She wasn’t exactly
sure when the pain started.
It can be that way,
with pain. Doctors always ask, “So. When did it start?” You’re expected
to say, at 9:47
a.m. on Monday,
April 27.
At first it was just
a tickling, a nagging as if she were about to sneeze. But the pain wasn’t
there, it was deep down in her belly. Like a bad menstrual cramp, but she’d
been done with those for years.
I knew. Even then
I knew it wasn’t good.
It took an
incredible amount of arm-twisting to get her doctor to even listen to her. When
she bled all over the floor in the middle of the night, that changed things,
but only briefly.
"When did you
bleed?”
”In the middle of the night.”
“What do you mean?"
“I woke up and – I
don’t remember, I was half-asleep.”
“How could you bleed
in the middle of the night and not remember?”
Blood gets some attention, so she was pushed on to the ugly-go-round, the
medical machine that whirls a patient around and around until they are sick,
then dumps them onto the ground again.
Things like an
ultrasound were neat, really, because she never had all this stuff when she was pregnant. Just
relax, Mrs. Parker. Cold jelly, sort of like lube, and this “thing” they
pressed into her, and it didn’t hurt, not even when they stuck a sort of cold wand
inside her, reminding her of being abducted by aliens. She wondered if she were
being considered as a hybrid pod, though surely she was too old for that.
Then there was the
nausea. When did the nausea start? A flicker, a wisp, and – nearly all the time
now. So it had to be digestive. Just digestive, because you could not
have more than one thing at the same time, it was medically impossible.
She had to
have her gut reamed, well, they called it a colonoscopy and really it wasn’t
too bad, though her doctor’s office didn’t call for two months with the
referral and she wondered if she would die in the interim.
“Mrs. Parker, this
is just a reminder of your appointment tomorrow with Dr. Samadhi."
“Who’s Dr. Samadhi?”
“He's the gastroenterologist. Didn't your doctor's office call you with the appointment date?”
“No.”
“But they made the appointment with us two months ago. Can you
explain this to me?”
“No, but I called
them twice to ask what was going on and they said, don’t call us any more,
we will let you know.”
“Did they let you
know?”
Of course! I heard about the appointment months ago and
just ignored it. Happens all the time!
So OK, the doctor
says, the colonoscopy was clear, the ultrasound was clear, so - .
The doctor shrugged like
the dog in the Grinch cartoon, a puzzled look on her face.
So she did what she
wasn’t supposed to do and looked on the internet and found 147 potential causes
for abdominal pain. Her doctor had checked off two and sent her home.
But the pain.
It escalated, something awful, and she was reminded of Rosemary’s Baby
and the demon pain dismissed by Rosemary’s doctor during her macabre pregnancy.
It was then that the
pain, incessant now (the doctor told her to take a Tylenol) began to work on her, to
work on her mind and her spirit.
She began to be
blown off-course by this thing, and started to think there was “something” in
there.
It couldn’t be a
baby, hah! Couldn’t even be a tumor, since that possibility had been “ruled out” conclusively by machinery. The
doctor said she was sure it wasn’t cancer because she looked at her cervix and
it looked normal. Not inside her uterus, which she was sure was “fine” because the ultrasound was “fine”.
She was beginning to
hate that word “fine”.
She gave up and
cadged Tylenol 3 from her husband, sat for hours in front of her computer with
an ancient electric heating pad pressed to her belly (covered with a fuzzy
Winnie-the-Pooh blankie to keep it in place).
Undressing one night, she was horrified. The skin on her lower abdomen was burned raw, almost branded. The 30-year-old heating pad was something like an old electric chair, she guessed, thinking of that awful scene in The Green Mile where the man is fried alive. But I'd do it all again to get some relief.
She was supposed to be
seeing a gynaecologist, but the doctor’s office didn’t call, and didn’t call,
and didn’t call. She felt sick and one night broke down and screamed and cried,
certain she had cancer and no one cared or would ever bother to treat it.
She could dangle on forever
until she died, probably horribly. Meantime the pain, exactly like a furious,
deadly menstrual cramp, just escalated until it took over her every waking
minute.
“I really don’t
think I should give you any painkillers,” the doctor said. “The potential for
abuse is just too great.”
“I’ve never abused
painkillers.” This was a lie. She had abused painkillers nearly 25 years ago,
then stopped and never again took a single unregulated pill.
