Knot
A very old, unpublished text, recently unearthed on my dying computer. I think I started writing it in 2017.
‘So, where exactly is the pain?’
I put two fingers on a tender spot just in from my right hipbone. Admittedly, this particular ache often seemed to expand, at times filling most of my right-hand side, back and front, even snaking up my spine. I didn’t tell him that.
‘OK,’ he answered, head tilted in a look of mild concern, ‘would you mind getting up on that bench for me?’
This was the third time I had done this in as many weeks. I duly manoeuvred myself up onto the bench, unbuttoned the loose-fitting trousers I had remembered to wear, and folded their right side down into a hasty triangle: ‘Just here,’ I said, grabbing the handful of flesh in question.
‘Right, I see,’ he said, laying his frigid hand on the spot; kneading it in circular movements — ‘is that sore? What about now?’
I looked at the ceiling and waited for the pain to build up. It was of a distinct kind: a dull capacious thud that grew more pointed as the day went on, finally reaching such a level where even sleeping was difficult. Over the weeks and months, I learned to soothe it with codeine or alcohol — ideally both — sleeping on my back with a grey furry hot-water bottle resting either under or on top of my hip. Sleep had become a ritualised dance of shifts, flips and rearrangements; before, it had simply happened.
‘Yes, just there,’ I said, a slight grimace for resonance.
He nodded and continued massaging the spot, testing for swellings, fractures, alien spawn or god-knows-what at this stage; I drew up my shirt as his fingers moved higher, curling into an indolent foetal position as he repeated those motions on my lower back. At one point he drew closer as though listening.
A long minute passed before he stopped and again sat upright in his swivel chair. Versed in the language of these assessments, I now reverted onto my back, pulling my shirt down and quickly buttoning my trousers. Really I didn’t know whether to stay horizontal or sit up: the latter would have meant putting a leg to either side of the bench, like a cowboy, and so I persevered in lying down, my head tensed awkwardly as though being wrenched upwards by some unseen pull.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can’t feel anything but I think it might be your ovaries or some kind of infection; I’m going to have to get a urine sample from you.’
‘OK, no problem,' I said, knowing full well it would be a waste of time. The doctor then reached into a wooden cubbyhole and pulled from it a small blue-capped container, handing it to me and gesturing vaguely towards the toilet.
I left the room and went into the cramped toilet at the end of the surgery’s narrow hallway. As I pulled my trousers down, I remembered reading somewhere that midstream was better; waited a second before diverting the robust flow into the tube, which I then closed without spilling a drop. I peered at it in the austere winter light that seeped in through the small partially frosted window and it was the colour of pale straw, clear as water: it certainly looked healthy enough. Washing my hands under the cold tap, I looked up into the mirror long enough to register my harshly painted face and uneven eyebrows, filled in with indiscriminate smudges of brown. I grabbed the mortifyingly warm tube and went back into the doctor, who was now eating an apple.
He put on some plastic gloves and took the tube from me. Then I left. I might have felt relief or expectancy at this point, but hope is probably too strident a word.
The tests came back negative, as I had been sure they would. On a subsequent visit, the doctor siphoned off what looked like an excessive quantity of blood; but that, too, was clear.
At this point, he recommended an ultrasound scan, handing me a brown envelope, already gummed shut, that I was to present to the A&E department at South Tipperary General. Within seconds, I regretted choosing this closest hospital over Limerick, for example, because Clonmel is notoriously bad: small, grubby and overcrowded, a hospital itself in its throes.
I went there the next day, getting a lift with my aunt who commutes to work in the town. Rather than simply text when she was outside, she rang the doorbell at 7 am, waking everyone else up too, as though in an effort to metastasise her profound displeasure with the world. She was in a particularly bad mood — as was I, anxious and annoyed at the prospect of spending a whole day with people who were outwardly, unavoidably, ill. To distinguish myself from them, I brought both my laptop and a book, Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, in which the heroine dies from ovarian cancer. It seemed clear that I was flirting, albeit joylessly, with portent; though in sharp contrast to that book, my forthcoming demise only looked wan and anti-climactic.
