So I had a very interesting week. It began Monday with what I thought was a case of food poisoning that just would not quite clear and than clarified into acute abdominal pain on Thursday. I know doctors mean acute in some kind of diagnostic way, I mean it like, fuck that hurts. Oh wait, fuck, it hurts even more. Is it hot in here? I need some air. ow.Ow.OW.
Of course we are in the middle of switching health insurers, just to make things more complicated.
Eventually I drove myself to the emergency room, shouting incredibly colorful things at anyone who dared stop at a light in front of me and garnering stares from a woman walking by, as the windows were wide open. Since, as I mentioned, it was hot in here.
While I was being evaluated by the nurse he said, "probably gallstones". My GP had said the same thing on the phone when I talked to her earlier and I asked him why everyone was so convinced of this on no more evidence than it all seemed to have started when I ate something greasy.
And he said "well, you can't sit still", which is true, I was pacing and standing and sitting and bending and kneeling and walking, "but mostly you're the right type."
Type? Sure, he said. A woman, forty (39 I said) and...small pause...not slim.
I was amused. "Tactfully phrased"
"There's a phrase we use, a mnemonic. But I'm not telling you"
Eventually I achieved a kind of weird yogic prone lotus on the exam room bed - it's funny what pain does to your sense of self consciousness - that was semi comfortable and remained thus until the doctor came in.
"I think you have gallstones" he says.
Exam, blah, blah. Tenderness in wrong location for gallstones, possible appendix? He still thinks gallstones and sends me for an ultra sound, not before giving me a big fat syringe full of something just delightful in the line of an anti-nausea med, as well as something equally delightful by way of a pain killer. I really could not tell you which one I liked better.
When he comes back to tell me what next I am high enough to say, "explain the gallstone conviction to me. Why does everyone start there?"
"You're the type."
"And the type is?"
He would clearly rather not tell me. I insist, in my charmingly narcotic persistent way.
"Female, 40 and...another word that starts with F"
For some reason I found this hilarious. Female, Fat & 40.
Well, ok, fair enough.
Fat is a word I have been avoiding my whole life, treating it like something between a moral judgment and a declaration of low value. But in the end, it's just a description. We forget that, there's a lot of other baggage attached. Higher body weight has some straight up medical consequences that are based in biology and chemistry, not opinion. No matter how much we might like that to not be true.
To my mother, fat is the most important thing about me. It's both a judgment and a fear, she sees her own weight problem as the root of her life's dissatisfaction and monitors others as harshly as she monitors herself. I grew up hyper aware of fatness.
And of course people who love me, if I say I'm fat will say, no, you're curvy or no you're above your ideal weight or no, you're big not FAT.
What they mean is that I am not unattractively fat, that I'm healthy and fit and pretty and smart and they love me. And it has always been very, very important to me that they say that, that they believe that. So I can believe it myself.
It's always been important that I not have any health conditions associated with obesity too. Cause then, you know. I'd be FAT. And have no self worth.
So you would think FEMALE FAT & 40 would be the worst thing I ever heard. But I thought it was funny. And not just cause of the opiates, because I still think it was funny. Also the way everyone tip-toed kindly around it so as to not be mean was really sweet. Silly. But sweet. Though I think now, they were waiting for explosive denial and anger.
I'm just so over it, working so hard to pretend I am other than what I am.
I was dating this guy last summer, and one time we were in my bedroom and I was getting dressed and he stopped me and said "you have such a beautiful body" and my jaw crashed onto the floor, like do not pass go, WHAT?! Because he was entirely sincere.
And eventually I pulled myself together enough to say "thank you, I don't ever think of myself that way but, um. Thank you" ('cause of course I need to file the disclaimer on the compliment WHILE accepting it)
And he said "well, why not?"
And I'm like "well, uh, um - I'm kinda of fat, you know?"
And he said the most remarkable thing I had ever heard. "Does that really matter?"
Do you mean to tell me someone could like me not in spite of my weight, but because my weight is irrelevant to my attractiveness and worth?
Weird.
I tell you what too. When I was sitting there all drugged up and waiting for the cat scan the nurse who checked me in came to hang out with me. I mean, he checked vitals and stuff, and we had a long and probably not as witty as I remember conversation about the blood pressure cuff and how if it was accurate I was probably dead and he got it working and what have you, but I think he was getting off duty and came to see how I was, 'cause he wasn't the nurse assigned to me or one of the floor nurses in my section. He just liked me enough to see how I was doing.
Even though he knows how much I weigh.
He was cute too, I should have asked him out.
This maybe doesn't make sense, but it just felt like a really powerful moment, a tipping point. I've been fat my whole adult life for lots of reasons beyond the simple I like to eat too much. I don't really have much belief in plain old simple reasons. But I've never been able to say it without bracing myself, or explaining why it's only sort of true or flinching deep inside.
And how can you thrive if you flinch whenever you think of yourself?
But moments of pain strip off the bullshit always, and it just all seemed so stupid in the ER. It still seems stupid to think of myself with an asterisk next to all my good qualities, a footnote that says, *but she's fat, you know. Why on earth would I need to tell a man who is looking at me naked that I'm fat? He's had sex with me, he knows what I look like.
This isn't a fat acceptance thing really, I have some problems with the way that discussion is framed, and no, I don't think obesity is just as healthy as thinness, save your breath. I...
I guess I'm officially done flinching. And yeah, I'm fat.
Oh, and no, it was not my gallbladder. Kidney stone. Don't recommend it.
