by Jordan Dilley
Mycobacterium tuberculosis
Just beneath the skin the needle slips. This is no regular injection; this isn’t an inoculation. The nurse calls in a purified protein. Only many years will you frown at the irony. Today you only wince as the needle slips out again. “See? Not so bad,” the nurse says, spreading a Bugs Bunny Band-Aid across the prick. You don’t even like Loony Tunes, only watch it when it’s too hot outside to play, loathing the canned sound effects, and the unnatural saturation.
Every time you go to the refrigerator, there it is. A chart measuring diameters and the possible skin textures the injection point might assume. You stare at your arm, comparing the flat, smooth texture to the most interesting possibilities suspended by a Grand Canyon magnet. Each day you check back, but there’s no change. Your mother assures you that’s a good sign.
Leukorrhea
The good news is you haven’t peed your pants. The bad news is, they’re still a little wet with a substance you’ve never seen before. Vicious, almost translucent except in the spots where it isn’t, and so stretchy. Like in those old Gak commercials you can “Stretch it!” between your thumb and forefinger, the rope grows slimmer but never breaks. You want to ask someone older and wiser about it, but you have no older sister and your stepmother never read Our Bodies, Ourselves because it’s one of those bad books with clinical terms and illustrations.
The school nurse is straightforward. She smacks the illustrated uterus with her pointer. Discharge she says without hesitation. Its consistency and texture will change throughout your cycle; you can track your fertility by it. But you’re a long way off from fertility apps and basal thermometers. And anyways, something worse is coming that no amount of hygiene videos or smiling uteruses can help you navigate. Winged pads whose adhesive will refuse to unstick, cramp-induced diarrhea, the gush every time you stand up, roll over, or think about dolphins—your only compass is routine and endurance.
After the nurse’s lecture, you check the uterine poster. One of the ovaries is dented from her pointer, almost punctured.
Anemia
It’s the only thing you’ll ever have in common with an astronaut.
“We’re still go. Automatic launch sequence initiated. Full internal power. Arm retraction complete. T minus twelve…eleven…ten…nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…three…two…one. And we have launch!”
Couch receding into the distance, legs straighten, you’re gaining altitude. Whoosh. Lightheaded again, your blood pressure plummets. But you don’t fall back to earth. Drawing on auxiliary power you move forward. Toward another class, toward a disappointing salad (no bread please), toward your waitressing shift where you’re little more than a meat and potato delivery drone. Chives, extra butter, and a side of ranch! You imagine having a coin slot in your thigh. Fifty cents for butter, twenty-five for the chives. Ranch is a dollar and you’re cut off at one. It seems more reliable than hoping for tips.
But you don’t have a coin slot, you have a mouth. And you have little tablets that taste like death and make your tongue black. When you ask the pharmacist if there’s another way, she rolls her eyes and hands you a small bottle labeled “Yummy! Liquid Iron.” The dosage instructions are for children under four, so in addition to exhaustion, low blood pressure, headaches, and a weird heartbeat, you have math homework too. The citric acid doesn’t mask the taste, and your tongue still turns black, but you’re relying less on auxiliary, and you start to replenish your reserves.
Salpingostomy
You’d be relieved if you weren’t hemorrhaging. If the pain in your abdomen wasn’t blurring your vision, making the IV bag seem like an entire ocean, you could tell the nurse you barely found out you were pregnant. Though later you’ll wonder if the little sack stuck in your right fallopian was a real pregnancy if it was never viable. But you can’t say any of these things, so you mumble through numbed lips while the nurse preps you for surgery.
The operating room is cold, like a meat locker or a morgue. But at least it’s outside of you. You’ve still got skin and the skimpy hospital gown as shields. Then the anesthetic is injected, and the cold is inside you. Crawling up your arm toward your heart and brain, you count backward from ten. Things get fuzzy around five.
You wake up confused to a different nurse holding a cup of water up to your mouth. Your throat is so dry. The water helps, but the intubation tube has left your throat raw. You try to communicate your hurt, but it comes out warbled, incoherent. The nurse doesn’t have the patience. There’s someone in the next bed who just had a cancerous tumor removed. They woke up moaning, jangling the side rail bars around their bed. The nurse sighs and tells you they wished every patient was like you, before untangling the tumor patient’s wrists from the side rail.
You’re a good patient. You keep all your hurts inside. You cover the scars on your belly with the hospital gown, the ones in your amygdala with a smile.
Osteopenia
“It’s like a warehouse trying to walk on stilts,” he says, taking a pair of tongue depressors and demonstrating across the desk, letting his forearms weight down the little balsam sticks.
You frown at being compared to a warehouse. You liked your last doctor better, the one with the candle from Anthropologie she never burned. It collected dust where it sat on her desk, but the fact that she was the type to buy a forty-dollar candle instilled confidence. Dr. Sullivan has lopsided hair you’re pretty sure is a toupee.
