Prologue
THE WAITING ROOM
“Your ovary is angry,” the ER ultrasound technician told me. “We need to figure out if it’s strangling itself.” Was this guy serious? I knew I had self-destructive thoughts, but I had no idea my body was capable of punishing itself. I tried to keep quiet as he twisted the probe inside me, up and down and sideways like a competitive baton twirler. He captured image after image, his right hand touching a combination of six round buttons so fast he looked like a DJ at a rave. My entire pelvic region was tender, but when he touched the spot, I gripped the metal bed railing and howled.
“Right there! Please stop!” It was 10:00 p.m. on a mid-December evening, and I was in the emergency room.
Up until noon that day, I was at an idyllic artist residency on Vashon Island, a quick ferry ride from urban Seattle. The opportunity was a blessing from the Universe that fell into my lap. Seventeen days in a gorgeous waterfront house with three other artists: a paper cutter devoted to the shape of hands, an animator obsessed with a Russian mirror catalog and CGI fashion, and another writer who had a history with notorious stalkers. This would be like The Real World, but for artists, and I was the lucky one who got a detached cottage so I could finally be alone. I could turn off the nonstop demands of being a wife and a mother of a toddler. No responsibility with a capital R. I couldn’t wait, and frankly, I was running out of time.
I had promised my editor a “killer” draft in the new year. Originally, I’d said October, which was pushed from my August hope. My advance money dried up, so I took on some side hustles, which ate up more writing time. As if I didn’t have enough typical writer angst, there was one constraint I could not wriggle my way out of. I wanted to publish this memoir when I was thirty-eight, the same age my mother was when she died from a tummy tuck. That meant I had to get a polished draft to my editor in January, which meant I had to perform a literary miracle with my manuscript. As a procrastinator, I needed deadlines with actual consequences. This was a real deadline.
I was ten days into my residency and finally in the flow when an electric shock drove up into my pelvic area. I attempted to stand from my computer chair, but I couldn’t move. The pain was at a level ten with sharp pangs coming from every direction. I started yelling, but no one could hear me—I was in my prized cottage, separate from the rest of the house.
It was happening again. The first time was a little more than a month earlier. I couldn’t stand, sit, or walk, so I spent a few hours on the floor in the happy baby pose after popping ibuprofen and a THC gummy. To get to my bed ten feet away, it took five minutes of very tiny shuffling fully supported by my husband. Thankfully, it went away the next day. In the morning, I called my doctor, but she wasn’t that concerned. No referral, no nothing.
Now the pain was back, and I was on an island that didn’t have a hospital. But none of this should be happening. I had been diligently journaling my morning pages, meditating with an app, and bathing myself in affirmations on YouTube with galactic background music. Plus, I was training for a marathon while listening to Oprah’s Master Class podcast. I thought I had the whole self-care box checked off. Plus, I couldn’t afford time away from the residency. My deadline was just two weeks away.
I looked around for my phone. I thought I was being clever by putting it in different drawers so I could be less distracted. But now I couldn’t reach it. I got another thirty-second shock, a cramping pain so severe it felt like I was in labor again. When the pain subsided, I knew this was my chance. I hobbled to my front door, but before I could twist the knob, the lightning came again, even deeper. I slipped slowly onto the cold granite tile and flopped over into a fetal position. Right when the pain faded again, I made what felt like a fifty-foot dash for the residency director’s office. Instead, I moved like I had gunshot wounds, holding my stomach, dragging a leg, grunting to move a few feet. I looked like a mummy who had to go potty.
“Heather? I need help.” I tried to be calm, but the pain came again, and then I grabbed onto her desk to break my fall, giving her all the relevant details as I crumbled onto the floor. Eventually, we sped away in her tiny Chinese electric car, which topped out at a whopping thirty-five miles per hour. After an excruciatingly painful fifty-minute wait for the ferry (where I called several urgent care facilities only to be informed that their next appointment was in four hours), we went to the closest emergency room.
After my insurance company reassured me there would be no multi-thousand-dollar surprise, I checked into the facility at 2:30 p.m., where they took my vitals and a blood sample. I waited. And then waited some more. After two hours of leaning on the sides of my thighs to relieve the abdominal pressure, I couldn’t take it any longer. I asked if I could lie down somehow.
