by Donna Cooner
I don’t go to sleep for a very long time. It’s a good thing I didn’t chuck the folder in the trash, even though I wanted to. It comes in handy a couple of weeks later when Rat and I go to the session.
Dad is on a business trip, and Charlotte is helping sponsor the cheerleader fund-raising car wash. Lindsey is busy with senior parties and graduation plans, and who knows where Briella is. So Rat volunteers to be my support buddy and everyone happily agrees. Rat’s the only one, other than my family, who knows what’s happening. At first I feel bad that Rat has to go with me — like it’s got to be a burden. But he launches himself into all the material in the big blue folder like it’s some kind of bestselling novel. He’s completely fascinated with every single page of the reading material, especially all the gory medical details. To him the whole experience is an exotic science experiment, complete with various charts and graphs for future data entry of my weight loss.
Unfortunately for me, Rat has a perfect recall of anything he reads, so he happily recites various quotes from the Blue Folder on the drive to the meeting. I don’t need him to make me more nervous, but with typical Rat obliviousness, he doesn’t notice.
“They will make two small incisions. Then they insert the camera with the light on the end into one of the holes in your stomach. Did you know that it’s really dark inside the human body?” He is talking and driving way too fast. Way too excited.
“Never really thought about it before,” I say. Rat is especially interested in the actual surgery, which is the part that makes me feel nauseated.
“They pump your abdomen full of gas so they can move around in there and then they put the instrument through the other hole. That’s how they get to your stomach.”
“So they are going to give me gas?” I try to distract him with a little joke, but it doesn’t work.
“Only you won’t call it a stomach anymore,” he says. “It’s a pouch.”
“Now I’m a kangaroo?” I mumble. It doesn’t slow him down. He whips into the parking lot and turns down the row looking for a space.
“The pouch is designed to hold approximately one tablespoon of solid, unchewed food. Your teeth compress the food to about one-fourth of its unchewed volume.”
“Fascinating,” I say. I point out an empty parking spot. “There’s one.”
“So, if you chew every thing up really well, you can hold approximately three tablespoons of food in your new pouch, which would be about the size of a golf ball or a hard-boiled egg.”
Three tablespoons of food? That’s all? It should be scary enough to make me turn back, but it isn’t. Nor is the first thing I glimpse when I enter the conference room: a scale.
A tiny woman with a fuzzy white halo of hair measures my height and checks my vital signs. Rat follows along with a little green notepad and records every thing. I squint my eyes to let him know how serious I am, then try to mouth the words for him to go sit down, but he ignores me. The scale gets closer, and Rat stays glued to my side. I start to feel panicky, my breath coming in short little puffs. Don’t make me do this. Don’t make me do this. Don’t. Make. Me. Do. This.
“Go away,” I say, but Rat is already waiting beside the scale with his notepad in hand.
“I have to record the starting point,” Rat says, flipping the paper over to a new page.
“Please,” I whisper, not ready for this part. Not wanting Rat to see what’s coming. “I can tell you what I weigh. You don’t have to measure it now.”
“Get up on the scale,” the fuzzy-haired woman says, smiling kindly but totally ignoring my pleas to Rat. She’s probably heard every excuse in the book, and she’s not buying it. I take a deep breath and step onto the hated metal platform. She slides the weights over and over and then over again until they finally balance at 302 pounds. Rat peers over her shoulder, and I wait for the gasp of horror.
“Oh my God. I can’t believe a human being can weigh this much!” Skinny whispers Rat’s thoughts in my ear and I cringe with embarrassment.
I glance over at Rat, my cheeks hot with shame, but he is evidently able to keep his disgust well hidden. He never looks up as he records the weight in his notebook.
After I complete a survey about my eating habits and finish the check-in process, I look around, and Rat is nowhere to be found. Now that I actually want him with me, he disappears? I mumble, “Jerk,” under my breath and try to find two empty chairs in the rows of seats. I sit on the end so I don’t have to be squashed up against other people and put my purse in the seat next to me. Rat will probably show up again soon. In the meantime, I glance around the room. There are about ten other people. It’s easy to tell who is there for the surgery and who is there for the support. I’m definitely the youngest in the room.
