Memoir of a Debulked Woman by Susan Gubar

Author:Susan Gubar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-03-29T16:00:00+00:00

Given similar self-revulsion, why do I force myself to write about foul matters—because it does require overcoming a strong urge to hide experiences that I find appalling? Indeed, while many of my friends know that I am undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer, very few of them have been told about the intestinal disasters with which I daily contend. But self-censorship gnaws at me. In part, I dwell on Virginia Woolf’s lament in “Professions for Women” that her generation was not yet able to tell the truth about the body. Presumably, I am too well educated to be ashamed by a physiological phenomenon beyond my control, but all the social mores surrounding evacuation and excretion conspire to make the ileostomy unspeakable and unspeakably anxiety-producing.

One day when the home nurse arrives we realize that Hollister, which manufactures the equipment, has sent the wrong materials. We are without proper supplies to change the apparatus. Then my angst erupts. I weep from frustration. Will this filthy pouch on my belly have to stay in place unchanged until a Fed-Ex arrives from the manufacturer or the Indianapolis hospital? Might it loosen and leak? Could Kim drive to the local hospital’s supply office to see if it has the proper size in storage? In fact, she does run and finds the right equipment, but my tears and blessings upon her return tell me a great deal about the levels of fearfulness the ileostomy has raised and how distressed I am at the stoma’s upkeep.

On a bovine or porcine belly, a tautening and then elongating red protrusion might be mistaken for a swollen teat or engorged nipple. Yet despite my growing antipathy to academic jargon, I cannot help but think that the stoma seems and feels like an anti-phallus. Moist and concentrically circled, it looks like the thick last joint of a fat finger or the tip of a circumcised boy’s penis. When it is doing its peristaltic spasms (to eject waste), this small spigot bears a resemblance to the head of a one-eyed snake or slug trying to worm its way out of my stomach. Should it be exposed to the air (for cleaning purposes), the stoma has no ups and downs; it just droops. It represents what everyone dreads and loathes: the nauseating phenomenon of a slick and slimy internal organ protruding from the skin and thus the grotesque abrogation of bodily containment or integrity. Flaccid, small, and floppy, such a stubby stump could not penetrate anything at all, but would get smooched upon contact. At least for the morbidly minded, a miniature organ not of proud pleasure but of shameful evacuation stirs up ideas of castration, of wanting to tie up loose ends. Actually, an ostomy literalizes the statement, I am at loose ends. Impossible not to picture how easily this bit of gristle could be snipped off. When the stoma appears as it usually does, enclosed and barely visible within the (generally dirty) pouch, it also figures lack of control and the powerlessness of a foul embodiment.

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