The exam room is papered in salmon-colored stripes and it smells like a Yankee Candle melted over isopropyl alcohol and sickness. Jack is standing guard beside me, squinting at a family portrait on the wall. It’s an old picture, with gap-toothed children who are probably grown now and the golden kind of spouse and dog that every doctor probably has. The man who stands proudly beside them in the photo is a little bit fat and very happy underneath his giant red mustache. He walks in ten minutes later after a swift knock.
“You must be Ruthie.” He smiles, cradling my hand in his and giving it a firm squeeze. He looks much older now than he was in the photo but still happy. He’s shaved his giant red mustache and lost weight.
We sit across from each other, he on a short padded stool and I up high on an exam table spread with paper that crinkles underneath my butt. I am ready for him to fix me and Jack is ready for me to be fixed.
I tell him everything: about the accident in Louisiana, the Starbucks, the insomnia, the fear, the headaches, and the panic attacks. His expression remains friendly and professional the whole time, but I start to lose it. My voice shakes and snot drips down onto my sweater. Finally, I ask the question that I’ve been repeating to myself every five minutes since the day it happened:
“Am I gonna be okay?”
It comes out of me in a boogery sob. The doctor sighs.
I wonder if he knows that I need to be okay, that I need to be able to have babies and travel and dance. I need to know that the pillars of the rest of my life are still standing.
He hands a tissue to Jack, who hands it to me, and I blow my nose loudly and he tells us with as much certainty as he can muster that I’m going to be fine. He’s amazed this hasn’t happened before with my history; old traumas often leave intermittent pain behind when they leave and it’s really nothing to worry about.
“We can manage it.” He smiles, rocking back and forth on his wheelie stool.
Manage it. I repeat the words back to myself silently.
He writes me a prescription and orders some films. I fly out of the lab and into the fresh air when they’re done. Everything is going to be okay.
* * *
In the coming weeks, the pain intensifies. I go to the doctor again. He refers me to another doctor and then another after that. They all stare perplexed at my scans. They point at a black spot at the top of my neck. When I ask about it, they tell me it’s just the magnetism of the machine interacting with the wire in my spine.
They all have different suggestions but none of them has answers. They poke me with their cold, latex-covered hands; and they do more scans with more cutting-edge technology. In just three months, I have more pictures of the inside of me than the outside. I see a physical therapist named Janis who teaches me stretches, a healer named Steve who punctures my forehead with needles so delicate and hairlike that I can hardly see them. I try aquatic therapy at the YMCA, letting the liquid carry me across the pool while the Pussycat Dolls play in the background. When the doctors are out of ideas, my consolation prize is narcotic painkillers. Before long, I have a suitcase of them. This is what “managing it” is. I start back at work—we need the money—and though the pain doesn’t dim, I get better at pretending. I put on a costume of my best, friendliest, most charming self for the people who deserve her.
The first time I take the hydrocodone I’m on a camping trip with fourteen-year-olds.
Every year, the church sends us on a retreat to Rock Island, Tennessee, with the youth group. We build pitiful fires with wet wood and talk about heaven and Christ and we eat s’mores. The site is buried in a forest on a shiny patch of limestone. Three foaming rivers meet there and burst into falls. It’s the kind of beautiful, misty magic that takes your breath away but it’s slippery and rocky and unforgiving on my body. I bring my pills along with me just in case. I still haven’t felt brave enough to take them yet; the yellow warning labels scare me and I don’t want to feel stoned, but having them feels like protection. Andy has his bear spray, I have my narcotics.
Jack comes with us this time, partly because he is worried about me and partly for the semi-spiritual nostalgia of it all. The gangly pines and songs about God are all like souvenirs of his childhood and he eats the entire experience up. He waves at me from across the tired flames, surrounded by a flock of needy teenage girls covered in bug repellent and blotches of self-tanner. I smile back at him as I load bottles of water into a cooler.
He is a good man.
Work has been punishing since the pain came, not just physically, but spiritually as well. It’s hard to believe in Jesus’s healing love when your body is betraying you. The kids ask big questions about faith and truth, and right now I’m asking them too often myself to offer any decent answers. I don’t believe everything I hear in church. They say God is our father but the Bible feels feminine to me, like a mother. They say we’re all broken but that feels so cruel, it feels wrong. They don’t let women preach here and they don’t accept gay people. Some of the white men who run our church don’t seem anything like Jesus; they’re hungry for cash and prejudiced. It’s money for miracles and making sales of faith and collecting giving units. It doesn’t feel good the way I want it to. I don’t know what that means, but I can see God more clearly out here in the fresh air than I can in a giant stone building. God comes alive in the freckle-faced boys throwing footballs and climbing trees, he comes alive in the rushing water, he comes alive in Jack’s big heavy arm on my shoulder. I walk over to him and we sit on a sideways log to watch a dance that we both know unfold: girls sitting on stumps with shirts knotted at the waist, frustrated and waiting to be discovered by boys who are too busy chasing each other to see them. Everything feels peaceful, but then the pain starts in.
The sun is at the absolute top of the sky when Andy, looking blistered and exhausted already, motions for us to round up the kids, twirling his finger like a middle-aged cattle rancher. We gather up the campers for the same hike we did last year, a soggy march that I know is sure to become a symbol for something biblical over hot dogs and thick gray smoke later on.
By the end of the first day, I am haggard and aching. Jack is in the boys’ cabin. I’m alone in mine, exhausted and relieved to strip off my smile. Even if I’d wanted to do it, the pretending would be impossible right now because my neck is killing me and I have a migraine. I burned through my stash of Advil like it was trail mix on our hike along the river, and still I can hardly move. I need some relief. I pray and I wait, but nothing happens.
Standing in the tiny bathroom in my bra and panties with every busted inch of me on display, I survey my body in the mirror, shocked to not see it marred on the outside the way it is on the inside. I’m a human brochure for a healthier America: tall, thin, and, after twenty-five years of living in the South, perpetually cheerful. But I’m in agony and it is swirling right under the surface of half-decent skin and a pretty haircut. I wish I could wear the ugly naked pain on a T-shirt some days, so that it could announce itself and people would know not to expect too much. I feel like they expect so much. The tears arrive. I knew that they would. I set the pill bottle on the edge of the sink and size it up. I’ve never been hungrier for sleep, and the strange, scary tablets are all I have. I press down firmly and carefully, opening the lid for the first time and the chemical perfume hits me in the nose. I toss an oblong pill into the back of my mouth and swallow it with a palmful of water, stretching my neck like a goose to work it down to my belly.