from the Q Words category

The pain arrives, acute & intermittent. The pain is like nothing I have ever felt before. (Me, adrift, without analogy.) The pain, which the internet describes as epigastric, is something I have certainly tried to ignore. And while the pain frightens me with its suddenness, intensity, & lack of precedent, I’m shaken most by the way it’s inconvenient. I can’t just keel over while teaching a class on Zoom. When the Tele-Health link fails, the nurse chirps, “Just use FaceTime! It’s so much easier!” then texts me the doctor’s cell. Call me 2010, but I’m not wild about this way of interacting. I prop my phone on the window ledge, rock the sleeping kitten in my lap. A fast-talker like me, the gastroenterologist pops on screen & launches his litany of questions. I realize it’s been almost a year since I’ve been face to face with a stranger. He’s about my age—though a Google search confirms he’s slightly younger. Thirty-six. Old enough, I suppose, to have spent some serious time with the gut. “Look,” the doctor says, loud & brash with Boston in his voice, “you’re no spring chicken.” Who says that? What thirty-six-year-old tells a forty-one-year-old they’re no spring chicken? Only late fall chickens, preferably winter chickens, have implicit permission to speak about the seasons of chickens. “Excuse me?” I’m blinking like a cursor now, somewhere between annoyed & bemused. “Don’t get me wrong—you look great—but you’re not a kid anymore. The engine light’s bound to kick on at some point.” From poultry to motor vehicles then. I have no real problem mixing metaphors. It’s the way everyone conflates aging with illness—something gone wrong instead of something gone right. (If you’re not aging, you’re dead, mother fuckers! And if I wanted to feel bad about aging, I’d watch some TV, read a magazine instead.) In my first memories of my father, he’s already more than forty, & my mother’s close behind. No one would have joked about their ages, dared suggest he was “over the hill” or she was “past her prime.” My father’s hair had been gray a long time. My mother called him “a silver fox”—sometimes with long sideburns & once with a disco perm. Hers? Well, we couldn’t be sure what color it was since she’d dyed it at home for so long. (And her wigs—a row of different cuts & shades. The foam heads formed a silent closet brigade.) Vital, you would have said if you knew them then. Vital, if you knew them now. Each year the primary care doctor asks if my parents are still alive. Each year I nod & avoid her eyes, but this year, I’m chatty behind my mask. “Last I heard, they’re re-laying their rockery stone by stone.” Last I heard, people still love him, people still fear her. Last I heard, they have no plans for “slowing down.” About aging, my parents are a paragon of reason—not defined by numbers, not hampered by them either. Did I tell you my mother has beat cancer three times? The first occurrence was in her thirties, & I arrived as the bluff called, the nobody-tells-me-I-can’t-have-a-baby card played. At forty, my gynecologist told me “my window was closing” to conceive a child of my own. (Mind you, I didn’t ask.) Shut it! Lock it! Close those curtains! I wanted to scream. Instead: “That’s fine,” I said. She’s a good doctor, & I like her overall, but for Chrissake, let it go, would you, Dr. V? (She wouldn’t, or perhaps she couldn’t.) “Now, of course, there are always other maternity options we can discuss for women your age.” I think some people just don’t like to see a happy summer chicken out for a stroll without a row of squawking chicks trailing behind her. There’s a lot of suspicion around a lady chicken who refuses to become a mother hen. “No thank you,” I said, in the same tone (polite but let’s get it on with it) I use to convey that I don’t need to hear the specials since I already know what I want. When they learn gallstones are the source of my pain, I’m relieved to have an answer, though not pleased to hear surgery is required. So often new pain becomes a condition of eliminating the old. Speaking of which: the gastroenterologist, who has asked me about poetry now & for whom I nurse a grudging fondness, is quick to proclaim—“Such a common condition for women in their forties!”

“What is a Quadragenarian?” $1600