The pharmacist rattles the bottle of supplements and calls your name.
“I called your name three times,” he says as you sign for the insurance.
Say it again, bitch. Instead, you just smile as he bags the supplements. You quit apologizing for small things years ago.
One of the supplements smells like fish food flakes. You choke it down with coffee, but that isn’t the end of the smell. Every time you pee it’s like you’re in a pet store staring into the plexiglass tanks at goldfish who swim in and out of miniature castles, and bob over rainbowed pebbles.
On a Wednesday morning, you wake up to snow. The driveway and street are covered with inches of glistening powder. As a child you relished these mornings, everything transformed, the world made magic overnight. Now all you see is danger. Blinking hazards across the driveway because there might be ice underneath the snow. A siren on the way to the mailbox because the snow is hiding a tree root that broke through the pavement years ago. Even a stop sign outside the front door because icicles have formed on the roof and are dripping onto the second step.
Every trip upstairs is a negotiation between gravity and your SD numbers. You develop a checklist without consciously seeing it as such. You must be wearing shoes, your hand must be dry—no lotion or sweat, and you must be leaning forward. A fall leaning forward is better than a fall leaning backward. Forward you can deal with, backward and it’s all up to gravity and angles. When your nephew offers to paint the banister where the beige paint has worn off, you turn him down so quickly he looks hurt. You ply him with sugar cookies until he forgets you even have a banister. Before he goes home you wipe the blue frosting off his lips. It smears on the back of your hand, and you marvel at the nearness of the pigment to your sometimes bulging veins.
Atherosclerosis
“It’ll be smooth sailing after the surgery,” the surgeon says, patting your leg under the ugly hospital blanket.
Smooth sailing. Of course, it will be, everything is smooth after you fall off the edge of the world; there’s no friction to hold you back anymore, just a steady descent.
The surgeon continues, rattling off recovery time, the survival rate for a woman your age, even what kind of foods you should be eating afterward (hint, they don’t include bacon or Chubby Hubby). But all you can think about is whether surgeons wear diapers during long surgeries like yours. Six hours is a long time to go without a bathroom break, and are they really going to go through the process of scrubbing, gowning, and gloving again? And how is that sanitary? Even if they restrict themselves to liquid waste?
“Sound good?” The surgeon asks.
You nod, too embarrassed to admit you were thinking about his bowel movements and not his post-surgery advice.
When he leaves, the woman in the next bed asks “Single, double, triple, or more?”
“Just the one,” you say.
She closes her eyes and leans back into the stack of pillows. “Amateur,” she says, holding up three fingers.
You try to feel grateful it’s just the one blocked artery for you, but when you notice her nicotine-stained fingertips and the tight wrinkles around her lips all you feel is a sense of superiority. At least until the anesthesiologist wheels you into the cold operating room.
“Count with me. One…two…three…four…five…”
Indigo, violet, magenta. Forest green, olive, chartreuse. Mustard, canary, lemon. You measure the passage of time by the colors that bloom from the middle of your chest. When only the faintest trace of yellow remains, you’re cleared for things like exercise and sex. You roll your eyes at both. You’ve never liked the first and the last time you had the second people were stalking Walmarts and Targets for Furbys. But you dutifully scrounge your closet anyways and find an old pair of sneakers that are stained with potting soil.
Just around the block at first. Past scribbled dinosaurs and spaceships in neon chalk. Past the hound with white hair around his nose and mouth. He barely lifts his head, you have no mail sack, so you’re not his problem. You bend down at a cluster of tulips to tie your shoe. Yellow and red petals tremble in the cold spring wind as you bunny-ear the laces. The petals are brave to be out so early. You want to press them back into the ground where it’s warm and snug. Wait until later. You reach out and brush the beaded stigma with your fingertips. The sticky surface coats your fingers in saffron pollen which you wipe on the front of your jacket.
Toward the end of your walk, just as you turn the corner onto your street, your chest begins to ache. Hand still stained deep orange; you massage the scar that ripples underneath your t-shirt. The doctor said aches and pains would be normal for a while, but you have no baseline for comparison, no way to know if this is a normal pain or a sign of something else. You rip off your jacket and t-shirt and toss them on the bathroom floor. When you get out of the shower you notice the smears on the hem of your t-shirt where your ovaries would be if you had them, the lines of orange down the front where your heart lay exposed. You turn toward the sink, and something in your leg pops.
Jordan Dilley lives and writes in Idaho. She has an MA in literature from the University of Utah. Her work has appeared in the Vassar Review, Heavy Feather Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Loch Raven Review as well as other publications. Her 2022 short fiction piece “Lani in the River” was nominated by JMWW for a Pushcart Prize.