Flash fiction / body horror
Organ Grinder
Thank goodness for health insurance, or this hospital visit might have been a nightmare… A fresh slice of body horror.
It began with an automated email from her insurance provider:
Congratulations on reaching 40 years old!
We are pleased to inform you that you are now eligible for a full range of preventive health services, at no extra cost. Make an appointment today with a Primary Care Provider of your choice!*
(* Only approved Providers within your plan’s network.)
Melanie goes in for her checkup. She’s always kept herself trim and healthy. Never smoked. Drinks sensibly. Avoids UPFs, HFCS, all the bad acronyms.
So, a week later, when they call with her results and they tell her that she has a slightly elevated white cell count, she’s not concerned.
The call centre operator books her in for a face-to-face at the hospital, and tells her to bring urine, spit and stool samples.
The three pots sit obnoxiously on the desk, as the fresh-faced male nurse asks about her family history.
“No cancer,” she tells him. “Lot of halitosis on my father’s side.”
She agrees to a smear test. As her ObGyn grates her vaginal wall with what feels like a Cadillac, he makes small talk.
“I wouldn’t worry. You probably just picked something up,” he reassures her. Melanie thinks this makes it sound like she wanders the streets with her vulva scuffing the sidewalk.
Two weeks later, her results are back. Her smear test is fine, but her cytogenetic analysis “rang a red flag”.
Possible ovarian cancer.
Melanie can’t believe it. She has no symptoms, no discomfort, not even a headache. It’s like she turned 40 then: Boom! Cancer!
Her ObGyn refers her for a laparoscopy. It’s a half-hour procedure. Routine. The surgeon introduces himself before the operation. He calls her ‘Michelle’. She corrects him.
“And you know it’s my ovaries, right?” she jokes. He doesn’t laugh.
It’s under general anesthetic. She’s never been out out before. She had valium when she got her wisdom teeth done, and even that messed her up. The dental staff had been super understanding after she’d come round and apparently told them that she wanted to have sex with each of them in turn on the dentist’s chair.
This time, she comes round in the ICU.
Electrodes straddle her chest. A plastic clip glows pink on her index finger. A wheeled machine with a screen like a 1980s handheld game announces each heartbeat for the entire ward to hear.
She holds her breath to see if it will trigger an alarm. It doesn’t.
The ward nurse tells Melanie she’s been asleep for twenty-four hours, and she should just relax. The instruction is incompatible with the facts, thinks Melanie. She worries about her car, which probably has a ticket by now.
The surgeon comes the next morning. “So Michelle, I have good news and bad news.”
“Is this multiple choice?”
He tells her the laparoscopy revealed lumps on both ovaries, so in the interest of expediency, he whipped them both out.
She nods as consequences crowd her mind. No children, she thinks. Ever. She’d put off egg harvesting because it meant repeatedly sucking out her own insides. Now all her eggs are in the trash. She feels, and is, hollow.
“So here’s the bad news…”
Wait… that was the good news?
“We found something on your colon. I did a digital examination, but the results weren’t clear.”
“A digital examination?”
“I poked it with my finger. Could be a tumour, could be a turd. We’re booking you in for a colonoscopy.”
The colonoscopy surgeon is very professional. Certainly more than her first boyfriend who attempted a similar procedure with his penis.
As she lies on her side with her knees tucked against her chest, he tells her: “Yes, as I suspected, not a turd. But definitely a lump.”
Two days later, post-op, back in the ICU. The days and the wards and the beds are becoming indistinguishable, to the point that she’s not certain that they have changed.
Mostly she feels fine. It’s the food that makes her nauseous. The ward nurse scolds her for holding her breath again. She becomes certain that her car has been towed.
“We took out the colon,” the third surgeon tells her. He looks exactly like the second surgeon, but eighteen inches shorter. “Your intestines are now directly connected to your anus. If you eat a steak, it’ll come out looking like a steak.”
Melanie has long considered going vegan. This seems a good time.
“But while we were in there–”
“We?” she interrupts, in a moment of clarity between shunts of morphine.
“Yes, myself and my students–”
“Students plural? Inside me?”
“Michelle, please stop repeating me,” says the third surgeon, who is less patient than the previous two. “We spotted an anomaly on your lung.”
Melanie knows where this is going. She’s never smoked. Not really. A few joints in college. Some crack cocaine that one time, with the same amateur colonoscopist boyfriend.
“Did you already ‘whip it out’?” Melanie asks, basking on the crest of a wave of intravenous opioids.
“Take out your lung? Don’t be silly. That’s booked in tomorrow.”
“Oh,” she replies, tumbling into unconsciousness, wondering if she will ever see her car again.
She wakes suddenly to alarms and movement and her brain throbbing like she’s slugged ten espressos, and a handsome Asian doctor with his warm palms smooshing her nipples.
“She’s conscious. Get me an IV lidocaine bolus and 0.5 mg atropine.”
The handsome Asian doctor releases her breasts, but doesn’t close her gown. She realises her gown has been cut off her, and also that she misses having the handsome Asian doctor’s warm palms on her tits.
He plunges a needle into a tube which goes into her chest above her clavicle. She feels another ten espressos hit her.
“Don’t worry,” he pats her shoulder. “We’re taking good care of you, Michelle.”
“It’s fuck… ing… Mel… a… n…”
She wakes two days later. A PVC tube runs down her trachea. A baroque device from a Cronenberg movie deflates and inflates next to her.
“So we took the lungs.” It’s a fourth surgeon.
Melanie can’t reply because of the tube transecting her vocal cords.
“But don’t worry, we’ll find you a donor pair. What plan are you on?” He flips through her notes, then shakes his head. “Listen, Michelle, if you upgrade to Crown Prestige Empress Tier we can get you some Canadian lungs. Otherwise it’s gonna be Mexican. Up to you.”
Then he’s gone. Tubes ache and tug in her throat and nose and wrist and chest. She’s no longer breathing for herself, which means she can no longer attempt to hold her own breath. The nurse looks smug.
(She is certain her car’s being resold from a towing yard by now. Some greaseball salesman is handing her pink slip to a nice young couple who are probably two decades from their forties.)
But things improve. A week later, they pull the tube from her throat. The nurses and doctors and students gather to see if her body will remember how to breathe. For a minute or so, she’s pretty sure she’s going to die. Then she feels something in her chest expand. She looks down to see a pair of asymmetric, mottled yellow lungs protruding from a hole where her ribcage once was.
“Mexican…” mutters a fifth surgeon, shrugging.
As the months pass, she regains her strength, learns to breathe with her immigrant lungs and how to accessorise her colostomy bag. She’s hobbling across the ward on her crutches when her surgeon (#22) walks up.
“There you are! Fit as a fiddle. Ready to go home?”
“You saved my life, doc. I feel like a different person.”
“Well, technically 16% percent of your body mass has been swapped or removed, so you are substantially no longer the same person.”
Melanie twitches as a migraine pierces her temples.
“Michelle, are you OK?” asks the kindly surgeon.
“It’s nothing, just a headache…”
“A headache? In your brain? Nurse! Call the OR! We gotta get this woman’s brain out, stat!”