Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster (18 page)

Two months later, as a different person, I would endlessly stare at that wheel from my bed as it went around and around and around. It’s almost as if I thought that if I stared long enough, somehow I could become one of those lucky people on it, whose only concern was if she should go to Buckingham Palace or Harrods when she disembarked.

As night began to fall, Nurse Wretched came in to check my p.m. vitals.

“They make you work tonight?”

“Hmm.” She wrote something down.

“That sucks. I bet your boyfriend’s bummed about
that
, huh?” For weeks I’d been pumping her for some tiny morsel,
anything
to help me flesh out what I imagined her world to be. Unfortunately, this was one tight-lipped lady, so my imagination was pretty much doing it all. (Here’s where I was so far: A tiny, dingy flat kept ruthlessly tidy. Framed pictures of President Kennedy, Lady Di, and Queen Elizabeth on the wall. A sickly, demanding mum in the back room. Many, many, many cats.)

“You ’ave bow’l movemen’ t’day?” she asked.

Or, we could always just talk about that.

“No.”
How could I when I eat the equivalent of a saltine a day? At this rate, a poop might happen in July.

“Cheers.” And she was gone.

And that was the full extent of my human contact that entire day.

A few long hours later, I was beginning to doze off when I noticed that
Papillon
, a movie I’ve loved since I was a kid, was beginning. That’s the thing about English telly, they actually play
old
movies on their major networks.
Papillon
was made in the seventies and stars in the title role one of the most heart-stopping, gorgeous movie stars
ever
, Steve McQueen. Costarring with him was Dustin Hoffman, an actor I usually really like, but in this case he went a bit crazy in the “nutty accent, funny teeth, and kooky eyeglasses” department. Now, I’m the last gal to judge a scenery-chewer, but it’s almost as if he said to himself,
Maybe if I whip out every single acting trick in the book, nobody’ll notice how sexy McQueen is.
(Not a chance.)

Papillon
is based on a book written by this French petty thief of the same name. The events he describes have since been called into question, but it’s a damn good movie regardless. Papillon, for doing almost nothing, gets sent to hell on earth, Devil’s Island, which at one time was a real French penal colony in French Guiana, South America. This place was so awful it makes anyone who kvetched about Alcatraz seem like a pussy. I was amazed to find myself smiling, because for the first time in almost two months, I could finally enjoy watching someone who’s life sucked way more than mine.

Papillon soon becomes obsessed with escaping (you really can’t blame the guy, what with the heat, the workload, them pesky ’skeeters, the occasional bout of leprosy, guards who relish torturing for the slightest infraction), but every time he does so, he gets caught, and more and more time is added on to his sentence. He’s also forced to spend so many years in complete darkness in solitary confinement that by the time he gets out, his hair is white, he can barely walk, and his teeth have fallen out. (Guess who’s
still
a fox?)

Finally, he and Dustin are sent to Pig’s Island, where they live in little huts and have pigs as pets. They’re left there without guards because the cliffs are so high that escape is deemed impossible. Pig’s Island always seemed pretty nice to me, if they’d just put up some curtains, give the huts a good cleaning, and maybe pick some wildflowers.

But Papillon doesn’t have time for a broom. He refuses to give up the dream of escaping.
He will not be confined.
Besides, Dustin’s scenery-chomping would try anyone’s patience. Eventually, Papillon somehow figures out by tossing a bunch of coconuts over the cliffs into the ocean that there’s one short lull in the tide, and that instead of smashing back against the rocks, one lucky coconut gently floats out to sea. So, he makes a coconut boat, figures out the timing, and floats to freedom and a life as a celebrated writer. Leaving Dustin behind to ponder why the hell he worked so damned hard if McQueen was gonna effortlessly steal the whole movie anyway.

I was at the coconut-throwing scene when I heard a loud bang. Because I’m from New York City, I almost ignored it, assuming it was just someone being murdered. Then, out of the corner of my eye there was a burst of orange. I looked up from my bed out the window, and I saw the most glorious, enormous bursts of color lighting up the Eye and the rest of the skyline. Fireworks. I could even hear the “oohs” and the “aahs” floating up from the celebrating crowd.

To this day I don’t know exactly why, but for some mysterious reason, this was the moment that sanity finally chose to break through the madness that had held me in its iron grip for so many years. With no warning, I was struck by this thought:

There are people in that crowd who are looking at the same fireworks I am right this very second who are STONE COLD SOBER. There are people in that crowd who don’t feel the need to touch their back pocket of their jeans constantly to make sure the six pills are still there. There are people in that crowd who are simply enjoying the spectacle, without wondering if they have one refill left at the pharmacy, or if they would have to call yet another doctor. There are people out there RIGHT NOW who aren’t imprisoned by drugs. They’re just with their loved ones and are just happy to be alive.

Grief overwhelmed me. True, real sorrow because I finally understood what I was. A selfish, self-serving, loathsome creature who did nothing to better the world. I finally truly
felt
the weight of all the pain I had caused, all the tears that had been wasted on me, all the gifts I had been given to me that I had just carelessly frittered away, and all of the thousands of hours I had spent obsessing about something as ridiculous, boring, and stupid as
me.

