Notes on "Cramp"
Susan Sontag is a fraud who never went through anything as difficult as what I'm going through now. She also has nothing to do with this article.
It’s deliriously hot in Manhattan, the kind of day where a refreshing blast of sooty subway air arrives like a godsend and Fran Lebowitz can be found zooming down a slip ‘n slide on Park Avenue, and I’m lying on my bed in the fetal position with the air conditioner maxed out, wondering out loud whether I should try and eat something or kill myself.
My stomach hurts. And though I’ve just begrudgingly decided to carry on living, I’m not jazzed about it. I know that everyone everywhere is always going through their own private sufferings all the time and yada yada, but trust me when I say this: my life right now is harder than anyone else’s ever has been or ever will be.
Because I have cramps.
Having a tummyache is worse than being a prisoner of war for two reasons. One: it’s happening to me, which makes it more important and interesting. Two: prisoners of war are typically fed. Admittedly, it is not always a Michelin-starred affair for them, but it has to be better than the B.R.A.T. diet, with which I have grown entirely too familiar. Waking up each day and staring at my sad pantry filled with bushels of browning bananas and jars upon jars of children’s applesauce is depressing, and choosing between them is definitely more stressful than that Russian Roulette scene from The Deer Hunter. I don’t want to ever hear again from some self-important veteran about how “terrified” they were or how “unimaginable” it was to be the victim of “war crimes.” Try running out of sourdough toast, cry baby!
The only thing worse than having a stomachache (and every genocide in history combined) is having a prolonged stomachache. For the past two months, I’ve had cramps. And bloating, and indigestion, and weight loss, and, you know, some other unfortunate things about which we don’t need to go into detail. It’s kind of made my life a living hell, a plight to which only a few people in history can relate, including Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, and Lindsay Lohan circa 2009. Summer, my favorite season by far, has flown by with warm days spent indoors and sunny weekends spent in hiding. The constant threat of needing a bathroom has given something as simple as going for a walk the same degree of danger and scintillating thrill as the act of participating in the Pamplona Bull Run. It’s high risk, questionable reward. Worse case? I get gored (a.k.a. shit my pants in Washington Square Park). Best case? I get a cool Instagram photo (survive).
Scheduling my days has never been more taxing or nerve-racking, requiring both an on-one’s-toes computational prowess to determine the expected cost/benefit ratios of each daytime outing as well as an encyclopedic knowledge of the city’s various restroom locations. If I go to work out at 3:47pm, that gives me about six minutes of walking down 7th Avenue until I reach my gym, where an emergency toilet awaits me with open arms/lid. If my friends invite me to picnic in Central Park, I risk being stuck in line for the single Le Pain Quotidien stall that somehow serves the entirety of Sheep’s Meadow. And forget about bar-hopping—unless I really do intend to put the “hell” in Hell’s Kitchen.
This level of planning proved even more challenging in Colombia, where I spent the previous two weeks in August. I am not from Colombia and, before arriving, knew startlingly little about the nation’s political-economic history or its plethora of toilets. What I know now is that even while my partner and I strolled through the preserved cobblestone streets of Cartagena’s walled city, hiked through a coffee bean farm in the jaw-dropping mountains of Medellín, and scampered through the Chapinero gastronomical district in Bogotá, about 75% of my mindscape at all times was dedicated to worrying about if and when I would need a bathroom. The other 25% was dedicated to trying not to think about the cramps.
The constant fretting soon drifted its way over to my partner’s psyche, and soon our romantic getaway became a ménage à trois: me, him, and my tum-tum. The unexpected companion added weight to the trip; it slowed us down, took too much time getting ready, and was way too picky about choosing which restaurants we could eat at and which activities we could partake in. At least my boyfriend was patient, compassionate, and logical about our newest travel buddy, helping assuage my anxieties and caring for me when I felt sickest. He was also valid in being frustrated by my unwillingness to be fully present in certain moments, to spend hours each day seizing my abdomen instead of seizing the day. The cramps made me sad, which made him sad, which made me sadder.
Now that I’m back stateside, it’s easy to see how I hindered myself on that trip in many ways. No grand calamities occurred, and there were few if any casualties. Was this because of my precaution, or need I have worried so much to begin with? Man, were the cramps really cramping my style?
Everything is easier to see in hindsight, and things are even easier to see when I’m not scrunched up in bed with my knees tucked up against my nose. It’s hard to see things when you have cramps. It’s hard to see the sky when you’re doubled over in pain or your neighborhood, your city, your world when you’ve secluded yourself from them all.
It’s hard to see how things can get better.
I’m 18, and I start noticing that certain foods that I used to relish aren’t sitting quite right with me anymore. But then, sometimes I eat those same foods and nothing bad happens, so what gives? Other times I eat nothing remotely controversial at all and bad things still happen. It’s a mystery! All I know is that my body often feels like a piñata filled with piranhas as I walk around campus or lie in bed at night or watch Blue Is The Warmest Color for the 16th time (just normal college things), my bowels hosting an all-night kegger to which I am not invited. I miss chunks of class, I leave parties early.
Something is wrong. I just don’t know what.
