I'm Fine...And Other Lies

by Whitney Cummings

  I hadn’t cried or felt any physical pain yet, but once I looked over to the construction worker and we made eye contact, I exploded in sobs. Through tears and blood I uttered a phrase that my vocal cords usually boycott: “I need help.”

  He didn’t miss a beat. He called an ambulance and started looking through my car for things that could work as tourniquets. Luckily, he had no problem finding something, given half my wardrobe lives in the backseat of my car.

  When the paramedics arrived, they asked me to show them my ear, but I couldn’t. By this time I was violently shaking and my whole chest was contracting. I wasn’t even sure if the ear was still attached to my head and I didn’t want to find out. The three very handsome, buff paramedics finally convinced me to show it to them. Solely because they were cute and primordial biology is a filthy pervert, I finally acquiesced and pulled my hands away from my ear. Nothing. My hand was stuck. The blood had congealed so much that my hand was plastered to my head. The hot EMTs poured something over my hand to liquefy the blood. Once I was finally able to pry my hand away from it, they saw my “ear.”

  Their eye line told me that my ear was still in the same general vicinity of my head, but their winces implied that the injury was bad. I remember one of them gasping, which I concluded couldn’t possibly be a good sign, given the horror paramedics are exposed to on a daily basis. Look, I believe men should be able to wince and not be shamed for it, but I have to admit that I’ve seen grown men wince only a couple other times in my life: when Anderson Silva’s leg snapped on live TV, when “two girls one cup” was making the rounds on YouTube, and when I showed a paramedic my cartilage frappuccino of an ear. Suddenly this day was in very weird company.

  I heard the sirens of an ambulance. That noise usually makes me anxious, but when the ambulance is for you, a sense of relief fills your body. Once I was in the ambulance, that relief was quickly shattered. I was strapped to a wheelchair, but was far from secure. Every time we stopped or turned, I would jolt over the chair like a crash test dummy, bracing while trying to hold my ear on. I was less than thrilled to find out that while being rushed to the ER I had to engage my core, and as far as I’m concerned, the only thing worse than missing an ear is having sore abs.

  I’m not sure if paramedics are trained to make boring small talk to make sure you’re coherent, but the guy in the ambulance with me was what I can only describe as aggressively casual.

  “Cold out today, huh?” was his opener.

  It was as if we had been married for forty years and had officially run out of things to talk about. Mind you, I was in a fetal position on a wheelchair, releasing guttural screams and erratic prayers to a couple of different gods. The most annoying part was that it wasn’t even cold out. We live in L.A.; it’s actually never been cold before. His small talk wasn’t even based on accurate information. My guess was he was nervous about how much I was crying and his weird conversation was intended to distract me. From what I gather, it’s pretty overwhelming for men to see a woman suffering, even when they cause it, and this may actually have been the least bizarre way I’ve ever seen a man cope with watching me cry. In the past, when men have seen me have a meltdown, they’ve done everything from abruptly leaving the room to start laughing to offering me money to stop. Twice I’ve had guys get an erection when they saw me cry. I know, primordial human nature is a nightmare.

  I mustered all the strength I had to formulate a sentence, something in the vein of asking the aggressively casual paramedic if I could borrow his phone. With no irony or apology, he handed me an old LG flip phone. Look, I’m not a snob about technology. I’m basically a Luddite: I’ve never waited in line for a new iPhone, until very recently I thought .com meant .computer, and my current e-mail has a number in it. I know. Ghastly stuff. Oh, and .com stands for .commerce if you’re like me and didn’t know.

  I never got the flip phone to work, but trying to remember phone numbers and press the impossibly tiny keys at least kept me distracted during the seemingly five-year ride to the ER. Maybe that’s why they give patients a Stone Age phone, so it keeps them busy, serving as more of a Rubik’s Cube than an actual communication device. The truth is, there really was nobody I could call. If I’d had a functioning smartphone, I would have bombarded a bunch of people who couldn’t do much except show up and wait for other people to help me. Stressing my friends out would just stress me out more. The only people who could actually help me in this moment were complete strangers. Maybe this was a profound Buddhist lesson in nirvana or maybe it was a sign from the universe to befriend some surgeons.

