That creepy story

Monday I had pain and yesterday there was a wound and today I got some care. It was all ok. The sutures that should have dissolved didn't and were expressing their need to be removed.

I visited my local stoma counselor and as they are all psychic there, she told me that though she was removing my stitches, I should know that I have NO chance of this causing my stoma to slip back into my body. I dunno how they do it without a crystal ball or some magic cards or anything. They just know my brain. And my brain is always expecting the zebra at a horse ranch. When taking hormone shots for IVF, my mind went straight to extreme ovarian over stimulation. And since  February 4th, I have had reoccuring nightmares that my intestine gets sucked back into my abdomen. Even though the more common issue is it herniating further out of the abdomen.

If you're not grossed out yet, I shall tell you that creepy story. The one that I try never to tell to any hypochondriac: Back when I was in Floating hospital in Boston, I was allowed to have a roomate again after I had my lower intestine removed. (If you've got to be in hospital with Crohn's, it's pretty great that they typically give you your own room because of Cdif risk.) The chick who moved into my room had a story. She was 17 and seemed way cooler than me and had arrived at the hospital in a chopper after breaking her ankle in South America. They'd set the ankle and sent her home, but it was all inflamed and they had to operate and reset it back in Boston. Her mom was super attentive in the way that a mother would naturally be after allowing her minor daughter to go to South America without her and return broken.
While attending to her daughter, my roommate's mother was rubbing some cream on her daughter's knees for her. It was a lovely smelling cream and was meant to help her daughter relax and gave the whole stinky hospital room a lovely lavender scent. Her mom asked her "What's this? Does it hurt or itch?" and her daughter and I both got curious. The mom showed the lump that she was talking about and palpated it gently and gasped "oh, it's moving!"
THAT'S RIGHT! AND THERE WERE MORE BUMPS!
My roommate got her own private room once they'd opened her back up and removed the things that had hatched inside my roommate's wound from her break in South America.

This story gives me perspective. I can remind myself that I'm dealing with a horse problem. But it also gives me the peace of knowing that there are Zebras out there. 

"Charismatic"

Back in 2007, I was in a crime book club. I don't enjoy reading crime books, but I'd heard that they argued a lot and 2 of them were German, so I thought that I could improve my arguing in German as a newcomer to Switzerland. It was true and even when I didn't partake, I got to hear a lot of arguing in German, which was quite helpful.
We never discussed the books until after dinner, so during the first hour or so of our get togethers we'd eat dinner and discuss politics and religion. (I wish that I was joking.) As the 2008 elections heated up, the subject of Obama came up and I got my first chance at germanic repartee when the two German members mentioned their knee-jerk reaction to seeing a population whipped into a froth by a charismatic leader. I got it and everything, but Obama was whipping people in a super positive way so I didn't get their fear.
I get it now.
This blog has begun to resemble an ostomate or infertility blog in the past year and I've never really written about politics, but I've been thinking about that book club dinner as the primaries and debates are raging back in the motherland. The two Germans in my book club never said the word "Hitler" because they're German and not trolls on the internet, but we all know that that's what they were talking about, yes? That name has been tossed around will nilly and it feels like it's lost its powere, being associated as it is with people who believe seemingly anything and express that belief online. But when I see the things happening at Trump rallies and hear the things that he's saying to froth up his supporters and the elections in Germany, which feel so fear-fueled....

Our Convalescent Home

Two weeks before I  went into hospital, my downstairs neighbor broke both wrists simultaneously. Can you imagine? 4 days later, her upstairs neighbor broke his thumb - an inconvenience, to be sure, but not nearly as limiting as broken wrists. Then another neighbor did her ankle in. The younger tenants in our building were dropping like flies.

I was going in to hospital for gut stuff, so my first thoughts about the neighbor with the broken wrists was, "krikey! How do they go to the toilet?!" And instantly had new gratitude for my functioning wrists.
In the lead up to surgery, gratitude was everywhere; I'd bend and stretch and twist and turn and sit down hard, grateful for my functioning and (for my norm) pain-free body.

This morning, I noticed something that I have noticed many times before, but this time it made me cry. My husband was putting on clothes to go cross country skiing, he had a full belly after having eaten a large breakfast, and his only concern was if there would be traffic and how soft the snow might be. Seeing this and trying to imagine what that must be like just brought tears to my eyes.
Not even 2 weeks ago, I was cross country skiing, but I had to wake up two hours earlier than Ivo so that I could eat breakfast and digest in time for physical activity. I was nervous the whole morning, looking forward to the gorgeous views and the sweat and the flying across the snow, but I was girding myself against all of the ways that my body could potentially betray me. But this morning, I saw my husband and knew that such thoughts have never troubled his mind. He broke a bone in Kindergarten and since then, the only time his body hasn't been exactly where he expected it to be is when he's had a cold.

