SOMETHING TRUE | Sonny Fillmore
"Do you know about the old lady who swallowed a fly?"
The screen illuminated my sonographer's face. She suppressed a smile, awaiting my response, like she had told me a silly playground riddle. Her eyes were trained on the screen as she spread the ultrasound jelly over my neck with the probe. In the dark room, the static flashed on her face like a faraway lightning storm.
I'm here because my doctor heard a whooshing noise in my neck. Like the blowing out of a candle, or my huff and puff at the top of the stairs, or a whiffing baseball bat through pure air. She called it a bruit.
I had read the book about the old lady who swallowed a fly; she haunted me as a kid, and I'd often thought about the zoo in her belly, and the way it must've shaken and tumbled with each of her terrible steps.
"She swallowed a spider, who wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her," I recited. The sonographer didn't respond, engrossed now in her work. She scanned my neck up and down and sideways, left and right. She moved the probe like she was stirring soup with a ladle, then like she was shifting gears in a car.
"Is it a boy?" I said, then regretted it: a stupid joke. I wanted to keep the mood light. Proverbs 17:22: A merry heart doeth good like a medicine; but a broken spirit drieth the bones.
She laughed, but she didn't answer. The probe slipped away and the static went black. "The doctor will be in soon." And then she was gone, leaving me in the dark to tend to my jellied neck.
My doctor had an old blind French bulldog that she brought to work. It followed her around the whole workday, guided through its cataract haze by smell and the doctor's clucks:
"Oh, Penny––c'm'ere, you old cow, good girl. Tsk tsk tsk."
When the dog moved, she hobbled on her swollen gouty knees, feeling the world with her snout. She twirled and smelled the air before reclining on my doctor's feet.
The look on my doctor's face was grim: an apology. She smiled, looking too long over her glasses.
"How are you feeling?" she said.
These days I'd been sleepy and my stomach hurt but that was a good thing––I was getting up early and intermittent fasting, and these were the feelings a morning person must suffer. I was doing my dishes, meal prepping, applying to new jobs. I bought a sunrise lamp and an automated coffee maker that woke me up at 5:30am to bitter ambition. I was making my way through a list of old friends to cold call; they often didn't pick up, but I felt better for reaching out. When they did answer, I sometimes wish they'd hadn't; how does one ask, "So how's it been the last ten years?"
As part of my renaissance, I'd gone to the doctor for my first checkup since I turned my head and coughed. My mom didn't believe in doctors, not this kind––she had encouraged me to eat off the floor and walk the Earth barefoot like they did before medicine, before "illnesses of modernity."
I think I felt okay, but it hurt to poop sometimes and my legs were always itchy. I struggled to focus, but that was a personal and private failure. I'd had a cough for three years, and I'd quit smoking annually for the last ten. Sometimes I coughed so bad I cried; sometimes I coughed so bad I peed myself a little bit. Sometimes, I choked on water.
I cleared my throat. "Really tired," is what I settled on. "How am I doing?" I said.
She started to speak, but then put her lips together and puffed like a toad, putting up a finger. She wheeled her stool to the computer and swung the screen outward to me, showing me the ultrasound video that was captured.
"This is you." She flourished the screen as if to say: behold.
I nodded, smiling at Penny, her French bulldog face. So ugly.
"The concern was that there was a bunch of sludge making it hard for the blood to flow through the arteries in your neck... but what we found is that your blood vessels are so flexible––supple, really––that they blow with every heartbeat, like branches in the wind. It's a common benign finding in young people, and good news all around."
Penny sighed on the ground.
"But we found something else." She pointed to a staticky blob with white spots and squinted at it. It bounced and ellipsed in the ultrasound recording. She followed it with her finger, back and forth, as it transformed. It looked like a fat rabbit, hopping up and down, to and fro.
The screen looked like pen scratch. I nodded, acting––she could've been pointing at a static screen, or a weather radar, or a bunch of wet tea leaves. I wouldn't have known the difference.
"What is it?" My throat felt tight, and the words came up phlegmy. I coughed and coughed, while the doctor looked at me and nodded, eyebrows furrowed, kissing the air.