  We’ve all had horrible ER experiences, so I won’t pretend like I’m the first person on the planet to be rolled into a corner in the waiting room facing the wall. The nurse had nice enough intentions and was trying to keep me hidden, but I wasn’t really worried about TMZ showing up at the ER. Given how white I was from shock and how much blood I had on my face, I would have loved to have seen the headline the next day: “Marilyn Manson Rushed to ER Holding a Phone from 2006.”

  I leaned my forehead against the cold, Pepto-Bismol-colored wall and rocked back and forth, trying to keep myself amused by uttering “Nobody puts Baby in a corner” after Baby was aggressively put in a corner. I realized I was literally banging my head against a wall. This is something I do in a metaphorical sense very regularly, but doing it literally was a new development.

  I turned the wheelchair around and a young, handsome Middle Eastern guy was sitting to my right. He looked at me intently. “What do you need?” he asked in a thick accent. I didn’t know the answer, and even if I did, I don’t think he could have given it to me, so I settled for “Can I borrow your phone?”

  Without flinching, he gave me the phone he was using. I’m not even sure he said goodbye to the person he was talking to. When I thanked him, he looked surprised. He continued his intense eye contact with me and said, “Don’t thank me. We’re people. This is what we do. We help each other.” I remember thinking what he said would be very profound if it was in a movie. What a shame such a great moment was being wasted on real life.

  I felt very guilty that I was using his phone and leaving him without one in an ER, so I kept thanking him over and over. Annoyed, he pulled another phone from his back pocket, held it up to show me he was good, and nonchalantly started using his other phone instead. He had two phones on him. This is the kind of moment in a writers’ room that we would call “too broad,” as in, it’s funny but too ridiculous to ever actually happen in reality.

  As I studied his phone, I was convinced I must have also had some kind of damage to my brain or eyes because I couldn’t make out the characters in the little keyboard. They all looked like tiny sea monkeys. I finally realized through my trauma haze that what I was looking at were Arabic letters. I was too embarrassed to ask him to change the keyboard to English characters, so I just pretended I knew how to use it. Look, I like to think I’ve made a solid amount of progress around my codependence, but when shit hits the fan, I often revert to my primary mental conditioning. So here I was, lying to a stranger in an emergency room, with my ear hanging off my head, pretending to know one of the most complex languages in the world.

  Before I could embarrass myself further, I finally got called in to see a doctor. I was rolled into a room with three other patients separated by paper curtains. A lovely male nurse put me in the bed and said, “The doctor will be right with you.” I’ve been to the ER enough times to know this phrase actually means: “You’re going to sit here for about an hour, so if you have a serious injury, you might as well just spend some time on WebMD and do the surgery on yourself with a car key and some chicken wire.”

  “You’re okay, you’re okay,” I kept saying to myself. I was not okay, but delusion has always been my most reliable anesthetic. I had read that when animals get injured, their senses sharpen. Even though I was missing most of my ear, my hearing was the best it had ever been. I was
surprised I could hear the doctor two curtains away talking quietly to a patient. The patient was describing his common head cold in excruciatingly boring detail. The doctor probably should have just diagnosed him with Munchausen syndrome and sent him home, but he sat there listening and saying “It’s going around.” I was so antsy to get treated that in this moment I saw the cruel irony in sick people being called “patients.”

  I was feeling forgotten about and invisible, so I tried to do breathing exercises Vera had taught me. You breathe in for five seconds, hold for five seconds, breathe out for five seconds; then you repeat this again and again. This calms down the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that basically tells your body to go apeshit with panic. After about twenty minutes, I deduced that the vibe in the ER was way too mellow for my taste: The nurses moseyed around and nobody seemed to be in the slightest bit of a rush. It seemed to me like once you’ve been working in an emergency room long enough, nothing seems like an emergency. Maybe I didn’t need a doctor or a nurse; maybe I needed Shonda Rhimes to come in here and infuse everyone with the intensity of Grey’s Anatomy.

