In the Body of the World (6 page)

As part of me rages and refuses, another part of me is already there. I watch it there and it knows, truly knows, something else. This part of me likes the gnome, wants to crawl up on his lap and be his patient. This part is so tired. This part knows he is telling the truth, he is a guide, giving me a challenge, a vision, saying, “This is it. Your life has to change. It cannot be driven anymore by a need to prove anything. It cannot be a reaction, a ‘fuck you,’ an ‘I’ll show you.’ That’s how you got sick. That is what your sickness is: overtaxing the body, the nervous system, fight-or-flight, always driving off the imagined enemy, always pushing and driving yourself, pushing and fighting and driving.” I am too tired now. I have cancer. My organs are gone. I have tubes coming out of me, and a bag. My
body is sewn up the center. There is no drive. I can’t find the gears. I am a patient. Patient. Patient. And something relaxes in the center of me for the first time since I heard my father raise his voice, and I sleep, I really sleep.

SCAN
THE RUPTURE/THE GULF SPILL

At Sloan-Kettering they show it to me on the CAT scan screen: a huge pool of blackness in the center of me—the same day as the Gulf oil spill, the now poisoned Gulf of Mexico somehow inside me. Sixteen ounces of pus. Two point five two million gallons of oil a day. An intra-abdominal abscess. Contamination from postsurgery, postexplosion leaking, the spread of infection to the bloodstream to the ocean. My body is rupturing, shit leaking from where they closed it up, leaking there and spilling, purging—same moment, same day BP exploding rising up, gushing out of me from every orifice, nothing can stop it, trying to shut it down, but not able, there is no stopping it, and it smells putrid, otherworldly, and it fills the bag and I can’t get to the bathroom and the bag explodes and I am puking, my guts still sewn raw from the surgery, and it really hurts.

Symptoms may include abdominal pain, chills,
diarrhea, oil penetration destroying the plumage of birds, making them less able to float in the water, less able to escape when being attacked, preening leads to kidney damage, altered liver function, ruptured digestive tracts, lack of appetite, nausea, dolphins spurting oil through their blow holes, rectal tenderness and fullness, seal fur reduced in its insulation abilities, leading to hypothermia, vomiting, weakness.

They need to start the chemotherapy, but they can’t until the infection is gone. I’m too weak and there will be too many complications. Chemo compromises your immune system and I am a sea of infection. They will need to suck it out of me. Treatment of an intra-abdominal abscess requires antibiotics (given intravenously) and drainage. Drainage involves placing a needle through the skin into the abscess, usually under X-ray guidance. The drain is then left in place for days or weeks, until the abscess goes away.

After two false starts, BP engineers successfully insert a mile-long tube into the broken riser pipe to divert some of the oil to a drill ship on the surface. Over nine days, the tube siphons off about twenty-two thousand barrels of oil, which is just a fraction of the total spill.

Over the next three weeks, the Sloan-Kettering team will insert tubes on three different occasions into
the center of my abscess to drain the pus. The first time I am wheeled into the operating room, I decide to wear sunglasses because it is so bright and I feel too exposed. There is a madly arrogant rock-and-roll surgeon dude who treats my body like some beat-up practice guitar. He tells me to keep my sunglasses on because they’re hot (and he doesn’t mean me). Then, before I know it, he is driving a thick needle attached to a catheter tube through my surgical wound and I yell and tell him it really hurts, but he doesn’t stop or drug me properly or even seem to hear me. I scream more and he just keeps going. I hate his guts. I am crying and I feel like some groupie chick who’s decided too late that she doesn’t want to have sex with the band in the back of the van, but no one is listening.

Afterward I meet with my oncology team, who seem utterly distracted. I explain that this procedure really hurt and I’m super weak from the infection and have lost a lot of weight. They tell me they can only begin chemo when the infection is gone and that they have been waiting for me. I feel as if I have failed and that my cancer cells are psychotically subdividing as we speak. They want me to consider radiation. They send me to another distracted, testy, arrogant doctor dude who makes me feel that my questions are childish and wasting his time. He tells me that they were planning
to radiate the place where my cancer was but that scar tissue has already formed around my intestines and they don’t dance and move the way they should (again my fault). There is a risk that the radiation could zap the same intestine section over and over, and if that happens I would probably never be able to eat again and I would have a permanent bag. And so I ask my irritating questions: Is the radiation necessary? “We don’t know.” Is radiation more effective than chemo? “We don’t think so.” Are radiation and chemo more effective together? “We are not sure.” Is chemo more effective than radiation for uterine cancer? “Yes, we know it is.”