"Likely just a lump of lymph: benign as a baked potato. But we'll have to take a look and see." She looked at me, first in the eyes but then all over. Down to my neck and my chest and belly and lower, all the way down.
Penny snored at our feet. Honk-shoo.
"Before we wrap up today, I just wanted to ask: have you ever been bit by an animal?"
I wracked my brain. "Do mosquitos count?" I assumed humans didn't; my sister bit me once when we were kids.
She smiled, annoyed. "Have you ever been bitten by an animal south of the equator?
I'd never been that far from home, but I think they had mosquitos everywhere. "I used to volunteer at a zoo."
She pulled out paper and started writing. "Tell me more about that," she said, looking down. A few of her hairs got caught in her mouth. She grabbed and grabbed at the strands, thp-thping with her tongue. "Why hadn't you said before?"
***
I swallowed a camera. I peed in a cup. I pooped on a plate, gathered it into a box, which I froze in my freezer, right next to the bananas, and delivered it, on ice in the wee hours of the morning before the sun was out. They hole-punched my skin, swabbed my throat, took my blood, spun it around and put it back in again. They put stickers all over my scalp and a strobe-light headset over my eyes while I laid down in Velcro restraints, and watched my brain think. I slept overnight in a room while the nocturnist watched and studied my sleep. Or maybe he slept, too—I can't be sure. Each visit, they asked me if I was taking any medications beyond the ones they prescribed; it felt like a never-ending rehearsal, at the end of which they would tut and say, "From the top!"
They told me there were crystals in my pee. Ecosystems inside my poop. That the sun made atomic bridges in my body, like tying my DNA's shoelaces together. I received the results like a college acceptance letter: hoping for something sure, anything but the dreaded waitlist so I could carry on with my life. They said a lot but nothing for certain:
Nonspecific lymphadenopathy, likely reactive.
Morphologically normal in area of concern.
Mild dysplasia. Low-grade lesion. Equivocal findings.
Symmetrical with sporadic epileptiform wave forms.
Clinical follow-up advised if abnormality persists.
They cut my body into digital slices with a magnet, first hotdog then hamburger, and gave me a hardcopy. I scrolled up and down on my computer, left and right, taking my body in frame by frame. I changed the windows, the modes, the so-called "sequences," but they were all just different Rorschachian grays. I compared them side by side with internet images called "normal MRI."
I read my doctor's notes, too. Sometimes they read like a book:
This is a 31-year-old man with no significant medical history, referred by primary care physician, presenting for cough and fatigue of several years duration. Patient is poor historian, unable to supply a reliable chronicity of symptoms or alleviating and aggravating factors for symptoms, reporting that he's "never really felt healthy." He also reports arthralgias of the neck, shoulders, wrists, hands, hips, and ankles.
I thought they were running out of questions to ask.
"Denies pets in the home, promiscuous sexual activity, recent travel, interaction with livestock, military service, chemical exposure, or consumption of raw meat."
They went on, in shorthand biography:
Family History:
- Mother aged 72, "takes antidepressants"
- Father deceased at age 51 in accident
- Siblings "healthy as far as I know"
Social History:
- Employment: unspecified; "I send and receive emails”
- Alcohol: drinks socially, "enough to get drunk," but not recently
- Tobacco: 11 pack years smoking history, quits (and relapses) perennially
I Googled and felt worse for it. I brought PubMed articles to my appointments, where my doctor listened while I wracked my brain for any clues, wracked my body for any small symptom. Eventually, she told me she could take some of my spit and a little bit of my skin, and voilà, look at my genetic blueprints.
When she came into the office where I waited to discuss my genes, she bore a massive tome of paper. It looked like a phonebook. Penny dragged behind her, ragged.
"How are you feeling?" the doctor licked her finger and turned the page, still looking at the test results.
I took a mental once-over. My stomach hurt more, and I woke up this morning with a headache. I felt sad sometimes and angry other times, and sometimes nothing at all. I had a big bruise on my butt from who-knows-where. It looked like a galaxy.
