Excerpt from Body Friend
BY KATHERINE BRABON
In the first days in that new house, the last before the surgery, I took a bath every night. I worked from home or took copious painkillers if I had to go to the office, and while there attempted to walk as little as possible, as I hated my limp and all that it signified.
I lay in the bathwater, which I would run extra hot, and let the weightless heat hold me. I heard Tomasz come through the front door downstairs, the familiar shake of keys, the ticking of bike wheels down the hallway.
‘Food’s on the stove,’ I called. ‘Should still be warm.’
I closed my eyes. I loved this time, the reunion and release at the end of a day. He ran up the stairs, light and quick. Bowl in hand, he walked into the bathroom.
‘Dinner in the bathroom? On the toilet?’ I was happy he was home.
‘I’m actually doing it. It’s gross.’ He twirled the pasta with the fork, ate a few mouthfuls. ‘I can’t do this,’ he said in mock indignation.
I laughed as he stalked back out of the bathroom. I turned to my side, the water lapped, he sat on the top of the stairs, eating and talking about his day. We were together between rooms. When the time came, he helped me out of the bath, his hands dry and warm.
Before the surgery I was in a halfway state. Not fully engaged in the world nor entirely detached from it. I was able to say: I’ll be going to the hospital soon, or, I’m not well today, I’m having surgery in just a few weeks. I would not have readily admitted that I liked this time of stripped expectation, a lifting away of the public skin, but I did. I liked having a reason to excuse myself from what waits for us daily, the social outings or work commitments, even if that stripping away afforded me simply a moment to be by myself. This probably sounds terrible, even lazy. I don’t know what people would think of this. But to my mind it is a positive act of refusal, a desire to reject something buried very deep in the structures we submit to in our lives. Perhaps calling myself lazy is a small fiction I don’t really believe; my socialised self, the mask talking and accusing. Perhaps it’s truer to think of participation in productivity as a small sidestep from oppression.
Tomasz became accustomed to the side of me that turned away from the world. In the lead-up to the operation, he spent more and more evenings at home. He even seemed to prefer it after a while, proclaiming exhaustion and declaring that he would rather work on his art projects in his workshop or put a movie on early in the evening. I was not sure if this progression in him was natural, a consequence of getting older, becoming less young, or if I caused this and if I did, whether that was a bad thing.
In the first years of our relationship we were constantly out, at bars, at restaurants, in parks with fizzing bottles, my body reasonably under control in that I’d not had a bad flare of the illness for some time, and Tomasz had not yet seen that side of me I knew lay dormant. That existence, the confidence to do those things, the bars, the parks, the long afternoons out and standing and walking, long and languid afternoons lasting until the late summer darkness arrived, in Edinburgh Gardens, in Princes Park, that faith in the body’s capacity to withstand them, seemed now a series of brilliant moments, and any occasions like this I’d missed, which I did because of pain or introversion or fatigue, were a sign of thwarted potential I might never get back.
When we had not been dating long, when we barely knew each other in any deep way, I worried constantly that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with him, or that I was stopping him from doing things he used to do often—the all-night parties, the spontaneous nights out. He seemed to do those things when I wasn’t with him, and then when we were together he preferred to stay in, content to cook a meal and eat it on the couch in front of the heater, to fuck in the afternoon and maybe again before sleeping. I send you to sleep, I’d complain, you’re different when you’re with your friends. He would dismiss it, reassure me that he enjoyed this gentler pace, and yet I’ve always wondered how greatly we can shift the mundane and fundamental urges in a person.
And it seemed, in those days before the hospital, that my personality relented and curled into his care. I became almost infant-like, dependent and prone to express physically every need and emotion. The bad leg pained me constantly; I held on to walls to walk from one room to another. My sick leg is so ugly, I said to Tomasz, over and over again. I hate this, my sick leg is so ugly.
If I felt okay and cooked or stayed up late, days or hours afterwards it would come back to me, that energy spent, in a debt of increased pain and exhaustion that I couldn’t help but see as retributive. Tomasz went out less. I would hear him say, I think I’ll stay in with her tonight, and I would feel such relief I can’t adequately describe it. Tomasz was a fixed safety, an enclosed, inviolable space in which I did sometimes dissolve into my teary fatigue or snap and rage at the pain before eventually settling.