“It says so on your
chart.”
“I’m in pain all the
time now. I can’t – “
“Just take a walk.
Push on your – here, like – “ She pushed her fingers into her lower abdomen,
and it reminded her of volleyball, the way your fingers were supposed to be.
“I’ve done that.”
“Well, can’t you try
something else?”
Trudging out of the
doctor’s office, the gynaecologist appointment felt like a sort of myth, not even set
up yet, or, more likely, set up already, but they just weren’t going to phone
her to tell her WHEN, so that she had some sort of date, something to hold on to.
She might even miss it and have to start all over again.
It was then, in the
evening, that she felt the flicker.
It was the weirdest
thing. She was watching TV and knitting something and relaxing in a Tylenol 3
haze, or trying to, with the by-then-constant heating pad pressed to her lower
abdomen. The skin had grown tougher now, almost like a thin layer of scar tissue to protect her against electric burns.
A flicker. Nothing,
really, a digestive thing probably, except it was dead-centre and low down in her
uterus, where they told her the pain wasn't because they still wanted it to be
a gastrointestinal issue, something to be remedied with a Tums.
She ignored it, but
it came and went, and after a while it was like a sort of tiny fetal wiggle.
She hated to think what it might be: could a tumor squirm and move about? The
first time she felt the baby move when she was pregnant was thrilling, but that
was more of a – what? At least she knew that it was human.
Maybe she could kill
it. By this time she was so unhinged by the pain, the pain that didn’t really
exist because the doctor wouldn’t give her anything to help her tolerate it,
that she began to come up with ideas, maybe thrusting one of her knitting
needles up inside herself in that old-fashioned, tried-and-true method of
self-induced abortion.
If she took a very
hot bath, would it be cooked? It wiggled and jumped harder as the months went
by. Still nothing from the gynecologist, no call, although by now her nerves were as
raw as her abdomen, with that butcher-shop feeling, blood leaking out of brown
paper.
Then it began
to actually kick.
She couldn’t
go back to the doctor. The doctor wouldn’t even listen to her heart, let alone
look at her swollen abdomen or believe something was “in there”. Something alive.
Of course she
couldn’t tell friends, tell family, tell anybody, so if anyone phoned her or met her on the
street and asked her how she was doing, she carolled, “Oh, fine,” in that cheerful studied way she had. She’d been doing it for years.
Alone with her
illness, her mind shrank back and retreated. She walked robotically through her
days. As with any illness, not that this was a real illness, there were good
days and bad days. Some days she felt better: not “ALL better”, as people
usually interpret the word, but “relatively better”. Unlike Rosemary devouring
nearly-raw steak, however, she wanted fish.
They sat in a
restaurant one night.
“Hon, you don’t eat
sushi.”
“I do now.” She
attacked her plate like a scavenger.
He looked at her,
amazed. “Didn’t you wear that dress when you were – “
Oh yes, twenty years
ago! But wasn’t it back in style again? A sort of smock that tied in back and accommodated her
burgeoning belly.
But of course he
noticed, and they got in a fight about it, with him shouting at her, don’t
you even care about your health?
“No. Because nobody
else does either.”
“That’s bullshit.
Quit feeling sorry for yourself. How can you accuse us of not caring? I can’t
believe how selfish you are.”
He bullied her back
to the doctor’s office. Four months had passed and there was no appointment for a
gynecologist, she was still waiting. The doctor said, these things take
time. They’re backlogged, they’re busy. You’re a low-priority case.
“But what if it’s
already been booked and I just don’t know about it? What if you haven’t even
bothered to tell me? Look, this happened before and I came damn near to missing
the appointment altogether.”
Stony silence from the doctor.
"Please, listen to me, please, somebody has to, nobody gives a fuck about the fact that I am about to die!"
An incredulous look,
like she had just called her a cunt. The doctor closed her file and just sat looking at her until she left.
In her file, she had written only three words: out of control.
So, no meds, no
nothing. Seven months after her initial visit to the doctor, during which she
stole codeine from her husband to make life bearable, and nearly undone from
grief and stress, she looked in the mirror nude and saw it kicking, her belly
rippling from the force of piston legs and tiny little feet.
BUT HOW CAN THIS BE?