“We don’t have any empty beds. Sorry,” said the apathetic receptionist, who was mostly texting on her phone. Then I asked for a mat or a sheet so I could lie on the floor with legs up on a chair, my lazy happy baby pose. “That’s not recommended” was all she said. I asked her again, but now smoke was flaring out of my nose like an angry dragon.
“Please!” I begged. Didn’t she understand that I didn’t come here to hang out for fun? This pain was nonstop, but she didn’t seem to care. “Fine!” I threw down my coat and carefully moved my body to the ground so I could relieve the pressure buildup. It was then that the receptionist appeared with three sets of sheets.
“Here,” she said, tossing them down on the ground. I looked at the twentysomething employee the way I look at my toddler when I’m upset, scowling. As I lay down on the worn sheets, I started to cry. I didn’t like being vulnerable. I hated that I couldn’t fix my way out of this. A woman sitting in the waiting room asked if she could be with me. I let her. She seemed like a mom. I emoted. She listened. Three hours in, two other women also commiserated about their health ailments until we all got wheeled away by different nurses, waving until the double doors closed.
* * *
I spent the next five hours on a hospital bed doing more waiting. I still had waves of pain, but they were at a pain level of four or five. This time, I had more comfort from cable television featuring a Friends marathon. When my ER doctor came in, he said he’d ordered an ultrasound.
“My triage nurse said CT scan. Are we doing that too?” I asked. The doctor thought about it and agreed, which surprised me. “Wait, I’m not the medical professional here. Could we do both, or what’s the benefit of doing one before the other?” I was confused. How could I have swayed him so quickly? He said he forgot what he read on my chart. The CT scan would give us a more comprehensive picture, and if needed, the ultrasound would zoom in on the problem. The last time I checked, I was an artist and he was the doctor. I had always been a little skeptical of relying on just Western medicine, but this interaction made me feel even more nervous. Was there anything else he forgot to consider?
The CT scan revealed a burst cyst on my right ovary, which led me to the ultrasound technician. My blood flow was regular, which meant my ovary wasn’t actually strangling itself—yet. I could grow another cyst, and if it was much bigger than the one I had now, it had the ability to double over and choke my ovaries. I was discharged with the recommendation to have a follow-up with my ob-gyn.
“But what if the pain comes back?” I asked. “What exactly do I do?” My only tool would be ibuprofen and returning to the ER. Western medicine could only confirm what they saw. I arrived home at midnight after an almost ten-hour hospital visit and six episodes of Ross and Rachel giving each other mixed signals. The next morning, I hopped on the 9:30 a.m. ferry to return to Vashon Island. Jill, the writer from my residency, picked me up from the ferry. She was kind, lanky, and spoke in whispers.
Back at the residency, I kept hitting a wall with revising my memoir, so I kept doing irrelevant tasks to feel productive—that is, until the Universe intervened. At 4:00 p.m., another knife up my entire midsection. My phone was on the shelf, and I had ibuprofen ready, but I couldn’t move my body to reach it. When the first wave passed, I got my provisions and slid onto the bed in the fetal position. I called my ob-gyn triage nurse, and in between my yelling and crying, she told me to call 9-1-1.
“But what if the pain goes away?” I screamed. Clearly, it hadn’t. She urged me to get help so someone could come check my vitals. Amid the stabbing pain, I managed to call Jill because it was Heather’s day off. Then I called my husband, Marvin, and asked him how much the ambulance would cost with our insurance. When Jill arrived, I gave her my phone. I kept trying to call 9-1-1 but kept pressing 6-9-9. I was useless.
Firefighters came, and I was eventually wrapped in a series of sheets and carried to the icy gravel driveway. They put me on a gurney and wheeled me backward into an ambulance as my residency friends waved goodbye. The doors slammed shut, I got strapped in, and then it hit me. This is what my mother went through the day she went into a coma and never returned. Rushed into an ambulance without any loved ones riding with her, completely subject to an EMT stranger. The parallels made me weep.
My mother was in an ambulance all alone when she was thirty-eight. A botched plastic surgery from a negligent surgeon. She went without oxygen to her brain for fourteen minutes before he made the 9-1-1 call. Here I was, thirty-seven years old, about the same height and weight as she was, also alone. I wasn’t ready to die. My son was almost three. My mother died when I was eleven.
