Can I Eat?

My mask filled with hot breath, even as the air outside barely reached freezing, which was fairly cold for April. My steps slowed and each Nike outsole imprinted the Brooklyn concrete in heavier strides as I fought my way home for the last half mile. As soon as I reached the black, iron gate entrance to my apartment, I put my hand on my stomach and cursed myself for eating street meat the night before. Upon entering the apartment, my dog, Otis, excitedly jumped all over me as if it had been 3 weeks and not 30 minutes since I’d last seen him. I followed my forward momentum to the bedroom where I stripped off my outer layers, tossing them haphazardly on my husband’s nightstand and crumbled to the floor. Twisting and turning into different positions didn’t seem to alleviate the pain and my dog’s pawing at my chest also wasn’t doing the trick. Otis, give me a minute, I remember muttering.

Eventually, I pulled myself up and turned warm water on in the shower since I was already running late for work, thankfully, from home. Feeling a bit refreshed, if not painless, I attempted to start working, first from my desk chair and then ultimately from the guest bed where I could lay flat on the bed. I worked through some emails until 11am when I joined a client call and used all my strength to engage in some small talk before my other team members joined. The pain in my stomach suddenly worsened; I muted my audio, squeezed my eyes shut and clenched my jaw, wincing in pain. After a few deep breaths I lifted my shirt and noticed an unnatural bulge on the right side of my abdomen that panicked me. It looked as if I’d been possessed by something from a Sci-Fi horror film that took cover under my skin without my permission. After two unanswered calls to my husband, RL, I sent a desperate text, followed by one to my family group chat.

… I think I’m gonna go to the emergency room because my stomach is in so much pain and it’s, like, sticking out on the right side, like a mass.

The replies were emphatic and unanimous that I should go and I quickly ordered an Uber and pinged my coworkers that I was hopping off the call.

RL met me at the NYU Emergency Room where we were quickly ushered through the waiting room and almost immediately into a patient cot. I spent the next couple of hours retelling my story with the consistency of a principal courtroom witness, after providing an unusable urine sample that barely gave way to a meniscus; I blamed nerves. I was then connected to an IV for hydration and told I would be given a CT Scan but that there was a good chance what I was experiencing was some sort of gas or muscle pain that would go away on its own. Imposter syndrome began to flare up, leading me to review my morning and question how much pain I was really in. Had I rung the alarm bells over some bad gas? Perhaps the bulge I noticed was just from my body position? What was I thinking coming here where people were suffering real injuries from car accidents, overdoses, and the like?

I felt almost embarrassed and focused my attention on finishing the jug of Contrast liquid that I was told needed to be completed in an hour, at which point I’d be rolled up to the CT Scan line. The hour passed rather quickly, in part, because I had a task and in part because I had been placed next to an erratic patient who screamed and cried and begged for blankets, even yelling, “Kaitlyn, will you please put a blanket on me, I’m cold?!” after she overheard a nurse confirm my name. I made it my mission to diagnose her and wondered if the Doctor’s treating her had read “Brain on Fire” and if they thought she could be experiencing side effects from Encephalitis. They had a security guard stationed near the foot of her bed since she had apparently tried to escape earlier in the day, but that gave her a target for all her requests, so it did nothing to quell the noise.

Once I was rolled to the CT Scan area, I spent another hour waiting in line, enjoying some light banter with Norma, who was old and frail, and on water pills which caused her to fear urinating on herself in the waiting room. Her voice was too soft to command attention, so after a few failed tries I hollered for a nurse to come help her out. It was confirmed Norma already had, not one, but two diapers on and that should she pee, there would be no leakage. Norma thanked me and things seemed to calm down a bit, though she was not happy when they wheeled me into the radiology room before her - given I was waiting longer - claiming she could no longer hold her pee. How quickly she turned on me, I thought.

As the pelvic images were taken, I stared at duct tape peeling from the inside of the CT machine and thought about giving the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Plan a once-over when I got home to see if hospitals would be included. I was then wheeled back to where RL was working from his Surface, but they took us to a new area, away from the commotion coming from the patient formerly next door. I was placed against a wall in a hallway littered with patients in cots and it impressed me that the hospital operated with such organization in what appeared to be absolute chaos.

By this point I had finished my IV fluid and drank a liter of Contrast, so I giddily told my PA that I was ready to give a urine sample. I grabbed a handful of fabric at the back of my gown which had outgrown all of its straps and shuffled along the cold, concrete floor in my navy-blue striped socks to the nearest patient bathroom. My cup was filled nearly to the top when I returned and I proudly handed it over, to which the PA responded, “well, I’d rather have too much then too little.”

With no explanation, we were then taken to a room with a door. Neither RL nor I mentioned it, surely both thinking it was not a good sign, but not wanting to conjure any anxiety. We fiddled with our phones and tried to figure out what the room was used for, stocked with equipment, tools, machines - it was like a mini medical warehouse. And there in the middle was me, in my cot and overused gown, thinking of all the sicker-looking patients we’d passed in the hallway on the way to this room.

A shuffling of Crocs appeared in the glass rectangle on the bottom of the sliding door and in came three medical personnel: a doctor, PA, and a nurse. They surrounded my bed and my heart’s beating became an inconvenience I almost apologized for. Words fell from the Doctor’s lips onto my pained abdomen; “ovary torsion”, “masses”, “malignancy”, “surgery”, as I floated above trying to fit the terms into my stomach.

“What do you mean masses?” I heard RL ask and turned to see him calculating possibilities in his head.

“Like, tumors.” I responded, to which the doctor nodded in approval.

I floated back into my body when the doctor suggested that the masses were very concerning and that we may even need to operate tonight if I was losing blood from an ovary torsion. At that point I realized the road trip to New Orleans that RL and I had planned to leave for the following day was starting to seem out of reach. My eyes welled up with tears and the PA rushed to the side of the room and opened a fresh box of tissues, handing me one.

The doctor wore a concerned frown, “I know this is not the news you were expecting to hear; it’s certainly not what I expected when I first examined you, but we have a GYN on site and they’re going to give you an ultrasound and physical exam, and then we’ll see what we need to do from there. Do you have any questions?”

I wiped my bleary eyes with the tissue and met his eyes, “Can I eat?” was the only thing I could think to ask. It was past 3:30pm at this point and I hadn’t had so much as a sip of coffee.

“No, but you can chew on ice chips!”

I blinked twice.

The next few hours were filled with more invasive examinations and lots of tummy grumbles, before we were finally told that I would be discharged with an appointment on Monday already scheduled with my OB-GYN. Luckily, my ovaries were back in place and blood was flowing, so while I would still need surgery to remove the tumors, I could go shove my face with Enchiladas Suizas, for now.

RL and I took the East River Ferry home to Greenpoint, watching the sunset close in over NYU Langone. We over-ate delicious Mexican food and polished off a margarita a piece, celebrating what little we could before an impending weekend of wandering about with unanswered questions, incoming lab results and an uncertain future.