Walk It Off by Ruth Marshall

Author:Ruth Marshall [Marshall, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

9

Step 4—Be the Mom

“Do your drugs make you high?” my girlfriend Joanie asked me in a whisper one afternoon.

It was a perfectly reasonable question that I met with a frat-house response: “I wish.”

Prior to the surgery, narcotics played a very minor role in my life. I only took Ativan to fly, and on those rare occasions when my stress level manifested in a thumping heart that became too percussive to ignore. Post-surgery, however, I was amazed at the ease with which I cycled through my drugs: morphine, Percocet, oxycodone. Though frightening and evocative, they were necessary. The pain in my back was so thick, so seemingly impenetrable, the drugs barely took the edge off, let alone made me feel good. For this, I was profoundly grateful. I never requested more than my prescribed amount, not because I’m a martyr but because I’m a chicken. The constipation that followed was simply not worth the extra measure of pain relief. I started cutting down on my dosage in the hopes that I would be rewarded with a more smoothly running digestive system, but was furious when my body refused to cooperate. I noticed, however, that the decrease in my oxycodone didn’t really cause an increase in pain. Very quickly, I weaned myself down to just one dose a day—before I went to sleep. I called my cousin Joel to brag.

“Taking just one a day is useless,” he said. “Stop taking them, period.”

So I did what he said, and it was like falling off a cliff.

I was up the entire night. I lay there, counting backward from a hundred, trying to ignore the riot that had broken out in every single part of my body, until it occurred to me that I didn’t have to just lie there—maybe it was time to start reading again. I found a book on my Kindle, bought it, became engrossed in it, and read right up to the part where the mother thinks she is pregnant again only to learn that her pregnancy is actually ovarian cancer. She dies a few pages later.

I was ten days late for my period. I had told one of my nurses and she joked that maybe I was pregnant. I laughed off the absurdity—I was forty-seven and Rich had had a vasectomy years ago. Still, I added up the symptoms: nausea, no period, bloating, headaches. I went to the Internet and cross-referenced my symptoms with those of ovarian cancer. By the time Dr. Zimcik came to see me the following day, my nerves were rattled beyond anything gabapentin could control. I barely had time to register her pink pants and black-and-white polka-dot shirt before I cried out, “I think I have ovarian cancer!”

“Okay,” she said, cocking her head to the side. “I’m not going to tell you you’re crazy because what you already have is exceedingly rare, but I will tell you this: I am more likely to win the lottery tonight than you are to have ovarian cancer.”

She stood up, looking for something.

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