones was less offensive than making your family unwittingly eat your placenta and Dr. Morales agreed with me and said he'd totally had this same argument a dozen times, which seems like an odd argument to have more than once. He did, however, agree to take lots of pictures and share them with me. My friend Maile offered to come take pictures of the surgery, and I almost took her up on it because she's an amazing photographer. But then I remembered hearing that after the surgery the doctor pushes all of the leftover carbon-whatever gas out of your belly button. I don't think I'd want anyone to witness me forcibly farting out of my own belly button, because if people are really your friends this is exactly the sort of shit you should want to protect them from. Like it says in the Bible,
being a friend means never having to witness farting belly buttons
. Or something. I might be misremembering.

As I waited in the hospital room for the surgery to commence I was a bit worried because you always hear horror stories about people getting things left in them or having the wrong body part removed. “What if I wake up and have a penis?” I asked the nurse.

She assured me that wouldn't happen. She said that it was a normal fear and that often she sees people write “NOT THIS LEG” on their good leg when they're in for knee surgery. I considered doing that, but everywhere. Small notes all over my body saying things like: “No, not there.” “You're getting warmer.” “What the shit are you doing? I need that.” “Don't fuck with that. That's mine.” But Victor wouldn't give me a Sharpie because he said I couldn't be trusted when I was fully sober, much less high on pain drugs.

So instead I pulled out my lucky nipple. (Side note: On book tour once a woman brought me a fake nipple that she makes for people who want bigger nipples or are recovering from a mastectomy. It looks amazingly realistic and I often wear it peeking out of my shirt to see if people will tell me I have a nip slip. If they do I remove the nipple and thank them for being decent. It's an excellent way to single out the awesome people. Also, if I'm at a bar and the bartender won't look at me I'll put the nipple on my forehead because it always gets people's attention.) I stuck my lucky nipple to my stomach and when the nurse came back in I said, “I think I'm having some sort of allergic reaction. Is this supposed to be there?” as I pointed at the very realistic stomach nipple that wasn't there a few minutes ago when she'd begun prepping me for surgery. To her credit, she was not surprised at all, which makes me think that there are more people than you think growing extra nipples and also that she's probably not the most observant nurse ever.

They eventually wheeled me in and the surgery was probably very surgical but I don't remember it because I was high. The recovery was a bit painful because my gallbladder was more infected than expected but it was also somewhat entertaining for people who weren't me.

“I need drugs,” I moaned to Victor from my hospital bed.

He looked at his watch. “Not for another twenty minutes.”

“Why do you hate me?”

“I don't hate you,” he said as he looked back down at his magazine. “I just don't want you to overdose on morphine.”

“Fine,” I said. “Distract me then.”

“Okay. This magazine says that you can tell what you should do with your life if you just take away all thoughts of risks. So what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail?”

“I'd be a Pegasus.”

“That's not really how this works.”

“I'd be a brown Pegasus though, because if you were a white Pegasus you'd be hounded by Lisa Frank fans and nine-year-olds. And black Pegasuses are just as bad because they're all badass and heavy metal bands would probably want to kidnap them. But no one wants a shabby brown Pegasus. I could just flap around the neighborhood and no one would really care. And maybe I'd wish for back herpes so that people wouldn't hassle me for rides.”

Victor looked back at his magazine. “I'm not going to talk to you if you're not taking this seriously.”

“I
am
taking this seriously,” I said. “I'd be a rumpled, brown Pegasus with back herpes if I knew I couldn't fail.”

“That's not how this works,” Victor said. “It's supposed to teach you what you really want in life.”

“That
is
what I want.”

“PICK SOMETHING REAL.”

“Fine,” I huffed. I thought for a few seconds. “Then I guess I choose failing. I'd choose to fail but I
couldn't
fail so that would create a wormhole or some sort of paradox and then the whole world would explode.”

Victor raised an eyebrow. “You're going to blow up the world because you didn't get your way? Don't you think you're overreacting a bit?”

“I think I need more morphine.”

“I think this conversation proves you've had enough.”

I crossed my arms. “I'm going to tell the nurse that you're mean to me and won't let me have back herpes or drugs.”

Victor looked back at his magazine. “Good luck with that.”

I looked at the “on duty” chart in my room and was very confused about the fact that there was a nurse assigned to my room whose name was “Labya” and I couldn't stop myself from wondering if it was actually pronounced like “labia” or if it was more of a short “a” like “LAH-bee-yuh.”

When the nurse came back to give me a shot in my ass cheek I figured all social pretenses were gone and so I said, “I just have to ask … is it pronounced ‘Lay-bee-uh' or ‘Lah-bee-uh'?” and she shook her head in confusion, saying, “I thought you were here because of your gallbladder.”

“No,” I explained. “I mean, on the menu. Is that Labia?”