I am hopeful for the relief of a fraction of my body-betrayal anxiety to be removed in future, once i've healed, but I can not even fathom what that would be like. 

punctuated

As I sat on the 3rd floor of a four story tattoo parlour in Zürich, the tattoo artist chuckled while scrolling through google images, called up with the term "Doppelpunkt." I'd just told him that I wanted a "Doppelpunkttattoowierung" because in English, that punctuation mark shares it's name with an organ that I've been missing for nearly 20 years. And there on the screen was a drawing of a colon (or Dickdarm.)
There is already a post on this blog about the regret I have for the tattoo on my back, which I got in 1999. I still very much love the tattoo on my shoulder, which I got in 2010. I learned from the first that I should have and like the idea of a tattoo for a good long while before putting ink to skin. I first got the notion of this tattoo nearly a year ago and it made me chuckle. Then I started seriously thinking about it in earnest in the spring. I would have waited the full year of considering it, but I've got a rather largish surgery coming up early next year. When I mentioned the tattoo idea to my gastroenterologist, he chuckled and then told me that I should get it in time to be healed up for the surgery or well after the surgical wound has healed. I went for before.

Still talking about language

When we met the surgeon who will be caring for me at the Unispital next month, we got the obligatory question about our last name. Yes it's Dutch and yes Ivo is Swiss. There we were, talking about my surgical history and then the two of them started asking about accents. The doctor assumed that I was Dutch, and I told him that I was American. Then a bit more chat about the risks of the surgery and what to expect of healing and then Ivo had to ask him about his dialect. He was born and raised in Zürich but both his parents are German and so he understands the difficulty of speaking in dialect, etc, etc.
This year is my 10th living in Switzerland and the fact that I am an American speaking Swiss German no longer elicits the surprise it once did. Instead, when people ask how long I've been here, the response to my answer is a nod of acknowledging that that makes sense. So it was nice of this new surgeon to act as if my language acquisition was anything but ordinary.
We made it through the appointment, the heavy chat and the light accent talk and then we said goodbye to him and his assistant, who'd been silent the whole time but bid us adieu with the strongest French accent in the world and had Ivo and I chuckling on the way out of an emotionally exhausting consultation.

Ode to my abdomen

It's January and I'm aware of how succeptable I've been to New Year weight loss advertising in the past. This year, all I want is to enjoy my strong body before surgery.

When I was 16, I had 2 temp ostomies in 9 months. The first was an ileostomy (where the end of the small intestine was outside my body for 6 months.) the second was after my ileum had been reconnected to my rectum and a loop of small intestine was outside of my body to let the new connection heal. 

When I woke up from my second surgery, my bellybutton was gone. I was cross with my surgeon and he (a former mechanic from the Bronx) said "I didn't do it. Someone else closed. It might still be there but got staples in. But if you did lose it, it's the ultimate rebellion. You'll never need a tattoo or piercing."

It was just stapled in. I was relieved as only a self-conscious 16 year old can be. 

I've lamented my abdomen for nearly 20 years. I try to have scar pride, but can't help to notice the buttock effect of a scar through a middle whenI look down at it.

But now that my middle will be changed dramatically and permanently, I'm feeling a lot of love for it and wish that I'd given it more respect in the past.

Bowie Bandwagon

Last night, we ate dinner in front of the record player and played each other our favorite David Bowie songs - pausing for the BBC special and to watch the episode of the Extras, when Bowie sings to Ricky Gervais.
My husband and I went on our third date to a Bowie concert in Boston. I began to have my doubts about him when he started calling the Fleet center xenophobic for not accepting his swiss passport to buy beer, but reconsidered when I discovered they wouldn't accept my RI license either. Then there was that point when I saw his face when Bowie was singing Ashes to Ashes and I was so moved.
I'm a child of the 80s and so 80s Bowie was my first Bowie. But the time that I began to appreciate Bowie as an adult was at a weird basement bar in downtown Providence. I started going there with my boyfriend when I learned that they would serve an underaged me. (I'd order scotch neat so that they wouldn't know that I was a secret 19 year old.)
There we attended the weekly open mic night, mostly in support of my boyfriend's co-worker. He was a slight man with an astonishing voice. But each time, a middle aged man with messy hair, a paunch and a bit of a grimace on his face would sing Space Oddity, using different props each time and making exploding sounds at the end of it. At first I disliked this guy. His voice was ok, but he seemed so uncool (and I was 19, so it was my job to organize things into "cool" and "uncool" categories.) But over time, I came to love the way that this guy was expressing him. It was clear that this song was important to him and he was singing it with his whole self. It became beautiful to me and I can't hear it without thinking about this fella's enthusiasm and love of Bowie or Kubrick or space or whatever it was that was moving him.

When Kristin Wig sang it in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, I cried. As I've mentioned in past posts, I'm a crybaby. But I was also thinking of that open mic guy. My mom and I talked about that film before she died. She expressed an interest in seeing it. I think she'd read the book. And what I remembered most was this scene (my husband most remembers the long boarding ahead of the volcano.)
My husband is not a cry baby, but when the BBC went from the different places where Bowie had lived and showed the mourners collected, he got a bit weepy. It sometimes feels weird to be so sad about the death of an artist, but seeing all of those many people who were so touched all over the western world was really moving.