A huge woman wearing purple stretch pants slides slowly into a seat in the row in front of me. Plastic tubes are attached to her nose and lead down to an oxygen tank on wheels at her side. She isn’t that old, but she breathes so heavily I can hear her rhythmic gasps for breath. The acne-faced teenage boy with her leans over to ask if she’s all right. She nods, but she can’t say anything. The effort of walking into the room has made her so short of breath, she can’t speak.
“That will be you. Soon . . . soon.”
I don’t want to keep looking at purple-pants woman. It just makes me sad. I twist around in my chair, looking desperately for Rat and finally see him over in the corner talking to my doctor. He’s scribbling frantically in his notebook, nodding, while Dr. Wilkerson talks. I try to catch his eye, but he is as oblivious as ever.
The fuzzy-haired woman steps up to the podium and welcomes the crowd. The others applaud, and Rat looks up from his notebook at last. I motion frantically for him to come sit down. He writes in his notebook all the way over to the seat, but at least he finally joins me.
Fuzzy-haired woman introduces Dr. Wilkerson, or Abe Lincoln as I think of him, and then takes her place behind a waiting projector. The doctor steps up to the stage, welcomes everybody, and the small crowd again applauds politely. The first slide shows up on the pull-down screen, and Dr. Wilkerson gets immediately into the nitty-gritty of why we’re all here, pointing toward the drawing of a stomach on the slide.
Rat continues scribbling in his notebook. Sometimes drawing pictures, sometimes making various grunting noises in agreement. I try to ignore him.
The doctor goes on about small intestines and absorption. This is the second time I’ve heard this explanation, but I still can’t really take it all in. I narrow my eyes and try to focus on the steady onslaught of medical terminology. Biology was never my favorite class. I can’t tell the difference between a stomach and a kidney, but I do understand that my insides will never look the same again. Forever.
Rat’s hand shoots up. I roll my eyes and slouch down in my chair. Really?
“So exactly what are the advantages of gastric bypass surgery?” he asks when the doctor points to him.
“Well, as you can see” — Dr. Wilkerson points to the picture behind him and Rat nods — “the procedure reduces the amount of food absorbed by the body, resulting in rapid weight loss in the first six months following the surgery.”
Several people in the audience nod. Rapid weight loss. That’s what we all want to hear, and it’s worth all the rest that is to come. But hope is such a fragile flower in the rocky ground of my soul. I don’t know how to nurture it and I’m shocked at its appearance.
“You will be the one person that doesn’t lose weight. You’ll do every thing like they say, but you’ll still be the same. You can’t change,” she whispers. I should have known Skinny wouldn’t miss this.
“Of course, this limits the amount of food that can be eaten at any one time and it controls the intake of high-calorie sweets and fats due to dumping syndrome,” Dr. Abe Lincoln goes on.
Huh? What was that? No sweets?
The doctor continues, “Eating high-fat or high-sugar foods can cause nausea and weakness when sweets enter the bloodstream t
oo quickly due to intestinal changes.”
“Hummmm . . .” Rat says. He writes “no sweets” on his paper and underlines it three times.
No more M&M’s? No more ice cream? Hey, wait a minute.
“So what are the disadvantages?” Rat asks. I’m still grieving the loss of M&M’s and am thinking that’s a pretty big disadvantage. Of course, Rat has glossed right over that little detail and is now on to the grim medical facts.
Rat writes each one of the risks on his paper with a star in the margin to bullet each point. Each one basically means I could die or be in pain for the rest of my life. And I have the most life left to live out of everyone in this room. I’m choosing to do this to myself? I glance around and wonder for a moment if all of us will be happy with our decision. Will someone in this room not survive the surgery? I can almost hear a roulette wheel spinning around above our heads, waiting to drop the death marble into a slot. Will it click into the slot for purple-pants woman? The Weeble-shaped man in the stretched-to-the-limit blue jeans in the front row? Or maybe . . . me?