As soon as I got in, I had to take a pregnancy test. ‘The doctor just likes to know who’s pregnant,’ the nurse chirped. It came back negative, as I’d known it would. The day passed slowly: another urine test, an X-ray, both swaddled by purgatorial stretches in the waiting room. An old woman – visibly shaken after a bad fall up or down her back porch – staked me as her friend, telling me with reiterative abandon how the accident had bruised her ‘all the way up to her vagina’. In the fetid heat of this small room, I wanted nothing more than to be alone, to let the faces change because they, unlike her, expected nothing from me. As I walked past her on my eventual release, she assured me she would pray for me, and I felt barely human.
After six hours, my name was called and I was told to drink as much water as possible, now, and so I did. As the technician dragged the ultrasound device along my water-swollen belly soon after, I came painfully close to pissing myself; the technician confided — in a tone which seemed oddly congratulatory — that the pregnant women who I had seen waiting before me had had very full bladders, but nowhere near this full. Once the sound waves were conclusively bounced off my insides, I raced to the adjoining toilet.
Another hour passed before I heard my name called again. I followed a new doctor down a long, trolley-lined corridor, its sole inhabitant a pyjama-wearing girl of about thirteen, who appeared more bored than ill. We went into one small adjoining room. The scans were clear, the doctor said, before asking again where the pain was. Now indistinct, I lay up on the bed, pointing to where it typically resided. From his expression — the facial equivalent of tumbleweeds drifting in the wind — I knew I had failed to convince him. ‘Everything came back clear,’ he reiterated, ‘I’m willing to put it down to a muscular condition.’ I then left with what seemed like a booby prize: a vague, three-day prescription for gastric illness.
Shortly after the scan, I met a friend for drinks in an overheated Temple Bar pub. For a Thursday afternoon, it was uncharacteristically busy; or, characteristically busy, I wasn't sure. In between gossiping about other people, people we vaguely knew but unreservedly resented, I told him about the pain: told him how it seemed to shift and mutate, switching gears up and down, radiating variously from my spine and my hip; how the tests had come back clear; how the doctor had looked at me as though I was mad. He laughed. The same thing had happened to him. Test after test had come up with nothing; in the end, he told me, he had diagnosed himself with guilt. I found this hilarious.
I got very drunk that night: so much so, that little of it remains in my memory. But that conversation stayed stuck. The real pain’s twin — the thought that it could be something other than physical — seemed to re-emerge and glow, incandescent. And, thinking the idea altogether plausible, over the next few weeks, I attempted to make myself conscious of the pain’s fabrication, as a construct of my mind. In an opportunistic fidelity to things I didn’t really believe in, I tried to become “mindful” of my guilt. What guilt the pain represented was really moot: the fact was, at this point, I was not even aware of what I felt guilty about — and that was why it had transmuted into pain. Over the next few weeks, I thought a lot about what I could feel guilty about, focusing on these possibilities whenever I felt a pang. Like a particularly masochistic breed of prayer, I felt pain and then narrowed my eyes on the middle- distance, becoming mindful of my fundamental badness. And, it seemed to work: I felt even worse.
A month passed before I returned to Clonmel. At this point, the pain had become a bad answer to all the things I had done and regretted, all the things I wanted but hadn’t the courage to do, all the things that had slipped me by. If not salvation, I had found weird solace in this pain that did not exist. I returned to the hospital, anticipatory of another doctor that would look at me as though I was mad. ‘I know,’ I would tell him, ‘it’s guilt. But it’s fine, I’m working on it.’ Primed for his incredulity, I was willing to accept it. I would simply disarm the guilt, circumnavigating the epistemology of modern science. All would be well. I heard my name and followed the doctor into a small room at the end of a corridor. He sat down on a chair and introduced himself; but, anxious as well as flustered from my abrupt exit from the torpid waiting room, I could only barely process what he said. Two words, though, I made out well enough: ‘gallbladder’ and ‘out’. I left, vindicated, with a gentle instruction to eschew sweets and butter; and shortly thereafter, I stopped thinking about guilt.