I always describe this story as I have above, and then people tell me ‘that doesn’t count!’ or ‘I thought you meant you *really* got stabbed’ as if there were more qualifications to stabbing than pushing a knife into someone and I just didn’t know it. Maybe stabbing is all about the ambiance and this is just the story of the time someone pushed a knife into my lower back and it hurt a lot, a lot, A LOT.
It was the winter break of my freshman year of college and I was home in Louisiana enjoying the pleasant weather and the time with my family. We’re a relatively active family back home: we go sailing together, the kids go on bike rides together, Louisiana is just too pretty to not be outside. One of my daily routines involved jogging with my mom and then taking the dogs for a nice walk in the mornings, but I started to feel a weird soreness around the base of my spine. I figured I just bruised my tailbone, that it wasn’t a big deal, so I didn’t mention it to anyone until it started to get worse. It started hurting too much to run, it started hurting too much to walk. There was no bruising on my lower back, but what there was a little lump as hard as a rock that did not take kindly to being touched.
I had a week left until it was time to go back to school and I was bed-bound. I had a pilonidal cyst, a condition that most commonly occurred in hairy men and World War II soldiers- a strange grouping for a relatively hairless teenage girl. I am lucky to say that my parents are doctors because it meant I had an around-the-clock, professionally trained medical team at my disposal, but there wasn’t much they could do besides bring me acetaminophen, try to coax me into eating and make an appointment with a general surgeon to try and get my problem taken care of.
The surgeon said I would need two procedures that would take approximately a month and a half each to heal from. The first would be a simple incision to open up the cyst and drain it, and the second would be a more laborious hours-long affair where the flesh in that area where the cyst was would be removed to lower the chances of another unfriendly neighbor taking residence on my body as before. I was terrified of not being able to go back to school for the spring and with good reason. I couldn’t even sit down before my surgeries, much less walk effectively. We didn’t have a strict date set for the first procedure, the doctor said he’d call us to set up a time very soon. What he didn’t say was that he would call exactly at the time he was free with very limited time to operate while I was home alone with my father at work and my mother an hour away at a funeral.
Mom called me and explained the situation, saying she had already contacted the neighbors but no one was home: I had to drive myself to the hospital if I was going to make it in time. I could not sit without intense pain which made driving a very interesting experience- adding bumpy roads and speed bumps to the equation did me no favors. When I got to the hospital, I needed to take a second to calm down as to not embarrass myself in front of the doctor, which looking back was pointless because when I got there, the nurse immediately got me up on the table, said “this is going to hurt, sweetie” and the doctor came in and explained to me that I would receive no topical anesthetics and the nurse would hold me down as he cut, because they ‘didn’t always work in these cases’ and he was in a time crunch, having to get to the OR for a bigger surgery pretty soon. I wouldn’t have minded trying the anesthetic anyway but that wasn’t an option presented to me and the nurse said I could sign off on the paperwork for the procedure after we got it done, and then they got started.
I don’t know how to describe the pain of getting cut open like that. Already having intense pain in the area the surgery was probably didn’t help, but I feel kind of lame for even saying it hurt. It was a scalpel, clean, never before used and pristinely sharp. It sliced through me like butter, which I should be thankful for- dull blades hurt more because the stabber really has to force it, so I hear. But still I had to bite on a rag so I didn’t bite through anything else and when they were done I was crying far harder than when I had drove myself over, so as I said, it was a waste of time trying to hide my tears earlier.
The one upside was that I didn’t have to drive myself home. My dad took his lunch break and laid me down in the back of the minivan and drove as slowly as he could back to the house where he put me in his and my mother’s bed, the only bed that was downstairs, so I could rest. I didn’t get out of that bed for a long time. I didn’t go back to school for the spring. I did start healing as time went on to the point I could start taking walks around the neighborhood as long as I had a cane, which was especially funny because I had dyed my hair grey at the beginning of the winter holiday- from afar, people would see an old person with greying hair hunched over and heavily relying on her cane to get around and so as we would get closer passing each other in the street I could always see their double take as they realized I couldn’t be more than twenty years old.
I never signed the papers the surgeon had mentioned, and I saw him again around town and he would avoid my eye line and not respond when I said hi, which indicates to me he realized maybe he shouldn’t have done that surgery the way he did. I was on the table, but it felt very under the table if you know what I mean. I’m better now, it’s been months since the second procedure and the only thing left of that cyst is a scar.
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