I started talking to my Creator. Give me until I’m sixty—wait, no, seventy-five. And I’m not ready yet. I have to publish this book! That was my real answer. I didn’t say spare me because of my son. I wanted more time so I could tell my family story. Guilt, then shame set in. Then it was the pain that shocked me back to the present moment. I had also been listening to Eckhart Tolle on my runs, where he said “the now” was all there was. The Universe had a sick sense of humor.
My EMT, Bridgette, who was an on-call volunteer (and in the middle of making a fettucine alfredo when the firefighter called her cell), took my vitals as the ambulance raced to the ferry dock. I called out “Pain!” every time it came, while she took note of time intervals. I was having body shocks every three to five minutes for thirty seconds. If my cyst had already burst, why was the pain back in full force? They said once it ruptured, I should feel better, but I was only feeling worse. When I arrived at the hospital in the city center, it was 6:30 p.m. Since I’d come in on a stretcher, I had to wait only thirty minutes instead of three hours to be admitted. My privilege made me feel conflicted, but I was so relieved when they started giving me care.
For the next four hours, I was on a bed in hallway 9, and it was bustling. There was a woman in her eighties who kept wandering outside her room saying it wasn’t her fault she beat up the man. She kept insisting for a clock, because without knowing the time, she found everything disorienting. There was another elderly woman whose eye was completely swollen shut with a busted lip from a bad fall. Her son and husband took turns sitting next to her as doctors rolled different devices in to treat her. An unhoused man with no socks grumpily ate some hospital food and slept. A social worker reviewed his history with him, trying to figure out if he had anyone in his life who would pick up a call. There were two temporary health care workers just sitting around looking at their phones, trying to avoid getting moved to another facility late at night. Another worker sanitized a room in a full hazmat suit. Nurses and doctors walked briskly in Hoka shoes past the nurse’s station lit with blue Christmas lights. Maybe a nod to code blue.
The first nurse to check my vitals asked me where I was from. Santa Rosa, California, the artery of the wine country, I liked to say. He told me, as a young boy, he frequented the town’s small airport to meet his father, who was a pilot. Somehow knowing that he took the same highway exits I once did calmed me down. It was irrational, but aren’t most things we use to comfort ourselves?
After much poking and prodding, the ER doctor gave me the same diagnosis as the day before. But this time, I was prepared. I looked down at my handwritten list of questions. Doctors were like celebrities. There was so much anticipation to talk to them that I knew I would instantly forget my laundry list of concerns. I would only be able to react to whatever they said.
I started rattling off my questions. What activities should I avoid? Should I only eat anti-inflammatory foods? Should I get a colonoscopy? My blood test says I’m low on that thing I can’t pronounce. When I keep clicking on links and cross-referencing that with where my pain is—do I have liver cancer? What causes have been eliminated? What aggravates it? If I have another episode, what do I do? She told me to carry pain relievers and cautioned me not to get too paranoid from internet research. Then I asked to see the on-call ob-gyn from the Northwest Women’s Clinic who delivered babies at the hospital, including my own the last time I was in this hospital. I wanted a second opinion.
“I have a follow-up with the group’s nurse next week, but since I’m here, can I see the doctor instead?” I asked.
The ER doctor leaned in close. “She’s just going to tell you the same thing I told you,” she said without much compassion.
I knew she was probably right, but no one had solved my body’s mystery. Could this happen tomorrow or never again? Was this about the cyst or something else? And what was her deal?
“It would just give me peace of mind since I’m already here.” I held my ground and waited, but I was now feeling a little scared for even asking.
“I’ll call, but she’s not going to tell you anything different,” she mumbled as she walked away.
Her behavior was so unsettling. Since I started telling my family story about my mother’s medical malpractice death, I learned about patient advocate principles: make a list of questions, bring a person to help support, ask for what I need. But even knowing all of this, having to insist on talking to my ob-gyn felt extremely uncomfortable.