His equilibrium was miraculous to me. It is still this way. His mood is even but playful, his energy always evident in the most truthful way. He is restless, he is active, he is tired, he is hungry, he is not hungry. Whichever he is, he is it fully; inhabits it fully and takes ownership of these needs. It is a great difference between us: I resist or am hypersensitive to bodily states, unable to meet them with acceptance whereas if he is hungry he will eat, he will not look at the clock like I would and say, But it’s too early or It’s too late. If I am tired, I seem to think this is wrong and push against fatigue, as though I’ve never needed to sleep, or I must sleep right then, now, or I’ll cry. This difference is for me a source of envy but perhaps also love.
I don’t pretend to be able to describe the pain experience. There is an argument that some things are beyond language, another that words are our only option. But I can say that before the surgery, what I felt was a ruling kind of pain, each shifting of muscles dictated by it. Every potential movement was interpreted by my brain in relation to that pain or its imminence, so that sudden movements—a stranger standing too close on the tram, an embrace from Tomasz—were provocations. I would be angry or heart-thumping or anxious at the perceived loss of control. To lose control of how I moved was to lose control of how pain materialised and was inflicted, which was to lose control of something yet more, one of those precious narratives that get us through our days, control tumbling out of and out of itself. Perhaps this last is the one we refer to when we simply say lose control. I was, have been, on high alert for years now. It is an odd vigilance the body keeps, the adrenaline to protect from potential hurt, some old and primal need activated and misused by the modern unwell body.
Autoimmunity is you and it’s you against yourself and it creates invisible illnesses, except of course to the body they inhabit, except on the worst of their days. At the end of things—just before the operation, the only narrative end point I could construct at the time—when the pain was very bad, the illness emerged, as it were, visible to others after being, for so long, out of sight. In the final months, it was obvious that something was wrong with me. I would dress every day and put on make-up and blow-dry my hair, but I could not hide the limp as I walked past colleagues to go to the bathroom, to get a cup of watery coffee from the machine in the windowless lunchroom, as I walked into the classroom to face the students, as I got on and off the bus to and from the university. People seemed so surprised, even wronged, that I was going in for the operation. Surely not, I was too young for that. They shook their heads, rearranged their faces in a way that seemed to be both scrutinising me and disclosing their shock or even disbelief. They wished me well. In those situations I was almost glad to have some physical manifestation of the pain, as though I wouldn’t have been believed otherwise. And so I left the university, the office, unable to see myself there on the other side of the surgical procedure. It was as if no one had made the same journey. Pain is incredibly singular. A disease of autoimmunity is you and you, you towards you, you against you, you with you, you upon you, you cannot extricate yourself, you cannot skin yourself off yourself—there is no such aftermath as a bodily divorce.
I was in the hospital for five days. I thought of myself as a young person having an old person’s operation. I wasn’t yet thirty and my joints needed replacing. The procedure seemed to go as it should, and the pain, with the deadening of strong medicines, was surprisingly minimal. The transitions were difficult. Home to hospital. The suddenness of a thin hospital gown on a naked body. Pre-surgery and the last moment staring into the anaesthetist’s eyes, to the dissonant blur of awakening, stitched and raw. Horizontal immobility to standing, knocked by waves of low blood pressure. The surgeon ordered me to stay lying down for the first day after the operation, in case I fainted.
Throughout the first night, the woman in the bed next to me moaned for hours and spoke constantly of her pain. I asked the nurse if there was a private room. There were none, she told me, not unsympathetically. The next day I saw a young white boy, a teenager with blond hair, as he was wheeled post-surgery to the private room next door. I had missed my chance. The insurance to cover the surgery cost a hundred and thirty dollars a month. A person was required to be covered by the policy for one year—a year full of the constancy of painkillers, the limp I so hated—before claiming the procedure, and even then some extra thousands were to be paid directly to the surgeon, un-coverable costs, which I had in the bank only due to some book money, my first of that kind, and so I wondered if I’d been hoodwinked by this private insurance system with its surreptitious costs and unavoidable waiting.