  Just as the breathing exercise started working, I heard the doctor ask the male nurse about a sports person retiring from whatever sports he does. “He’s not getting traded?”

  You guys, I tried very hard to be cool and wait my turn, but small talk about sports? Well, that did it.

  I truly don’t remember getting out of the hospital bed, but within seconds I was giving a lecture to the entire ER. I was channeling Tony Robbins meets a JV soccer coach who lives vicariously through his players. I vividly remember saying, “The lack of leadership in here is incorrigible.” I don’t think I had ever said that word out loud in my life, and when I did, we were all pretty impressed. I followed that up with a diatribe on how poorly the ER was being run, even though I knew literally nothing about how an ER should be run. I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you that as my speech gained momentum, I started delivering it as if I was in a rap battle, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t defaulting to an impersonation of Eminem in 8 Mile. Maybe it was because I had to keep my hand on my ear, which felt like a rapper holding one of his headphones. Regardless, I want to be clear that I’m not proud of any of this.

  “The vibe here is way too casual, folks, and I need someone to take charge of my situation. Who is responsible for getting antibiotics?”

  Apparently when I’ve lost a good amount of blood, it seems like a good idea to use the word folks.

  My attitude didn’t land great with most of the nurses, but one cute, very competent-looking blond nurse seemed as if she was relieved that someone finally addressed the elephant in the emergency room. She also seemed to be fed up by the fact that there were eight people in a room with eight other bleeding people but no clear pecking order of who was to stop whose bleeding. She chirped “I’m on it” and left the room. I don’t know her, but I was proud of her.

  The ER doc wasn’t impressed by my heroic speech. He rolled his tongue around in his pigment-less mouth as he sauntered over to me. He gave me that look men give women when they think we’re being dramatic. I’ve seen this look more times than I can count. I was gonna say “a million times” but don’t want to actually be dramatic.

  “Ma’am, you need to calm down, you’re not gonna die.” As if that weren’t patronizing enough, he gesticulated toward me, sort of like a mini “Heil Hitler” right at my face. Now, before I tell you about the emotional carnival that followed this gesture, I’ll admit that I’m still not exactly sure what mansplaining means, but if this wasn’t it, I’m gonna need a word for whatever he had just done. He cunt-descended to me? Dr. Dick-ed me? Ego-farted on me? I guess I don’t even know how to mansplain it.

  I’m not sure how at sixty-something years old this man had not yet learned that the easiest way to make a woman less calm is to tell her to calm down. It was in this moment that I completely lost my shit—which come to think of it, I’m not sure I ever really had in the first place. So in that case I lost the already very lost shit. Another issue that further complicated the dynamic was that when this doctor put his hand in my face, I noticed that he was wearing a large cuff bracelet made of a mixture of coral and turquoise in a Tetris-type pattern. I was baffled that the same man who just treated me like a histrionic child also enjoys the spiritual benefits of precious New Mexican stones. Dude needs to pick a lane.

  Dr. Ego continued to say things like “Relax” and “It’s gonna be fine.” I realized very quickly that this man had a core belief that women are irrational and overly sensitive. Everything I said was just playing into his prewritten narrative of who he assumed I was based on every woman he had ever dated. Words were obsolete because he clearly wasn’t hearing what I was actually saying, so the only thing I could think to do was to take off the bandage wrapped around my head and show him my beet salad of an ear. He winced.

  Once he realized I was telling the truth and that my injury wasn’t a result of PMS or just from generally being a female, he got serious and left to call a plastic surgeon. By the time this happened, my friend Dori had arrived. You already know Dori, because she was one of the pals who was so patient with me around my eating-disorder madness. But allow me to give her some dimension: She’s hands down one of the toughest, most competent people I know. One time she called me on a weekday, and as soon as I picked up the phone I started rambling for twenty minutes at how terribly my day was going. Traffic was crazy! There was a line at CVS! That guy I’m dating is totally being so weird! She comforted and advised me for ten minutes on my fake problems. After I felt better, I finally asked her, “So, how’s your day?” She calmly replied, “Well, this morning I got hit by a car.”