"The same."
She looked offended, like my persistent illness was a personal affront: a riddle with a stupid answer. If not for my off-kilter labs—a lie detector, telling us to keep asking questions—I fear she may have punted me to a psychiatrist.
"Listen—there's no substitute for going in and seeing for yourself," she said. "It would involve a long recovery but think about it… if you want to get to the bottom of it."
The doctor looked at the patient as a chessplayer looks after a checkmate. Here we are. Can you see it? What must happen next? Her foot, hanging at the end of a crossed leg, bounced like a conductor accelerando.
I don't know why she swallowed a fly—perhaps she'll die!
***
It was alarmist yet to say that I was dying; I thought about picking up the phone and professing my secrets and my loves to the ones that got away, but I worried about the repercussions of surviving such an undertaking. It was also too late to take up a bucket list; who knew what thrills and debaucheries this body—sick as it might be—could handle.
I called my mom.
"How are you feeling?" she said.
I hadn't thought about it in a while. My knees hurt all the time, now. Sometimes my jaw locked in the middle of conversations, and sometimes I caught myself staring into space, with only a wispy recollection of the last several moments. I took a swig of soy milk straight from the jug with the fridge still open, and caught my fuzzy reflection in my window, backlit with the fluorescent kitchen light.
"I need a haircut," I said.
"When can you come over next? Somewhere I have one of those copper bracelets... They say that one touch of copper—real copper, mind you—can cure any disease.... Diabetes, cancer.... Pff—gone, with just one touch. I'll have to look for it, I know it's somewhere around here," she said. I heard rustling in the background, like I was on speakerphone, buried in her purse.
"Why did you take it off?" I said.
"It turns you green. Anyway, can you come over tomorrow? I'll give you the bracelet and you can rake the leaves for me. I have a million chores."
"That sounds nice." I was only half paying attention, split between the call and my computer. I watched gloved hands, pointing, probing with metal implements. It all looked like guts to me—how do they know what they're looking at? On TV dramas it was always much neater, much more obvious. The TV doctors always just reached in and grabbed, unfurling entrails like a magic clown trick.
***
"How are you feeling?" My surgeon looked down at me. I think he was smiling behind his mask, but he could've been wincing just as well.
"Super." I gave him a thumbs up. They wanted me to take off the copper bracelet, but I told them it was religious.
"That's the spirit!" He gave me a high five, his eyes focused on the copper bracelet.
They wheeled me into the operating room on a bed. I'd tried to stand and walk myself, but they said "Whoa whoa whoa...," and put their hands on me. The operating room was so bright there seemed to be no shadows. They laid me down on the table.
Someone shouted from the corner: "State your name."
I did.
The surgeon said, holding his gloved hands up like a dancer: "Why are we here?"
I cleared my throat. On the spot, I couldn't remember. I blinked. An exploratory laparotomy is what they told me to say. Exploratory, like scuba diving.
"To find out what's... going on." I made a jellyfish motion with my hand over my belly, my chest.
The surgeon bent the lamp down, a miner in the dark, focusing on me, and squinted.
From above, a voice: "10..."
My eyes lost focus and the doctors and nurses swam in and out of my field of vision, taking off my gown, painting my body with iodine. It felt like a dog lick, thrilling and cold.
"9..."
Gently, they taped my eyes shut. I felt them grabbing each of my wrists and bringing them to the corners, tying them down like they tied my ankles. Something went into my mouth. My legs felt warm, like I had peed my pants.
"8..."
The marker ticked its way down, to my belly button and beyond.
"7..."
It's weird to think that it's pitch black in there––that my cells do all that they do in the dark. How can they see what they're doing?
"6..."
I smelled something, like a firework fuse. They spoke in one or two words at a time. Buzz. Blade. DeBakey.
"5..."
I felt them, elbows deep, tickling me, diving all the way in. Digging, lifting, rooting around for something familiar, something true.
Sonny Fillmore is from Columbus, Ohio. He is a medical student at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. His backup plan to being a physician is to be a writer, and vice versa.