Lucifer's Wing -- a memoir (part one)

Here is the first part of a very delicate piece of memoir about my Crohn's and sepsis experience. I love the work, but it will be too graphic for some of you. Exercise caution.

I was on the ice floe, drifting somewhere bloody. The word septic was glowing like a foul morning star.

I am going to try my best to tell this story in a kind of order, a kind of beginning to end – but I’ll start in the middle. When the pain was a lodestone, the danger was a knife. This is only going to be a snippet, a moment, a biopsy of a time. When I got my biopsy, I got to watch it on a projector screen. Fields of red, blush, rosé, horror. I’m jumping ahead. Sorry. Let’s go back a little.

The appointment was for ten thirty in the morning. We’re in the summer of 2023. I think it was a Thursday, but that feels less relevant. I’d been shitting blood for a long time, not working nine-to-five. My boyfriend sat with me in the hospital. The chairs were blue pleather, the air was rich with bleach – which was reassuring. The place had to be clean, right? 

They’d told me I had a polyp or a skin condition or something fungal – that was the initial diagnosis, in the GP’s office that smelled like mould, a few months earlier. It was fucking bullshit, even I knew that. There was something emerging from my anus, something fanged and bleeding, an orange dipped in scarlet. But the GPs didn’t give a shit. I’d seen them multiple times, and was fobbed off each appointment. Eventually I managed to get a non-urgent referral from an indifferent family doctor, to a hospital unit who would inspect whatever it was, whatever it wasn’t. 

Something fungal. A skin condition. A “symptomless” polyp. How could each blonde woman with visibly greying roots claim I was symptomless? How? My body was falling apart, wasn’t it? I was drowning in symptoms, wasn’t I? The pains were myriad.

I’d moved countries in 2021, from Canada back home, but my body had left itself a continent away, and now I was haunting the hospital in some new form, a smaller and weaker one. I was the taller boyfriend, but I was now concave and hollow. The nurse thought we were brothers. She thought it was lovely that my brother and I were so close that he’d accompany me to my day of bleeding, my day of suffering, my day that was going to turn into a chop, a slice, a drain. 

I am trying to focus on the timeline, to keep things steady for you, as they weren’t for me then. I went to the colo-rectal surgeon in the hospital, yes, the ultra-doctor, to inspect my polyp or my skin condition or my something-fungal. The surgeon was - at first – a still lake, but upon examining my sour fruit with pronged fingers, he went from quiet and welcoming to somehow cursed; a silver shine, a plan, blossomed on his forehead. He told me I was strongly at risk of being dead as a doornail. The risk was imminent, a meteor about to obliterate a host of lizards. He didn’t say it quite like that. I didn’t quite grasp the urgency, to be honest, but my boyfriend-brother did. He was worried. 

The worry had lasted for a while, actually. It was justified. I had been sick for quite some time. During the pandemic, my foot went numb. Then things worsened: my stomach broiled, I begat blood, my vision faded in my right eye, I went to urgent care with panic attacks, I choked on my words, I dropped forty-five pounds, my joints itched, my muscles withered, I felt sick, injuries ceased to heal, I sat in a kitty-litter tray of hot saltwater each afternoon, my heart stopped and started and wibbled and waved, I could barely eat, eczema spread like algae up my arms, I started to shiver constantly, my testicles roared, I couldn’t focus on anything but feeling suicidal, and my penis stabbed with unbearable pain so harshly that a medic had to miserably fondle it in emergency care (twice!). All I could eat back then was a coconut-flavoured sludge that I bought in beautiful jars; I recycled them religiously.

In the summer of 2023, after the surgeon told me I was adjacent to something awful, I went downstairs to ambulatory care, a pockmarked depth of aquamarine paint, and my second doctor of the day shoved his fingers inside me and twirled them like he was looking for proof of the divine, but looking roughly, and – oh god: the pain, the severity, the suffering. The word septic was used once more, and I wondered if I should google it. I wasn’t sure what it meant. Blood spurted. (You’re getting bored of reading about blood already, aren’t you? I’m getting bored of talking about it, but heck, I was getting bored of living with it.) 

At this point, I was getting what you might call a little nervous. It felt like it had all been building up to something, all that horror, the suffering, the basement dread. It had been leading here.

They cut me open and let the horror out. Septic. Poison flooded from me. I was left with a mark in my ass, ten inches deep, that wouldn’t heal for nine months. My bowels – they were not happy buddies to me at this time, in this era: twisting jellyfish, reeking calamari. Some of my other symptoms vanished, others intensified, the world rambled and rumbled. And drew to a close. It was a punishment, not a blessing.

Everything stopped on its respective axis; albeit not for the wider world, just for me. 

Stay tuned for the rest of the story-of-this-moment, coming next week.