In the Body of the World by Eve Ensler
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DE-PORTED
Deport: to force a foreign national to leave a country, to expel or banish someone from their own country.
When they put the port in, it felt like they had implanted a chip, an identification tag, a marker, something to track me and control me. As an anarchist who has spent so much of my life resisting all forms of authority, I was surprised at how comforted I felt by the port, an umbilicus connecting me to Taxol and carboplatin and Zofran and steroids and the infusion suite. I could lean back in my big chair when the dose got too strong and nod off in a chemo swirl surrounded by Lu and my friends. The port kept me attached to Dr. Shapira, to Regina and Diane, and to all the other patients who were attached through their ports in the chemo river, the river of possible cure. The port relieved me. It was doing the work for me. My job was to survive and find a way of imagining all this so that I could transform and tolerate it. My job was to find the poetry. Rather than making me feel sick, the port made me feel other and bionic. It made me feel superhuman, intensifying my strength and ability to survive. Chemo powered. Hooked up to my chemical mother. Sometimes at night when I would wake up with a gasp at the dreaded and vivid realization that I had cancer and that everything had changed, like the first nights in the Congo when I lost my way after the stories entered me, I would feel for my port like reaching for my talisman: a hard lump of steel, right under my flesh. I would caress it and calm myself.
When the time comes to have the port removed, the nurses are happy to see me and tell me I am the only person in two years whose port they have put in and also taken out. I know I have dodged a bullet. Lu and Toast are with me, of course. They are so happy that the port is going that they would be with me in the operating room if the nurses didn’t ask them sternly to wait outside. I know they are ready to have this all behind us. I am not as ready. Chemo makes me feel I am doing something active to fight my cancer, makes me feel I am participating in killing off the bad cells. The port is the way I do this. Without the port I am vulnerable again. I am open to the cells dividing, disguising, invading. I am open to the destructive forces of proving and driving and fighting. The port is evidence that the chemo is in me. It is the place that holds five hours of Taxol and carboplatin mercilessly dripping into me.
Now the doctor sticks needles in me to numb where the port is, and it hurts and pinches and I hold the nurse’s hand and I can sense the doctor making a slit in my skin. There’s bleeding, and I can feel her dabbing it, and then she lifts the port, pulls it out of my flesh, rush of emptiness. I have become uncorked.
Trembling, panicked, I try to get dressed and hold back what is rushing through me until we get into the streets and then I let out a moan, the sound of a mother pushing new life into the world. A sob the sound of my mother gone. The umbilical cord that connected me to Earth, to land, to something tangible. Now severed. A sob, the sound of cancer, of death, of sudden life. A sob in the middle of Union Square. I can barely stand up and Lu and Toast hold me there.
Sue: “The question is not: Will you die? The question is which you needs to die off, so that the new self can live and thrive in a new, loving world.”
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LIVE BY THE VAGINA, DIE BY THE VAGINA
I tried to explain to Dr. Sean that I have just had an enema and for some absurd reason they have scheduled my gynecological exam with him right after it and maybe we should rethink this. I am back at the Mayo, having a string of exams before the takedown surgery where they will remove the bag, as they believe that after months of healing, my reconstructed rectum and colon are now able to function properly.
It is the first time I have seen Dr. Sean since the chemo. My cancer has been gone almost a year, and as he was one of the Mayo surgeons who saved my life, I assume he will want to share in the glory. I slide all over his table, swimming in the enema waters leaking out of me, and I apologize. He tells me this is normal and I think, “For whom?” I resort to stupid overenthusiasm and say a number of dumb, impulsive things. “I feel great, I can tell it’s gone, my CA-125 was a 4.” Then I invoke my doctors in New York. I say, “They are talking of a possible cure.” The minute I say cure, I know it is idiotic. Cure? What is ever cured? Cure is an indication that I do not understand cancer. Cure is a big word, an extreme, unsubstantiated word, a word that gets you dismissed. It indicates you are American and stupidly optimistic with a ridiculous candounabletofaceeternaldarkness attitude. It is equivalent to saying you believe in miracles or that you follow your instincts or trust your gut. Cure is an insult to well-disciplined minds and intelligence in general. Dr. Sean says, “I don’t think we can think about a cure yet, Eve. We are quite a ways off from that. I think it is better we think more pragmatically.” And then he says, “If it comes back, it will come back in your vagina, there’s a ten percent chance. Have you thought about radiation? We can radiate your vagina.” Radiate my vagina. I feel like a character in a futuristic sequel to The Vagina Monologues. Radiate my vagina. I hear him talking, saying something about beans, or beads, or beams of radiation in my vagina. They would insert them, he says calmly, easily, deliberately. Insert beans or beads in my vagina. Radiate my vagina. Do you know who I am? Do you have any irony? But more important, you just said if it comes back. If it comes back. You just stuck a long thick hat pin in my future. You just erased seven months of my getting through an insane infection, and weeks of chemo, and an exploding bag, and my believing and getting myself to believe it was gone forever. I need you to believe it is gone. Okay? I need you not to make space for it to return. Not in beans, or in your mind, or even in conversation. So take it back. Take the words back. My vagina heard you. Tell her you didn’t mean it. Say you didn’t mean it. You’re my surgeon, for God’s sake. You saved my fucking life. I worship you. Nine hours in my body. Cleaning out the mess. Don’t give it away now. Don’t sink me. Believe. I need you to believe. Oh my god. I really am a wuss. I refuse to accept or succumb to what some might call reality. I cannot tolerate bad news. I admit it. I hate it. I detest disappointment. I am weak—so be it. I know if I open the door, it’s all over. That’s how I’ve survived. Probably because I am totally suicidal at heart. I’m just not going down without a fight, okay?
