Alien Invasion

1998

Who is that?  I gazed into the mirror wondering who was staring back at me.  I am someone who had battled eating disorders as a young woman. The rapid transformation of a body on prednisone is intensely disturbing.  Odd hunger drives a soul to feed, yet the logic in realizing that suddenly you have eaten the whole loaf of sourdough bread brought home from the bakery with butter oozing into the warm tangy deliciousness is insane.  Looking at the destruction of our spaghetti dinner’s friend I gasped in horror.  Bite by bite the transformation occurred.  I don’t remember eating that . . . . no wonder I look like an overstuffed cannelloni with eyes.

The funny thing about psycho steroid bitch is that I had no idea she was present until after the destruction.  Usually this happened at the cost of feelings being eviscerated by her acidic tongue.  I would find myself obsessing over the tiniest inconsistency in cleanliness, dress, or some other ridiculous detail.  Imperfection is the enemy she would think, all the while walking through life looking like some circus freak and attempting to act like no one notices.  Going to the grocery store, my daughter’s school, or anywhere feeling like there is a bulbous alien representing is a pathway to insanity.  I learned how to take steroids, one blast at a time, in order to avoid the visitations of the being from another planet who would invade my body. 

1999

Tonsillectomy, thyroidectomy, appendectomy, gall bladder, hysterectomy, shoulder surgery, foot surgery, angiogram.  I look at the emergency room nurse as I rattle through the surgeries, all but the angiogram having been performed at the same hospital.  History is one thing but having to memorize these strange medical terms for you cut another scar into my malfunctioning machine gets ridiculous.  Visiting the land of funny jammies is not my thing, but it seemed to happen on a regular basis as my body shifted from well to not.  Learning to recognize that one side of my body did not feel the same as the other was an exercise in self honesty.  This trip began standing in front of my bathroom mirror with a toothpick, slowly poking one side of my face and then the other in some surreal attempt to verify that I was crazy.  The only thing eventually confirmed was that the Sesame Street song “one of these things is not like the other” kept running through my thoughts in some maniacal way.  Am I having a stroke at thirty five years old?  Succumbing to reality I found myself attempting to explain to an overly kind registered nurse what was going on in my body.  Her blank expression led me to believe that she had no idea what to make of this moony faced woman with Lupus Cerebritis.  After getting me into bed I was hooked up to my friends the monitors who began their beeping song.  At the first blood pressure reading it was obvious that I was not imagining that something was amiss.  186 over 110 are not anywhere near normal!  When the mystery machine arrived in the shape of not Velma, the nurse stood there looking at the readings.  “Let me get the doctor” in a calm panic squeaked out and in that moment I felt validated and not psychotic.