And she asked, “You're asking me if
labia is on the menu
?”

Victor sank into his chair and tried to pretend he wasn't there.

I explained that I wasn't hitting on her and that I was referring to the chart on the desk and then she stared at it and then at me with a furrowed, confused brow, probably because she was now offended that I wasn't hitting on her.

Then she took a deep breath and said … “
Latoya.
That says
Latoya.
”

And I looked closer and it totally did say Latoya. But in my defense, it looked liked “Labia” from a distance. Much like tacos. Or Georgia O'Keeffe paintings.

Then Dr. Morales came in and showed me pictures of my gross, removed gallbladder, which was filled with stones, and he said it was really good that we did the surgery because my gallbladder was mostly dead and was beginning to affect my other body parts because it had started to gangrene.

“Gangrene?” I asked. “I didn't even know that was still a thing. It's like I'm on the Oregon Trail all over again.” Then Victor pointed out that I was thinking of dysentery and Dr. Morales was like, “
You had dysentery on the Oregon Trail? None of this is in your chart.
”

I said, “I'm guessing you didn't play a lot of educational computer games when you were a kid?” and he said that they didn't have computer games when he was a kid and I explained that that's why he probably never got dysentery in a video game.

Dr. Morales shook his head. “Sounds unsanitary. Just where were you putting those games?” I explained that that wasn't really what I meant and I redirected the conversation to my zombie gallbladder.

Victor tried to argue that my gallbladder was not zombified but I disagreed. It was slightly alive but mostly dead and was infecting everything it touched. It was literally the living dead. That's kind of the very definition of a zombie. So basically I was turning into a zombie one organ at a time. And I had a bunch of tubes in me to drain out all the bad stuff, which was shitty because I had to keep them in for a week. When I went home the cats thought that the tubes coming out of my stomach were great cat toys and kept batting at them and trying to hang on them. It's funny until your pain pills wear off. I don't recommend it for recovery.

Victor said he wasn't surprised that my ordinary gallbladder surgery—that he'd had as an outpatient—had turned into weeks of hassle because my body is known for being as complicated and weird as I am. But I'm not the only one with weird body parts. For example, Victor insists that he has “internal ear flaps,” which is just ridiculous. When I go underwater I always end up with an ear infection and then Victor blames me because I don't close my ear flaps. And he's right because
they don't exist
. He disagrees and claims my ear flaps are just weak. He says his ear flaps are almost superhuman. “I use them to drown out your crazy so they get a lot of practice.” I don't believe in ear flaps, but if I did have them I probably lost them when I was little and I got so many ear infections my eardrums burst. My mom would always try to cure them the old-fashioned way, by pouring olive oil in my ear and putting a cotton ball in it. The first time I tried olive oil in a restaurant I was like, “This tastes like ear ointment,” and that's because it was ear ointment. This is why I don't like olives or olive oil. Because they taste like ear infections.

A week after surgery my friend Maile drove me to the ass clinic to have my surgical tubes removed. Dr. Morales was in rare form and started talking about catacombs and the mounting national debt and he closed the small talk by saying, “We're doomed. End of days. Thank God I'm dying soon so I won't have to witness it like you will.” This is all true and not an exaggeration at all. He said it very cheerfully though. The man has a
hell
of a bedside manner.

Finally Dr. Morales clapped his hands as if to signal that the small talk was over and he told Maile to
pin me to the table
. Maile looked at him for a second to see if he was joking but he explained that I had to be pinned to the table by someone so that I wouldn't punch him when he yanked the tubes out of my stomach. So she shrugged good-naturedly and totally pinned me to the table. This is the sign of a good friend. Or a terrible one. Maybe both.

Then the doctor unstitched me and yanked, and it felt as if I'd accidentally gotten a jump rope wrapped around my liver. Or like if I was one of those dolls that talks when you pull the string on her back. And the thing that I said was: “
Ughaaah.
” Which roughly translates to “So now I know what a yo-yo feels like and also why you think your patients want to punch you.”

As we were driving home Maile said, “You know, this shit could only happen to you. It's like you manifested the
exact
kind of crazy, fantastic doctor to fit your life. I would never believe it if I weren't there.” And, yes, that's sort of how my whole life has been.

 

Cats Are Selfish Yawners and They're Totally Getting Away with It

The Fourth Argument I Had with Victor This Week

ME:
I was just thinking that when I see other people yawn I yawn because it's contagious, but when I see cats yawn it never makes me yawn.

VICTOR:
You know, you don't actually have to tell me everything that pops into your head.

ME:
So then I went on the Internet to find out why that is and apparently we yawn when other people yawn because we see them getting lots of delicious air and our brain is all, “FUCK, THAT LOOKS DELICIOUS. GRAB SOME QUICK BEFORE THAT BITCH TAKES IT ALL.”