  This girl was in the hospital recovering from having just had screws put into her knee and ankle, a pretty solid opener for a conversation and certainly a home-run excuse to interrupt someone else who’s complaining about nothing, but Dori is constitutionally incapable of being selfish. Dori also happens to be from New Jersey, is incredibly flexible, has taken magician classes, and has the incredible gift of being able to pee anywhere.

  Dori’s arriving was what my amygdala needed because it meant I was going to be okay. If Dori is somewhere, shit is going to get handled, so my body finally got the permission to collapse into being the terrified five-year-old that I was. She was able to say with poise and grace all the eloquent things I planned on saying but ended up coming out of my mouth as “What the fuck is happening?!”

  Finally, a surgeon arrived. He was very old, which was a relief. In fields like tech and computer science, the younger someone is, perhaps the more they know, but in the field of medicine, I want my doctors to look like a vintage leather couch. In tense situations, the presence of old age makes me feel safe, especially when it comes to doctors, pilots, and wine. I thought the surgeon and I were going to get along swimmingly until he started putting needles into my open lacerations without any warning. After I jolted around on the bed and yelled horrible things at him, he finally told me that he was injecting anesthesia, and that in order to get numb, you have to feel a shocking amount of pain. The ole “it gets worse before it gets better” racket. It felt like the ER version of when you unsubscribe from Pottery Barn e-mails and they send you an e-mail confirming you unsubscribed. Honestly, I’d feel less disrespected if a Pottery Barn employee just came to my house and slapped my nipple.

  Dr. Ego had told me I was going to go to the OR, so imagine my surprise when Dr. Old As Hell started stitching up my ear right then and there, before the anesthesia had even kicked in. “What the fuck!” came out of my mouth for maybe the two hundredth time. Once he was stitching me up, my tone switched. I tend to get incredibly polite when I’m in pain and exaggerate the enunciation of words. I said, “Sir, I don’t think the anesthesia has kicked in yet, because that is a shocking level of discomfort, sir!”

  Dr. Old As Hell didn’t respond.

  “Can y
ou please inform me before you stick a needle in my ear so I can mentally prepare myself for the excruciating pain, sir?” Nothing. He wasn’t even rolling his eyes at me like most doctors do. Just zero response. This man was literally ignoring me.

  Insane as it sounds, I don’t think my deep panic was caused by the dog bite, the fact that I now had bloodstains all over my favorite sofa, or Dr. Old As Hell’s telling me that my ear might not “take” and that I might need a prosthetic. Those things I could actually handle for some reason. My mind only kicked into a state of deep fear when I felt I wasn’t being heard. The only thing more triggering to my inner child than being patronized is being straight-up ignored completely.

  I continued to scream and cry as Dr. Old As Hell continued to crochet my ear without acknowledging I existed. Later that day, Dori called Dr. Old As Hell’s office to ask about when I could come get the stitches out and the receptionist told her that Dr. Old As Hell doesn’t take phone calls because he’s deaf. Deaf. DEAF. Look, I love deaf people. In fact, I prefer people to be deaf given I regret everything I say moments after saying it. But, I feel like when someone introduces you to your deaf surgeon, the least they can do is maybe, I don’t know, tell you he’s deaf? The good news is at least it wasn’t my imagination that I wasn’t being heard.

  So why am I telling you this story? What’s the point except to gross you out and make you think I’m still very insane and have made none of the progress I swear I’ve made? What could the lesson possibly be?

  Well, this all felt like an oddly familiar situation in my life. I urgently rescued something that needed me, took him in without acknowledging his limitations and traumatized neurology, let him get in my bed, projected a fantasy onto him of how perfect our life would be together, and it all ended in a tremendous amount of pain. I had played out this cycle before, only in romantic relationships. It also happens to be a version of the cycle of something called love addiction.