Then why, I ask, are you even thinking of radiation if it could destroy my intestines and make it impossible for me to eat or poop again? He says, “It’s up to you. Only you can decide. We have given you the data.” Implicit in this is my impending wrong decision. And I say, “What would you do if this were your body?” trying to bring his body into the room. And he says, “Can’t say.” And I say again, annoying him further, “But if you do not know if it will help, why are you putting me in the position where I have to choose?” Then he says the mantra of the end of the world. “WE LIKE TO THROW EVERYTHING AT IT. That’s all we know how to do.” And I say, “The only problem is that IT is attached to ME.” And I swear, he doesn’t flinch. Me is irrelevant. Me
is personal and specific. Me is what has to be passed through to get to where he is going. Me is what can be sacrificed to get better information. And I suddenly know what the bride in Pakistan felt when the drones bombed her wedding and her fiancé splintered into pieces and her mother was only fragments of dress. They were throwing everything at al-Qaeda. And I suddenly love my infection and my protective scar tissue, which are saving me from the everything they want to throw at me.

Later Dr. Deb tells me that she worked with a genius brain surgeon and mentor who performed operations trying to remove cancerous brain tumors, and most of the time his patients died. She once asked him why he chose to go into that field when he had so few successes, and he said, “Because sometimes I do have a success, and that is worth all the failures.” He was able to begin to trace what the successes had in common—all the patients had abscess infections in their wounds after surgery, and he believed that in fighting off the infections, their bodies ended up fighting off the cancer as well, that in fact abscess infections could be curative.

Maybe I was reaching for straws. But I like straws. I return home and I embrace my abscess. It is kicking my ass, but it is kicking my immune fighting system
into gear. I need my abscess. I put on my signed Muhammad Ali gloves. I box with myself in the mirror. I watch
When We Were Kings
for the sixth time. Kinshasa. Ali and Foreman. The Rumble in the Jungle. Biggest upset in history. That’s what I’m going for. It was Ali’s staying power. Foreman was young. He gave him everything he had in the first rounds, just like this infection. Ali stayed on the ropes absorbing the hundreds of blows to his body. Even Ali’s greatest supporters had their money on Foreman. But he was fighting for other things, bigger things. He dropped Foreman in the eighth round.

SCAN
BECOMING SOMEONE ELSE

I call Mama C every single day. It doesn’t matter if I am drugged after surgery or in terrible pain or depressed. I sit up straight. I change my voice. I become someone else. Mama C, besieged by corrupt contractors and dysfunctional UNICEF management, by cement that can’t be transported on roads that don’t exist, by prices that escalate by the hour, by the lack of water or electricity, by massacres in encroaching villages, by downpours that are so heavy and intense that untended babies get washed away. I call Mama C every single day. People tell me I am too sick for these calls. But honestly, I live for them. For fifteen or thirty minutes, sometimes an hour, I push past my own darkness and terror, past my weakness and nausea, and travel. I get to hear stories. I ask Christine to describe the morning. She tells me about the startling, diverse chorus of birds and how she didn’t sleep due to the singing that went on all
night and all week from the neighbors’ funeral. She describes eating the perfect mango and the just-ripe avocados from her tree, and how Justine and her troupe performed
The Vagina Monologues
, causing disruptions and discussions about vaginas and rape in the village churches. She tells me how there were suddenly cows on Essence Road, which held up traffic for three hours. She tells me how no one will be allowed to take pictures of women survivors at City of Joy when it opens because it is not a zoo. She tells me about Dr. Mukwege’s dear friend whose children were macheted on the road, how the wife was stabbed and lost her mind, and no one has any idea who did it or why.

