The whole genre of my healthcare had changed when I first woke up, swathed in warm blankets after my emergency surgery for a bowel perforation. I had just been raced over from the children’s psychiatric unit ten hours earlier before my eight-hour surgery after one of the nurses realized that there was something seriously wrong with me.
When she took my vital signs my blood pressure was in the basement and my heart rate was dangerously high. I’d also had a fever of 105.5. Suddenly I’d felt myself being loaded into a wheelchair and raced off the psych unit and into the CT scan suite.
“They need to get a picture of the inside of your belly,” Liz had explained to me when we got to the room where they do the CT scans.
My mom has been my safety net for my whole life. She just sometimes doesn’t hold my safety net in the right places. When I first got sick she didn’t know where to hold my safety net because the professionals were all insisting that there was nothing physically wrong with me. They insisted that I had an eating disorder.
Because she was holding my safety net in the wrong spot, I fell. Hard. And whacked my head on the floor of an elevator when I passed out after a routine blood test. My dad had to rush me to the ER. At the ER a doctor with a monkey fingerling named Mr. Bananas clinging to his stethoscope examined me.
It was March of fifth grade and I was living off sips of Gatorade. The last time I’d had any actual food was in January. My body was skeletal and looked like I’d break if I slipped and fell. I kept asking myself, “What is wrong with me?” I wasn’t on some sort of starvation diet because I was scared that the food would make me get fat. However, that’s what everyone insisted the problem was.
Dr. Monroe, my pediatrician had started that theory after finding out I was on a high-pressure gymnastics team. To her credit, Dr. Monore had done an abdominal x-ray and some initial blood work. But when her tests came back normal, I asked her “What is wrong with me?”
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