What is this thing, or did I somehow absorb my twin and it came back to
life?
One day, suicidal, she
decided to jump off the Lion’s Gate Bridge and was about to leave to do it when the
phone rang.
“This is just to
remind you about your appointment tomorrow with Dr. Gage.”
“Dr. Gage?”
“Dr. Gage. The gynaecologist.”
“But I didn’t hear
anything about this appointment from my doctor.”
“You should have.
They set this up six months ago. They should have told you then."
"I didn't hear anything."
"You should have asked them about it.”
"I tried to, but when I - "
Click.
So she went to this
Dr. Gage, a man unfortunately, an older man, much older, a pee-smelling stale
old man with a saggy hanging face like Peter O’Toole. His vein-bulging hands
doddered and clumsed, and it was these hands that were soon going to touch her
body, to pry her private parts open.
“You’re going to
need an x-ray,” he said in a European accent. She wondered if he had changed
his name.
An x-ray? Nobody
took x-rays any more. They were like something out of an old comic book.
Low-tech. If high-tech equipment was available, it had to be used, simply
because it was there. And if it cost more, it had to be “better”.
But oh, hey, an
x-ray, she’d had THOSE before, years ago when she thought she had TB. This
office seemed like something from the 1950s, and when he came back with this
transparency-thing in his hands he slapped it up on a light-screen to have a
look.
Holy Hannah.
That’s what he said.
Holy Hannah.
She couldn’t say
anything at all. For inside her, plain as day, plain as the nose on her face,
was
It was a frog.
Stunned, the doctor murmured, “Frog. Frog.”
“Jesus, how did that
– “
“Mrs. Parker, have
you been inserting objects into your vagina?”
“NO!”
"Because the practice is not unknown. Especially among psychiatric patients."
He practically threw
her down on the examining table and felt her belly, an even lower-tech thing to
do and nearly unheard-of by now.
“Mein Gott, it's alive," he whispered.
You don’t want to
hear a doctor say that, but that’s what he said.
“You mean there’s
a live frog inside me?”
“Mrs. Parker, I’m
sure this can be explained.”
“HOW?”
“Don’t be
hysterical. We can do a D and C.”
“But it’s huge!
How are you going to get it out?” The frog was positioned head-up, breech.
Would they have to pull it out by the legs?
She had an awful
thought: frog legs, aren’t they good to eat? Hello my baby, hello my honey,
hello my ragtime gal.
The operation was
like something out of Ben Casey, the ether mask, the clanking, the cries of
“nurse!”. Now she knew she had gone mad. She just wanted this THING out of her
once and for all. But when she came around, the doctor did not have a good look
on his face.
"I'm sorry."
"What?"
"You haemorrhaged.
We had to stop.”
”STOP?”
“Stop. Frog didn’t
want to come out. And you were allergic to the anaesthetic. It would have killed you.”
She looked up into
his face, abject.
“Kill me.”
“Nonsense. We’ll
take a wait-and-see approach. This can be monitored, managed...”
“Oh, you mean LOTS
of people have live frogs stuck in their uterus?”
“No, but its rate of
growth seems to have slowed. We’ll learn a lot from this, Mrs. Parker. It’s a
medical opportunity. Even something of a miracle.”
She wondered if he
hankered to be on one of those awful reality shows on TLC, the ones that
celebrated monstrous freaks as “miracles”. “Maybe I should just donate my body to
science. I mean, NOW.”
They sent her home,
still huge and wriggling inside. It would be years until the lawsuit, when her husband discovered by accident that they never intended to do the D and C, that they wanted to study her, to see how far it would go.
She could feel something, as if the frog were
trying to straighten its legs or even jump. It must be enormous, packed
inside her with its legs folded up.
She had a demonish
thought: when she was a little girl, or maybe once last year at the lake, she
went swimming, and somehow a tadpole - . No. It wasn’t possible.
Though pain
assaulted her all day, at night she could blessedly crash into oblivion. Then
came a night.
She just thought she
had to go to the bathroom. Something warm and wet between the legs: she was
horrified she’d had an accident. Then she felt something slimy begin to violently jerk and wriggle.
Staggering to the
washroom, she sat down on the toilet gripping the seat on both sides, listening
as the blood fell in slimy plops, moaning and howling and praying as she waited
for the horrific miracle to begin.