“You’ll also be left with a lifetime need for nutritional supplements to avoid vitamin and mineral deficiencies, which can lead to serious health conditions, including metabolic bone disease or anemia.”
Yeah, yeah. So I take Flintstones vitamins. No big deal. It’s the dying and pain part that I keep thinking about . . . and the loss of M&M’s. The woman in front of me’s breathing machine sucks the air in and out with a rhythmic, never-ending push-pull. Purple-pants woman or death? What are my choices?
At the end of the presentation, the doctor introduces a young man in the front row. He looks about twenty-five with black curly hair and smiling brown eyes. He’s wearing blue jeans and a gray T-shirt. A picture of a fat boy comes up on the screen. Only the black curly hair looks the same. The eyes are brown, but they certainly aren’t smiling.
“This is me one year ago,” he says, gesturing to the screen over his shoulder, “when I weighed almost four hundred pounds.” Now, he looks totally normal.
A year is not that long, I think, looking down at my hands clenched tight in my lap. One year. Three hundred sixty-five days. A tiny spark glows in my head. Things could be different. My life could change. In a year, I could try out for the lead in next year’s spring musical. I could be center stage singing for a crowd of people. In the spotlight. No one laughing at me. Jackson would be in the audience looking at me like he looks at Gigi now. The world would be different. A year from now.
The audience of fat people claps like the young man at the podium has just won the Academy Award. He smiles broadly.
“This surgery changed my life. It isn’t easy, but it is worth it.”
The raw desperation from the people around me leaks out into the room. This is their salvation. A year seems like nothing to those of us trapped inside our bodies. They want to believe it and, I’m so scared to admit it even to myself, I want to believe it, too. If I don’t do the surgery, where will I be a year from now? Four hundred pounds? Five hundred? I can’t stop it by myself. I know that.
Later that night, I’m in my bed waiting to fall asleep. Maybe it’s because I’m close to leaving consciousness or maybe it’s because of the curly-haired man at the podium at the meeting earlier, but I let my mind drift. I count up twelve months from now, and I imagine a world for me that’s different. I’d have something to look forward to next in my life — a next first day of school, a next Thanksgiving, a next Christmas, a next musical away. There is a strange lifting feeling in my heart. I recognize it and try to push it back down again. It’s an idea — a dream — that something could change. Three hundred and sixty-five days from now.
I will be sixteen. I’ll go to the Fall Ball with Jackson. I’ll wear a strapless red dress and high heels. He’ll touch me. I’ll dance. At school, I’ll walk the halls in miniskirts and black knee-high boots. I’ll laugh. I’ll sing in front of people. They’ll clap and cheer and throw flowers onto the stage. I’ll bow.
Next summer, a year from now, will I wear shorts and sleeveless tops? So different from the stretchy jeans I wear now, even in the hottest days of summer, and the black size 5X T-shirts. Will I finally feel the sun on my skin? Will I uncover my legs from all the clothes I’ve kept my body hidden under? I wonder. All of it is right in front of me. Only a year away.
“Don’t.”
Then I stop wondering and start to actually want. I want to go swimming.
“Don’t.”
I want to learn how to drive a car.
“Don’t do it.”
I want to climb the stairs and not be out of breath.
“Don’t want.”
I want to stand in front of that crowd at next year’s musical and have them clap at my success.
But then right before I let myself drift off to sleep, I hear it. A whisper in my dreamy, sleepy ear. Louder. Louder. Louder.
“It will never happen.”
Chapter Six
The surgery is scheduled for three weeks before school is out. May 2 at 8:00 a.m. to be exact. It would have been better if I’d been able to finish the semester, but evidently surgeons don’t care too much about summer break. I have to cut my stomach up on their schedule.
Because of my grades, I’m able to get myself out of pretty much every thing. My average is high enough to be exempt from final projects, and I arrange to do all the other work ahead of time. All my teachers seem fine with my upcoming absence. Especially when I’m sufficiently vague about my medical issues. They really don’t want to ask a lot of questions. Mr. Blair is the only teacher left to talk to, so I hang around after the bell on Friday. I lean against the wall, waiting for him to explain the homework assignment to Kristen Rogers for the third time.
