What It Feels Like To Have Exploratory Surgery Tomorrow Morning

"I don't know what I'm supposed to do"
Tolstoy, just before he died

What it feels like to have exploratory surgery tomorrow morning: It feels like you are going to audition for the Cirgue du Soleil without knowing how to juggle or sing or do the splits or be funny or dance or do high wire or anything other than the fact that once you told somebody something about Yourself and Performance that they believed. It feels like you are hanging from a tree branch. It feels, in other words, like you are going to be exposed as the biggest fraud ever.

Because. What if you are wrong about the "something wrong" you believe is going on inside of you, and - - therapist or no therapist....one hundred years of therapy or no one hundred years of therapy....the truth is that you are simply a classic hysteric? It could happen. It HAS happened.
Maybe not to you.........yet. But there is always a first time.

Since I have described my symptoms to other women, four other women, including the beautiful know-it-all Colonics-Woman who at first self-described herself as "the healthiest, most progressive, least-toxic" female "on island" - - is now saying that She, Too (!!!) - - experiences the Very Same Experiences as me.

Oh God. No, don't say it. The very same physiological experiences as me. I have patients who experience this, but they are heavier than me and so they don't experience the swelling. A female member of my family now says she experiences this. All these women.

So. Either my symptoms are symptoms which (hundreds? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands?) of women suffer from and do not receive help for.......or we are all a bunch of.........oh God.

Oh, God. In Freudian terms, I've already said it. Hysterics.

All my tests: the Ultra-Sound, the Colonoscopy, the Upper GI, the Lower Bowel, the Catscan.........turned out as clean, as healthy as can be. The only thing they had in common besides clean and clear and healthy was Expensive.

With apologies to Shakespeare because I don't have him right hereat my computer, "It is a
tale/told by an Idiot/full of sound and fury/signifying/nothing."

("SHE is a tale/told by an Idiot/.....")

All through America, women are made to feel inept, idiotic, small, inferior, hysterical, etc. etc. etc., inside the doctor's office. There is no element of camaraderie the way males sometimes are able to institute with their doctors. At least with male doctors, women are never, or at least
rarely, "the heroes". Our reporting of our conditions are precarious, at best. We blush. We tremble. And, if we get angry, God help us! Boy oh boy, does our precious female anger, inside the Doctor's office, ever get us into trouble. But we wouldn't have to get angry if the doctor's would simply believe our own reporting.

And this, my friends, is what "my" surgeon has done for me. As well as "my" neurologist. He has, she has, believed me. When one is believed, there is no need for anger. Otherwise (and this is how it goes, so often in America, you don't really know that you're ill until the doctor tells you so.) Your own self-report? Get out of here! You are not ill until WE tell you so!

As Anatole Broyard says in his most magnificent book INTOXICATED BY MY ILLNESS, "The sick man has got there: He's at a point where what he wants most from people is not love but an appreciative critical grasp of his situation, what is known now in the literature of illness as "empathetic witnessing". The patient is always on the brink of revelation, and he needs an amanuensis."

Of course, Broyard is speaking of a "He".

I do not think I am making too much of matter of gender here (do remember, Dear Reader, that I have sat, hour after hour after hour, for twenty-six years, with females who have reported to me their accounts of doctor visits as opposed to their HUSBANDS' accounts of doctor visits, very often with the exact same doctors .......and THEY ARE SIMPLY NOT THE SAME.

So it was immensely gratifying when I met with the surgeon, who, yes, happens to be a friend of mine (if he werent a friend of mine, what then, Dear Reader???) who has agreed to do laproscopic surgery tomorrow. And even so.....even so.

You can take the person out of the culture, but you can not take the culture out of the person.

I am female. And I live within a culture that labels female patients as hysterical and eccentric and self-pitying and psychologically disordered.....but does NOT label males in the same way. At all. Not at all.

And so I face tomorrow with a great deal of hope and also with a modicum of dread , predicated, I believe, by the culture, which is not friendly to my gender. If I were male and I presented with my particular array of symptoms and, after having undergone the {extensive} array of tests which I have undergone, the surgeon agreed to do exploratory surgery and discovered....... nothing, I do not believe for one moment that the male would experience a sense of shame for having had insisted upon the surgery. I believe he would have simply experience his insistence as his right, his reportage as his right, he would shake his head and get on with it. Down a few drinks. Goddamit. What the hell. No shame, no blame.

And, Goddammit, after all, he paid for it.

But. Being a female in this culture, I expect that, tomorrow, if my surgeon discovers nothing, nothing at all, no adhesions, no dangling anythings, despite my cognitive intelligence, my {considerable, really} understanding of the culture, my understanding, as a social scientist, not to mention as a psychologist, of what happens to sick people when there is no-known cure to explain what is going on with me, I will experience at least an unconsciouse inner-feel of guilt.

"Only for you, Kay, only for you," my surgeon said to me, when he scheduled me for surgery tomorrow at one o'clock. My neurologist, the Most Very Good Dr. Linda Swartz, calls my surgeon "the best surgeon in Kitsap County".

I know he will do everything he can for me. Bless his heart. Bless his heart. He has little enough to lose and I have everything to gain. Even so. I must depend upon myself to believe in myself no matter what. After all, I am not exchanging my humanity for anything here, I am simply banking on my own good sense, on my own good reporting skills and fine noticing skills, which have gotten me where I am (I am still, let's keep on facing it, a successful therapist, without advertising, without working in a clinic with referring capabilities, without any help from anybody other than word-of-mouth assistance and the help of one or two doctors to keep me getting along in this world.....).

What I have, quite simply, is desire. The desire to feel better. The desire to get better. The desire to be healed. I have that right and I take that right. I take that right as my own. And with exploratory surgery, it may happen or it may not. It is 7:10 on Sunday evening. The New York Giants have just won the Super Bowel. Alan and I, who both own stock in the Green Bay Packers, were rooting for the Patriots. Okay, big deal, it was a hell of a game.

I was going to make us Chicken Parmesan for dinner but we ate a big breakfast at the Streamliner Diner and now Alan says he's not hungry. Anyway, the last time I fixed Chicken Parmesan, I lied and said I had made it myself. He loved it and it even seeemed, fixed with brown rice and fresh broccoli, to redeem his belief in me as a cook. Tonight, though, he just noticed the package of Chicken Parmesan from Town and Country in the refrigerator and, as he stooped down to give me a kiss (I was sitting here, typing) he commented on it. In a joking sort of way. Which made me bristle some and made me wish I had a lock and key on my refrigerator, which, really, has become, of course, his refrigerator too, as he is living here more and more and more.

We are talking about buying a house. On Bainbridge. On the waterfront. We shoulda been
some contenders.

Anyway, so, tomorrow we become The Great Explorers. Along with The Great Surgeon. We'll keep you posted, ok? You know the famous Surrealist dictum that says that, "Beauty is the chance meeting, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella?"

Well, think of that, for me, tomorrow.