I make good things out of bad. I always have. It’s a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder. In the end it probably is a failure of character: unable to face the utterly miserable heartless state of existence.
I know I had cancer, bad cancer, cancer that went to my nodes and all that. Stage III, IIIB almost, maybe IV. Well probably IV. I know all that. I know the goddamn percentages.
But it’s gone now. Do you understand? It’s gone. It has to be because that’s how I am. I am a this-boat-will-not-sink-me person. I am a you-will-not-destroy-me-as-you’re-whipping-me person. I am an I-will-find-a-way-out-of-this person. We all do what we do to survive. Cynicism. Optimism. Both paths require work.
You have to dig in hard not to be a believer.
You have to ratchet up your snark abilities.
Make bitter fun or be highly suspect of anyone who has faith.
It’s not like I don’t see the world. I am not in denial. No, I really see it. Then I work really hard to make it be something else.
Later Dr. Sean is kind and gives me some plastic objects of various sizes that he doesn’t call dildos. He says these will help. It makes me happy that he imagines I will be having sex again. I hear myself ask him just out of curiosity what the side effects of beans, beads, beams in your vagina are and he says, all matter-of-fact, “Well, there are some not-good effects, the narrowing of the vagina, which could mean the end of intercourse, destruction of the bladder, severe diarrhea.”
I weigh the pros and cons as I unconsciously grip the phallic helper in my hand. No more penetrative sex ever against a 10 percent chance … but destruction of bladder, severe diarrhea … Radiate this!
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FARTING FOR CINDY
Toast and Lu circle my bed as if their quiet moving ba
It is terrifying not being able to poop or fart. Shit claustrophobia—everything stuck inside you and there is no way it will get out and eventually you just explode. I was honestly scared: scared the operation had failed, scared nothing would ever work again and I would need another bag.
I could tell Lu and Toast were scared too. They were on fart alert. Each morning they would arrive with great anticipation, and I would shake my head. No farts. Not even a shot of wind. It was going on too long.
Then they sent me Cindy, the fart deliverer. She went room to room. She was very large, determined, and strong. The first time she came she told me, “Farts are music to my ears. I welcome farts. That’s why I’m here. Do not be embarrassed. Give me your fart.” I tried to imagine them saying something like this in Africa or Paris. It was so American. Give me your tired, your poor, your farts. Cindy knew all kinds of positions and tricks, places to press and pull. I surrendered to her big hands as she lifted and turned me about. I could feel she was gifted, but my new, redirected colon with shallow homemade rectum was having none of it. Cindy, fart massager, came every day at 3:00 p.m. I tried to imagine her life. Bringing down the fart. Finding the perfect place or exact right moment when the colon relaxed and the newly built body released. I honestly think it was my need to please Cindy that brought on my first slight pass of gas. It was her fourth visit and I could tell she was frustrated. She took her work seriously. Cindy was a volunteer. The fact that she didn’t get paid for her fart work escalated my need to please her. If anything has kept my faith in humans, it is not the grand inventors or visionary poets or brain surgeons or even the Gandhis of this world. It is the Cindys, the quiet, invisible, often underpaid or unpaid Cindys who get up every morning, and after feeding their families, and taking care of their infirm parents, find their way on snowy country roads or polluted freeways to hospitals or old-age homes or mental institutions or orphanages. Frequently unacknowledged, they take care of the poor and the privileged, the sick and the depraved. They weave an invisible web of care through the lonely mansions of Beverly Hills and emergency wards and mammogram clinics and infusion suites.