“Are you next?” It’s Jackson. He gestures toward Kristen and Mr. Blair.
“Go ahead,” I say. “I’m not in a rush.”
“Great. Thanks.” He smiles at me as he slides into place between me and the teacher’s desk. “I just have a quick question about number three on the homework and I can’t be late to spring training. The coach will kill me.”
“I see some things haven’t changed.” I smile back at him. Next week every thing’s going to change, but I don’t say anything about that. I just want him to remember how things were. His head tilts to the side and he looks at me quizzically.
“What do you mean?”
“You were always the last one to show up to every thing,” I say. “You know . . . when we were kids.”
Remember. I plead with him silently.
His dark brows draw together over those beautiful blue eyes as if he’s thinking hard about it. “I guess so,” he finally says.
“He has no idea what you’re talking about,” Skinny says.
He turns back toward Mr. Blair’s desk, tapping his pencil against the notebook in his hands to fill the sudden silence. I’m left staring at his broad shoulders in front of me, thinking of the past.
Sometimes on those spring nights when we were kids, Rat, Jackson, and I would chase one another with flashlights in the open space behind our back fences. We played until the hamburgers were finished grilling on the outside patio and our moms called us to dinner or until the moon rose so high in the sky that hiding in the dark was almost impossible.
The game went like this. If you were “it,” you won the game by shining the flashlight onto the hidden person like a spotlight. They’d have to freeze in the position you spotted them — arms stretched out, legs crouched, mouth wide open — until you released them with a click of the flashlight. If you weren’t “it,” there was only one place you could be safe from the flashlight’s beacon and only one way you could win the game. If you could successfully hide from the spotlight long enough to make it to the big boulder out near the walking trail, climb atop it, and proclaim loud enough for everyone in hearing distance, all the open back windows and sliding patio >doors that surrounded our little piece of wild, “Home free!” — then you were the winne
r.
I picture Jackson, atop that granite boulder, arms out-stretched above his head. In my mind I see him punching his clenched fists at the carpet of twinkling stars overhead with a look of absolute delight on his face shouting, “Home free!”
Don’t you remember? I think.
I fidget with the cover on my notebook, trying to collect my thoughts, and desperately search for words of the past that will trigger the memories. I think about how we used to lie for hours in the grass out by the soccer fields and look at clouds. Rat saw cirrus and stratus clouds. I saw circles and triangles. Jackson saw bunnies and alligators and pipe-smoking old men. He was the best at finding something out of the white clumps of nothingness. When he was older, he was going to become a pilot and fly right through those clouds, he’d tell us.
“Do you still like planes?” I blurt out into the sudden silence.
Look at me, Jackson, I want to say. Look for the something inside clump of nothingness.
He turns back around to glance down at me. Finally. But he still has the same puzzled expression on his face.
“Sure,” he says, vaguely.
“You had all those models of planes in your basement.” I don’t give up. I need to see the recognition in his eyes now. Before the surgery next week changes me forever. “You wanted to be a pilot.”
He laughs. “I don’t have much time for airplane models these days. With football and band and” He motions toward Mr. Blair’s desk. “. . . homework.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Skinny hisses in my ear. “You just hang around the house eating yourself into a stupor.”
“I guess you’re really busy,” I say.
“And I have to get a workout in there somewhere or I’m never going to make varsity.” He flexes his arm. His bicep bulges against the short sleeve of his T-shirt. The height and the muscles are new this year. He doesn’t look the same, but I haven’t forgotten what he’s like on the inside. And his eyes are exactly the same. I know those blue-green eyes with the darkly fringed lashes. I’ve seen them crinkled with laughter, muddled with fever, sparking with anger, and squinting in pain. I saw those eyes when they were blue-green with delight at his first time on a skateboard. And when they were gray-green and clouded with tears over the death of his cat, Mr. Whiskers.