Once, during those five hospital days, I had to go for X-rays. I had no idea what time of day or night it was. As I lay face up on the bed, skimming thoughts nowhere, two nurses came into the room and lifted me up using the sheets, one on either side to form a makeshift stretcher. They set me down on a bed on wheels and pushed it along the various corridors connected like limb and joint, turning wide and slow at each corner. We arrived in the X-ray area, signalled by ominous black-and-yellow signs with a windmill-like image warning of radiation danger. For whatever reason—perhaps it was a busy time—the nurses left me. I lay on the gurney, my palms facing up, in the empty corridor. Soon I was desperate for the toilet. I couldn’t get up, I wasn’t yet able to stand without help, and there was nobody nearby.
A terrible loneliness in that moment: fluorescent, whirring air; chemically sharp, clean floors; a body waiting and needing. When I was finally taken back to the ward, lifted again with the sheets and onto the bed, when finally the nurse brought me the bedpan, pulled the sheet across like a magician covering up a secret process, the pan was close to full and I was too embarrassed to ask for it again during her shift. I learned when the nurses stopped and started, when I should wait or ask for things again, so as to avoid seeming too demanding.
It’s frightening how quickly it became a home to me, how soon I was habituated to the cell of a bed, how it became a point of view in which I felt safe, the view of the tops of the buildings in Richmond, five days watching sunsets and reflected sunrises through glass, content that I would never be out there to see them. I liked the regularity of the early breakfasts, done by seven, the tea served mid-morning and then again mid-afternoon. The visits from various staff on their rounds—choose your lunch, your dinner, choose tomorrow’s breakfast—and how strange it must be, then normalised, for their daily tasks to involve seeing someone in their most vulnerable, unselfed state. The conversations that took place around me, beyond the protective white curtain. Time passed in small deep sleeps of journeys to an ocean floor, and in visits from family and friends during which I felt a fragile, strange specimen in a white cloak, surrounded by loved faces who brought in the weather—summer, warmth on their cheeks; who brought in eyes and purpose from outside; who were suddenly slowed by the steady, focused quiet, convalescence, fluorescence, astringent air and fetid beds, the rise-and-fall of the hospital. Perhaps the enforced enclosure and stillness of a hospital validates for a time so many of our subversive, subterranean longings.
I became so accustomed to the routines of the hospital, to the noises and unending light denoting a knowing presence, to the people, almost always women, who brought tea and cereal, tea and biscuits, lunch and then more tea on a tray wheeled in on a trolley, to the sealed view of an east-facing sky above the suburbs to my left, the thin white curtain making a permeable wall to my right and separating me in quite a pointless way (I could hear her breathing, her swallowing, her body’s fluid gurgling after eating; how did sight make a difference?) from the person next to me. I didn’t drink coffee for five days, my body didn’t want it, and I was entirely dependent on others.
I was told that I was ready to go home, after the five days my surgeon predicted.
Tomasz helped me into the car, I used the crutches we had purchased because to hire them would likely end up more expensive, a fact I railed against, while Tomasz told me it was fine, relax. And who knows, said the consulting physiotherapist, you might need them again someday, a statement I likewise resented and repeated to Tomasz after the woman left. Outside, the day was bright and I noticed the fresh air, the smell of jasmine and exhaust fumes. A kind of jet lag, and strange, to be in a different time from others going about their workdays. I was removed from all that, a state both freeing and constrictive, bound up as it was with my ideas of choice and control, how illness could come through and steamroll both things, while perhaps shedding light on other truths, and how there may be a hesitant freedom within yourself in this state while you nevertheless try to operate in the more restrictive structures of society and economy around you. I think all this in retrospect, of course. On that trip home I contemplated only banalities: the steep stairs in the house; whether I’d be able to sleep; how long Tomasz would stay home with me while I recovered.
Copyright © Katherine Brabon, 2023. From Body Friend by Katherine Brabon to be published by Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc. July 16, 2024