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SEP 9, 2007
THE
END IS NEAR
This is how it ends: Not with a bang,
not with a whimper,
but with a silent surrender to sleep.
On Wednesday, September 12, at approximately 2:10 p.m., an anesthesiologist at the
University of Minnesota
hospital will fill my
veins with a magical unconsciousness-inducing elixir.
When I wake up, the hidden wasteland of my
gut will be gone — no more inflammation, no more infection, and no more
rectum. Just a lot of stitches and a new
faux-rectum, a stoma. This time, unlike
last, permanently, as in forever.
So it goes. So it must
— the photos from my last colonoscopy showed a landscape more bleak and
war-torn than anything you’ll ever see on CNN. Swelling,
scarring, a Grand Canyon’s
worth of
menacing shades of red.
It would be tempting to call it my own internal hell,
given
the potential for Profound Metaphor (What
could be more of an underworld
than the gut?), but the truth is, it lacked the moaning and
groaning and fire
and brimstone such imagery typically conjures. In
fact, I had not felt particularly sick; I had no
idea that my
infrastructure was failing. And that was
part of the problem — I was oblivious to the growing danger inside.
It almost sounds profound: If a major organ fails and
you
don’t notice, did it really fail? Well,
yeah. And if you continue to not notice,
through stoicism or a high tolerance for pain or sheer stubbornness,
things
fall apart even more and more, and you wind up in a hospital bed for
the rest
of your life or six feet under.
So it goes. Time
to cut
my losses. Time to stop worrying and
love the bag. Better a plastic bag than
a pine box.
I have no idea what the next few
months hold. A lot of anxiety, a lot of
pain, presumably,
but also, I trust, an unlimited amount of hope. I’m
sick and tired of being sick and tired, of
course, but I’m even more
eager to get on with life and to finally be able to pursue my
interests,
passions and dreams. (And I’m gagging
over the sappiness of that sentence right now, but I’m leaving it in as
an
example of one the more harmful effects of chronic disease: saccharine,
unimaginatively-worded prose.) I want my
time and energy back, and I’m looking forward to being an active
participant in
life, not just a dabbler, not just an eternal dilettante.
There are adventures to go on, triathlons to
participate in, books to read, languages to learn, feasts of non-soft foods to gorge on, things to
do, people to see . . . and unknown chapters of life just waiting to be
written.
So it goes: Being alive is a hell of a lot
more fun, so I’ve
heard, when you’re actually living. Here
ends Act I; let’s get going on Act II already. Sneak
preview: our protagonist saves the world, gets
the girl, and lives
happily ever after. Coming soon.
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