I don’t want this life anymore
, I thought.
I can’t bear who I’ve become.

I squeezed my eyes shut and started praying. I mean really praying, for the first time since I was a little kid. I’m not sure to whom, it wasn’t to some guy on a throne, or his son. I didn’t believe in those guys anymore. But I prayed to someone or something out there in the universe wiser than me. I prayed to all the people I’d ever loved, and all the people stupid enough to love me back. I prayed to my dead dog Pablo. I prayed to the gorgeous fireworks outside my window, and all the lucky people enjoying them.

I prayed that somehow, someway I’d figure out how to do the impossible—build a raft out of coconuts and escape from my own Devil’s Island.

Thirty-nine years old.

Totally alone.

A wasted life.

Happy New Year!

new year’s
Eve was my
bottom
, but it wasn’t
the end.
That would happen a few weeks later, due to the fact that I’m a stubborn control Freak. That, and of course since I was fucking crazy.

It was one fine morning in mid-January when my surgical team delivered the amazing news. My infection had almost disappeared, and I could finally officially leave! I couldn’t believe it.
The nightmare
is
over
. Then they informed me that I would be wearing a colostomy bag for the next month to help drain the remaining infection. My smile faltered. Then faded.
A colostomy bag
?
Aren’t those for old people who’ve had to have their butts removed
? Whenever I pictured a colostomy bag (which, trust me, wasn’t all that often), I had always assumed it to be an enormous blue bag attached to someone’s very old, very unhappy rectum.

Oddly, I was wrong. It’s actually way more fun. I was going to describe one to you, but I think Wikipedia’s definition is way cuter than anything I could rustle up. A quick heads-up first for all you idiots who don’t enjoy reading medical journals in your spare time: a
colostomy bag
is actually called an “ostomy pouching system,” which I think is much more elegant. Oh, and a
stoma
refers to an opening on the body (which in my case was located just below my left rib cage) and is
not
fancy medical lingo for “stomach,” which would have been my guess. So sit back, grab a snack, and enjoy!

I added the very end, just to make sure you’re still with me.

It basically looks like a quart-size sandwich bag with a circular, sticky ring so as to surround your stoma. One of the twelve-year-old doctors showed me how to tape it on myself, and I must say, nothing puts a spring in a girl’s step like sporting a darling, pus-filled “ostomy pouching system.”

I ended up spending a total of almost two months in that hospital. I had lost a whopping sixty-five pounds. When I looked in the mirror above the sink, I was so gaunt and ghostly white, I looked like I had been on
Survivor: Greenland.
As I made arrangements to leave, they asked me to pay the bill. I’d been dreading this part for weeks, and I almost had a heart attack when I saw it.
I couldn’t fucking believe it
: everything—the surgery, X-rays, CT scans, the truckloads of morphine, antibiotics, and many other medications, the staff, the blech-filled pouch, the private room—
everything
, all of it ended up costing me a whopping two thousand pounds.

Which meant that, in 2007, I owed them a little over three grand.

You have to understand that for
weeks
I had been preparing to give the go-ahead to my business manager to clean out my bank account and pension, sell my apartment, all while agonizing over which treasured family heirloom to sell. I honestly thought it would cost me at least a million bucks. I had been aware that I was in a country that was renowned for its incredible National Health Service (known as NHS). The UK’s NHS ensures that
anyone
and
everyone
gets free medical treatment, regardless of
who you are
or
what you do.
I just never imagined it would apply to
me
, an American, pill-popping lush.

Recently, I decided to see what information I could find on the Internet about it, and I almost fell off my chair when I read that one of the few areas of medicine the NHS doesn’t cover is dental work. Which explains a great deal. (Personally, I would gently encourage them to revisit that decision.) This means that the
only
thing I was charged for was my private room. Jesus, no wonder Nurse Wretched had a bug up her ass. She washed my hair and tucked me in, and I paid her not one dime.

Discussing America’s health-care reform isn’t one of my favorite pastimes; however, I must say that I think our system sucks because, soon, the only people who’re gonna be able to afford to
go
to doctors will be the fucking
doctors.
Infuriating. I can’t imagine what would’ve happened to me if my guts had decided to blow up in New York City. Well, that’s not exactly true. I
can
imagine. You might very likely find me in the San Fernando Valley shooting porn for gentlemen who like their ladies tall, blond, and a bit long in the tooth.

After I giddily paid the bill, I knew I had one last important thing to do before I left. I knew I had to say good-bye to one
very
special person. With a heavy heart, I wandered around the wing and finally found her being rude to someone’s devastated family member at the front desk. I grinned and leaned against the wall to watch her for a few minutes, soaking in my last precious moments with her. When she had the balls to simply ignore the hysterically sobbing woman’s question, I felt all warm and fuzzy inside.
What a lady.

I walked up to them, my pouching system sloshing noisily. “Excuse me.”