It was not but 351 days ago that I parted ways with one of my organs forever. Goodbye, my forever faithful gallbladder.
As that sickeningly sterile anesthesia mask was placed over my face I thought nothing of it. In fact, I was actually pretty gracious for it. I had been in the hospital for eight interminable days, without food or water. I was on a saline and sugar drip to keep my body from total obliteration, and my mind was completely incognizant as I had a circuitous cornucopia of painkillers pumped into me. It should have been bliss — everything should have been over and done with, quite quickly in fact. No more than an hour or two in surgery, they said.
Except it wasn't, because all that the doctors kept telling me was the same, completely unconvincing phrase I have heard nearly every day since, as if the simple words would be the panacea to my life's problems.
"But you don't look sick!"
Of course they meant it in a different manner. They meant that all of my tests had come up clean, I had passed them all with flying colors. By all marks, I should have been a completely fine fettle 18-year-old girl. And for nearly a week before they admitted me they tried dismissing me with that same exact claim. Except I persisted, because I knew something was wrong. And I still do, despite whatever claims another might make.
And you might wonder just how often I get that told that. Honestly? Quite a lot. Just looking at me, you'd never know that I was sick. You could never tell that beneath my skin, my immune cells are going insane, assaulting themselves and desecrating everything around them to rubble. I fight a constant battle every day, the greatest adversary I've ever faced being my own body. It puts up a valiant fight, too. Some days I'm extremely hesitant to even get out of bed. It's no easy feat — even the thought of moving makes your joints feels like they've been ground into something faintly reminiscent of a new brand of fine liquor; your skin burning from the touch of the same cruel mistress.
And sometimes when I tell people this they give this incredulous look and say, "well eventually you get used to it, right?" No. You don't. Because literally every day is a game of "dodge the bullets and bayonets" with whatever my body decides to throw at me. Some days I feel like throwing up at the mere mention of food. Other days I have to ask other people what I've been doing — and consequently question if I'm slowly ascending into the catacombs of lunacy — because my brain is so foggy and unbalanced that it's hard to remember what I was doing two minutes ago.
I've been to at least eleven different doctors in the past year, and those are just the ones I continued to see, because in the beginning it was hard to find someone who wouldn't simply pull up my files with ambivalence and then send me away. That's the thing about some doctors — what they don't know scares them. And I just happen to be a copious bowl of "don't know." I thought maybe if I could find someone to give me a name for whatever the monster was living inside of me (as if it wasn't actually myself), then I could put an end to people giving me those repugnantly pitying looks whenever I mentioned being sick.
And I get those look a lot. Most people are kind enough to give a quick, half-hearted colloquial of condolence and move on — they don't know how to deal with it. But then there's the few who love to seemingly cross-examine me, as if there was some sort of prize to be had for uncovering my "hoax." "But you're wearing makeup!" Or, "You were fine yesterday!" And while both of those are true, they're simply the thin gossamer that veils the shitstorm I call my disease.
Makeup hides the ugly rash. Foundation hides how sallow and sunken in my eyes are. I can distract you with my eyeliner — paint it on like a façade of wellness. And maybe if I'm wearing a skirt you won't notice that my hands are swollen and shaking from trying to open that bottle. And while it's nice to not have you notice, I can't seem to stress enough that I am not doing it for you. I do not struggle (and sometimes take a half hour to get dressed simply because it's exhausting and my fingers decided not to like buttons that morning) just to make you feel more at ease when we conversate.
I do it for myself. Because when I look in that mirror, I don't want to see the same person I saw laying in that hospital bed nearly a year ago. I don't want to think about those unlovely scars and blemishes or the fact that I haven't worn the shirt I bought last week because, oh no, it had a zipper, and those are the antichrist of my very existence. I don't want to remember that my body is a bastille. I don't look sick because I don't want to.
So please, please stop telling me I don't look sick. Stop using that blithe and condescending tone that says, "you have to be lying." Stop those acidulous looks, and stop following them up with once-over glances as if to stress your point. Stop telling me that I can't be sick if I can "do all of that." Because you have no idea what I went through to be able to do "that." You have no idea what it's like to wake up not knowing if you're going to have a good day or a bad day. You wouldn't tell that to someone in a wheelchair, or someone who lost a limb. So why would you say it to me?