As Cindy tossed me gently about, I thought of all the people like her who made me believe in love, the nannies and babysitters who helped me survive my childhood. Esther, who I met the first time I went to Panzi Hospital in Bukavu. I do not know her official title, but she is the Mama of the wounded. At any given time there were around two hundred women in the hospital who had been raped or suffered trauma and were waiting for surgery or recovering from it. Esther knew every single one of their names and their children’s names and the reason for their fevers and rashes and she knew every detail of every woman’s story. She created songs that reconstructed their narratives. Every day she danced with the survivors and played games with them. She transmitted her spirit into the broken and each day they got stronger. I thought of Miss Pat, who saved her church after Katrina so she could serve gumbo to the homeless, of Diane and Regina and the nurses at the Mayo.
As I lay there, Cindy had worked up a sweat. She was gently pressing my lower abdomen. When the world is right, it will be the unpaid and unsung people like Cindy who will be the honored ones, the ones who get paid the most, and they will sit at the big table. When the world is right, it will be these invisible people who we see and cherish. I open my eyes and I see Cindy’s face and I know she is only here to help me get better. She has no other reason or agenda. She is so concentrated and so kind, I get seriously choked up, and this distracts me and suddenly out of nowhere there is a little pop, a breaking out of what is, indeed, a fart.
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IT WASN’T A FOREBODING
The morning I left the Mayo, I had not even remotely pooped and the farts seemed faux and untrustworthy. I was starving and no one gave me food restrictions. Toast, Lu, and I were so excited to be off the Fart Floor to be in the sun, sitting outside at a restaurant, that we all ordered the special—there was something about the idea of special—eggs and pancakes. It felt perfectly midwestern and normal. I ate almost everything and fast. The idea was that I would stay at the Marriott for a few days until I pooped, then we would fly back to New York. After the special, I left Toast and Lu and crawled into bed. I was feeling a little queasy. I woke crawling on the floor, vomiting in a garbage pail. Whatever was supposed to be happening post-takedown, with the inversion of my stoma, in the now-healed pathway of my colon with my handsomedoctormade rectum was not happening. The nurses kept assuring me it took time for the body to relearn things. But my body had gone into a violent regression. There had been too much meddling, rearranging, removal, reversal, drilling, and reconstruction. The pancakes had begun to take possession like a dead animal drenched in maple syrup. I missed my bag. I needed my stoma. My body did not seem to remember how to defecate on its own. I was toxic and imploding. I vomited and vomited. I could not stop. It was as if something much deeper than the pancakes was trying to get out. They tried every antinausea drug and nothing prevented the retchingpurgingvomiting, the blood-bile sea of violence that washed through my veins and cells. It went on for three days. My body ached from retching. They gave me Marinol, chemical pot, and it made me raw and drastically depressed, and as I vomited, I hallucinated throwing up goldfish and pennies and chalk, but the puking did not stop. I puked out the absence, the lining of my gut and the insides of my organs and heart, I puked out the corneas of my eyes and terrible thoughts. The puking went on as the doctors came and whispered and the nurses stood by the bed, sometimes holding me, sometimes cleaning up. Toast and Lu huddled or paced or rocked with me. I was puking to death. My body ejecting itself. Retch, expel, get out. Get this out, out. There was something to get out. It was as if the whole journey of the last seven months had led me here. To a feeling, a memory, an image. As if through the journey of my body, through the excavating of organs and cancer, through the loss of weight from infection, through the evisceration of cells, and now through days of retching, the interior brush had been cleared and there was nothing covering or hiding the horror. I was at ground zero, back at the moment when I wanted no more of this world, back at the moment of witnessing what had shattered my psyche. Angelique in an exam room in Bukavu, telling me her story and then suddenly overcome with it, crawling on the floor, on the ground, pushing imaginary soldiers away, sealing her mouth, turning her head, screaming out as she sees again the pregnant womb of her best friend sliced wide open by a soldier and a half-formed baby tumbling out. The baby not ready for light or air or germs or loud raping men in uniforms. The umbilical cord still dangling, still attached to the mother bleeding all over the Congolese soil, the mother whose baby was severed from the cord and then tossed in the air like a ball by soldiers, the baby too embryonic to indicate pain, unable to cry or scream out, in front of the women, mothers whose babies had already been taken or murdered or strangled or dropped in the forest. Then the soldiers tossing the baby into a boiling pot, one of them with a knife, jabbing at the boiling flesh, raising it from the pot and shoving it at the women, scorching their mouths. Eat the baby or die. Eat the baby or have your head blown off. Angelique on the ground in the midst of a flashback, spitting, choking, scrambling, trying even now to get the horrible taste out of her mouth.
It was here I walked out of the world.