It’s 2018, and I’ve just broken down crying at the Cheesecake Factory two days after my twenty-third birthday, and this time it wasn’t because I’d thought too deeply about the Egyptian-style interior decor. Bad tummy troubles have been plaguing me for weeks, and I am certain that I have colorectal cancer because of an ad I got on Mayo Clinic’s website at 4am last night. My parents, sitting across the table from me, exchange glances and urge me to see a doctor if I’m so worried, but realistically it’s probably just the hypochondria talking. I scoff! I’m not one of those solipsistic whackjobs who think every minor ailment they have is a terminal illness foisted upon them by the wrath of God. My concerns are real, valid, and beautiful (an Instagram infographic taught me that). And also, side note: that mild fever I had last week is definitely HIV, and I’m not saying that just because I watched Dallas Buyers Club the other night!
My PCP recommends a colonoscopy, so I do that. Having a tube shoved three feet up my ass isn’t exactly as fun as it sounds on paper, but it isn’t that different from a standard Tuesday night either. The results of the procedure show no signs of IBD (intestinal bowel disease) or colorectal cancer. Crisis averted! I smile dopily as my half-anesthetized ass is wheeled out of the hospital, newly certain that my intestinal tract is not going to kill me anytime soon. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and I’m not sure if you know what’s involved in the pre-procedure preparation you need to do for a colonoscopy, but just know that I am feeling fresh down there.
But things don’t really get better. All the reasons I went to my PCP in the first place are still actively engaged in the same Civil War reenactment in my guts that’s been going on for months. The cramps continue. I go to my doctor again and ask what gives. He looks at my charts, looks at my colonoscopy results, and for the first time in my life proves to my naive mind that doctors are just flawed people trying their best when he says, “I don’t know.”
I’m at a gastroenterologist’s office in Sheepshead Bay, lying on my back on the tiled floor unconscious. My doctor, who is 4’11” and eight months pregnant, is shaking me awake while nurses rush to aid her struggle and take part in witnessing my humiliation. You see, I’ve just had blood withdrawn from my feeble flesh suit to test for Celiac Disease, and my pathetic brain registered the quarter-inch needle as a direct threat to my life. Then it shut down. I woke up after my vision blacked out and tried, with help from my Russian nurse and doctor, to walk to the waiting room. I passed out again on the way.
When my skin pigment and ability to walk return, I am shoved out of the office and onto a subway car. Three days later, when the blood test eventually comes back negative and a stool sample shows no signs of bacteria, viruses, or parasites, I am diagnosed with IBS, otherwise known as irritable bowel syndrome or, as it was classified for decades, spastic colon. I prefer the antiquated name for it; “irritable bowel syndrome” sounds like my gut is a curmudgeonly old hermit who yells at high-fiber foods to get off his lawn. “Spastic colon” rings a tad truer to how I imagine my digestive system: a neurotic, deeply ill-equipped organ that panics every time a reasonably complex carbohydrate passes through its system, something akin to how Lucy and Ethel handle their jobs at the chocolate factory in that one I Love Lucy episode. I respect my colon’s hustle but would still share some tough feedback at its annual performance review.
The doctor’s office fiasco occurred over a year ago, and I’ve just returned to see Dr. Gausmann. She, noticeably less pregnant, and I, noticeably more conscious, discuss how my symptoms have manifested for the past two months, how they have and haven’t been different from my previous bouts of cramps. She then provides me with some more information on remedies to treat each individual symptom as it comes up. IBS is a chronic condition, after all. Flare-ups will likely occur off and on for the rest of my life, causing me prolonged bouts of pain if I get sick or eat the wrong thing or just, I don’t know, piss off my bowels for some random reason. 80% of people with IBS also experience depression and immense anxiety about navigating their day-to-day activities, their moods, their sex lives, their capacities for being human.
IBS is like that, I suppose, and it’s why it’s the worst thing that can ever happen to anyone ever—but even worse when it’s happening to me. It’s unclear what it’s caused by in most people; is it hereditary, dietary, a curse imposed on you by that carnival fortune teller whose powers you belittled? Science has not yet found the answer, and while I haven’t completely given up hope that it will, it’s getting to be time to acknowledge that this shit is here to stay (obviously pun intended).
Before I go, Dr. Gausmann refers me to a psychologist she knows who’s done good work for some of her patients. This doctor, who apparently specializes in group therapy and hypnotherapy, started her practice for depressed and anxious patients with intestinal bowel disease, but she soon found that people with IBS experienced many of the same mental health issues, many of the same troubles. It turns out that for a lot of people having a body is hard—even though having my body is infinitely more difficult than having any other body that’s ever existed or ever will exist, yada yada.
I’m told this shrink will email me to set up an appointment within the week, and then I leave. I have the rest of the day free. I time out in my head how long it’ll take to get home via the subway, where in exactly 49 minutes I can have unfettered access to my toilet, my saltines, my glorious sense of sanctuary. I also think about how the days are getting shorter, how we’re rapidly approaching the last remnants of warmth before winter bulldozes in and pushes summer down a flight of stairs for the next six months. How much of the summer have I missed by staying indoors, and how much is even left?
My stomach growls; I’m hungry. I head to the nearest subway station.
Then I keep walking.