Then it hit me again. The frustration and confusion I was feeling was just a fraction of what my Vietnamese refugee father went through when my mother was in a coma after her plastic surgery. No way was he going to challenge authority or know what questions to ask. The person he conferred with on all the decisions was my nineteen-year-old brother. Here I was with my two Ivy League degrees, communicating in my native language, and eager to make requests. He didn’t have a high school education and spoke broken English. Even with all my advantages, I still felt belittled and intimidated by my doctor. My father didn’t stand a chance.
The gynecologist came, bringing comfort and new information. The cyst did burst, but the ongoing pain was unusual. She was confident it was not an issue related to my uterus and encouraged me to keep investigating with my physician. It felt reassuring that the behemoth medical system still had individuals who cared.
The next morning, I decided I would not return to Vashon Island and just focus on my health instead. Since no one actually had answers, I did what I do when Western medicine can’t cure me—I scheduled acupuncture. After waiting on hold for far too long with my primary care team, I did the thing that would make me feel undeniably good. I made an appointment for a haircut. My split ends had been looking obnoxious for months and agitated me every time I looked in the mirror. My biannual haircut was long overdue. Even though I despised driving, I hopped in the car and roughed it through the rain and dense traffic to a salon across town because my girlfriend said the style was nice and the price was right. Plus it was owned by a Vietnamese single mom.
Once I arrived at Hiếu Organic Spa, I waited with two other customers who were getting their nails done. When the stylist called my name, I decided to treat myself with a shampoo. Soothing circles around my temples, feeling held at different acupressure points, being bathed like a baby with warm water. I felt like I could finally relax after the nonstop forty-eight-hour health scare.
When it was time for my cut, I did what I usually do in Vietnamese salons—I pretended I didn’t understand Vietnamese. Eavesdropping was such a guilty pleasure, and I wanted to see if they talked smack about me. I made my guess at who the owner was, the power broker out of them. The one who answered the phone and triaged all the walk-in customers was also my hair stylist, which comforted me. Owners take pride in their work, so I felt like I would be in good hands. As she twirled the black haircut cape around my front, customers kept coming through asking how long the wait time would be for a pedicure. The shop was so busy, she had to turn people away.
Above her station mirror, I saw a picture of her toddler boy posing in a 1930s-era outfit with an antique train. Whenever I met mothers of young children, I felt an instant affinity. We spoke about the shape of my cut and settled on layers like Rachel’s from Friends. Television can be so influential. Then my stylist asked if I’d heard about the winter light show at Tulalip Resort Casino, the one by the outlets. She was thinking about taking her seven-year-old son to see that and the headlining singer.
“Vietnamese?” I asked.
“Yes, how did you know?” she asked, a bit surprised.
“I’m Vietnamese.” I smirked. And so began our intense conversation. Where was the newest phở place to try? Which bánh mì place had the best bread? Then I nonchalantly brought up my family story. I had to.
“I’m writing a book on nail salons. My mom had two, but she died. She was thirty-eight.” The stylist stopped thinning my hair with a razor. “Tummy tuck,” I explained. I told her everything. The plastic surgeon’s probation, his lack of malpractice insurance, Má having four kids. My hair stylist simultaneously translated to all her nail workers: her niece, her husband’s sister, and her sister.
“San Francisco! Nineteen ninety-six!” she exclaimed. Before I could finish my story, she pulled up her long white-sleeve shirt. “Look!” Her arm was covered in goose bumps. “I’ve been thinking about getting a tummy tuck for the last three months,” she admitted. “People have been saying Florida, Korea, maybe even Bellevue. But now you come here and sit in my chair and tell me this! I shouldn’t do it.” I looked at the hair that stood straight up on her arm and then at her son’s photo. Earlier she had said my Vietnamese was so bad, I sounded cute, like a toddler. That may be true, but the Vietnamese I did know was the Vietnamese she needed to hear.
“Rồi bây giờ chị còn muốn thử mạng nữa không?” I asked. So now, do you still want to keep playing with your life? She complained about her C-section scar. “Think about who you’re doing it for,” I urged. And then she answered how I think my mother would have answered.
“For me,” she said confidently.
“But why?” I pressed.
She replied right back without hesitation. “I want to be pretty,” she said unabashedly. An answer so honest, what could I say back? Didn’t I also squeeze my own belly fat and wish things could be different? I tried to stay neutral.
Copyright © 2024 by Susan Lieu