She tells me that we will grow a huge vegetable garden, and I ask if we can have goats. We talk about staff and training and funding and opening, and we dream of the revolution that will come after the first thousand women graduate and return home to their communities. Sometimes Mama C is very depressed and I use my strength to cheer her. Sometimes she lies to me and pretends everything is better than it is. It is almost impossible for me to complain. Cancer is rarely talked about in the Congo. The word is hardly used. When people get it, it is usually too late because there is no CAT scan machine in all of Bukavu and the Kivus. The women who have fistulas are incontinent and they will leak for life because they are not lucky enough to be
given bags. Some are even sent into solitary exile in the forests. Jeanne has had eight operations. Alfonsine is held together with tubes and prayers. Yet both of them spend their lives taking care of other women.

Mama C is Belgian and Congolese. She calls me Ev and worries about Ev in the chemio. Chemio. It sounds like a board game or maybe even something lucky. We do not talk about her fear that I will die and leave her alone with City of Joy. We do not talk about Dr. Mukwege, who is devastated by my cancer.

Several years ago we organized a huge march and demonstration. At least five thousand women took to the streets of Bukavu to protest the rapes, the war, and the torture. We ended up in a huge field. The international community, the elites, and the First Lady sat under a canopy while the thousands of poor women who had been violated and abandoned stood in the unforgiving sun. There was no platform to give a speech, just a wooden carton. I looked like a not-so-cool white female Che Guevara. I had been marching all day and was wearing a black cap. The First Lady looked like Princess Di on acid, in shocking pink with a hat the size of the Kinshasa. Christine was translating for me. But something miraculous happened as we stood on the wobbly carton, our arms around each other’s waists in order not to fall. She was exceedingly tall and I looked
very tiny. There was one microphone. I must have begun the speech, but honestly I don’t know which one of us gave it. She finished my English sentences in French. Our bodies were no longer separate. We were one unit of female resistance exploding on a box in a field in the Congo.

SCAN
BEWARE OF GETTING THE BEST

I am a pool of pus oil on a couch. I have two bags now: One drains the abscess, the other, poop. The infection and the antibiotics and Xanax have made me weak and I have lost my appetite. I find myself staring endlessly at the video of oil gushing into the gulf. There are oil-drenched pelicans and dead baby dolphins washing up, and it turns out I don’t need a uterus to be hysterical. All my caretakers, particularly Lu, are furious and try to turn the video off, but it is bizarrely comforting to watch the spill. I really don’t mind dying. I mean, who wants to live in a world where the ocean is bleeding? Did I tell you that my mother lives on the Gulf of Mexico and that it is her favorite place? Did I tell you one thing I love about my mother is how she can identify every egret, seagull, and pelican? She has given them names. My mother knows when the dolphins arrive—the season and the time of day. Even if she is in
her apartment, she can feel they are out there. Sometimes she just stops what’s she doing and runs out to the porch as if they’ve called her. I know that oil on her beach would kill my mother, who is already so thin and frail from three different bouts of cancer in the last thirty years; one was in her thyroid, one took her lung, and the last and most recent one was in her bladder. I am in the third hour of video-cam oil-spill gazing when Lu comes in and takes my computer away from me. I am sure she is going to lecture me, but she gently and tentatively says, “It’s back.” “What?” I say. “The cancer, Mom’s cancer is back … in her bladder. We weren’t going to tell you, but it’s serious. She will have to have an operation.” I don’t look at Lu. I turn back to the oil spill.

Later that evening my bag explodes again and the horrible smell returns and I am on my knees. The next day I am back at Sloan-Kettering. This time I sense an unbearable impatience in all the doctors and interns. They are sick of me. My infection has gone on too long and my body is not doing what it is supposed to do. After yet another CAT scan, it is revealed that the drain for my abscess is not in the right place. It cannot reach the remaining pool of spill. They will have to go into the wound again with another needle/tube. The second time a woman doctor fails to give me enough
medication, and only the nurse seems to hear my screams. I return home, but it is clear that the abscess is swallowing me. I am no longer sure I can go the eight rounds. Vomiting in a cup in the back of a cab, I return to the hospital. Once there, we wait nine hours in the emergency room.