Death and Cats

I was 29 the first time I should have died. A century ago, childbirth killed more women than any other single cause. Broadly speaking, childbed death ranked third behind all infectious diseases and all chronic diseases but ahead of injury. Not only would I have died before modern medicine, but my baby would have. My pelvis wasn’t wide enough to allow him through. He was three weeks late and weighed more than eight and a half pounds, and I was in labor and fully dilated for several hours when the baby went into what they called “distress.” I know it’s medical jargon, but I can’t help but wonder what isn’t distressing about the birth process.

Caesarians weren’t done very often until the mid-20th century. In ancient Rome, India, and China, fetuses were cut from the wombs of dead or dying women in hopes that the child would survive. More than a millennium later, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides and a Persian epic poem separately recorded that babies were sometimes delivered surgically, but doing so was rare and survival of the mother even rarer. If she did live, she would have no more children. In 1500, a Swiss veterinarian named Jacob Nufer claimed to have performed a successful caesarian on his wife. She allegedly delivered five more children naturally.

Once sterilization and handwashing became more commonplace, surgeons refined the procedure, and more women survived. With the 20th-century discovery of antibiotics to combat infections, caesareans happened more often. By 1991, they were routine. Thank you, modern medicine, for saving two lives with my first abdominal surgery. Modern antibiotics also cured both of us of the staph infections we contracted during the birth experience.

Of course, had it not been for modern medicine, I wouldn’t have been pregnant in the first place, so there’s that.

I was 32 the second time I should have died. My doctor explained what carcinoma in situ meant, and I came out of my second abdominal surgery without a cervix or most of the rest of my reproductive organs. The “in situ” covered a more extensive area than my doctor initially thought. Cancerous cells in my uterus and cysts encrusting my ovaries spelled doom for them, although the doctor scraped the cysts off my left ovary and left it in place so as not to trigger early menopause. Years later, I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and was grateful for her unwitting contribution in the 1950s to my survival in 1994.

At 38, I should have died again. At a regular visit for migraine management, my neurologist asked if anyone had ever told me I had a freckle in my eye. A few months later, my optometrist asked if, beyond my usual myopia, I was having trouble seeing. I told him no but mentioned my neurologist’s comment. He picked up the phone in the examination room, called an ophthalmologist friend, and said I needed an appointment immediately, preferably that day. Three hours later, that ophthalmologist told me I would lose my eye and that we could only hope the tumor had not spread into my brain.

I was still traumatized by the first cancer diagnosis. The second utterly froze me. My sister sprang into action and found that the University of Tennessee hoped to pioneer an experimental laser surgery to excise choroidal melanomas. I was the first patient in its new program. Today, I have a blind spot and a lot of floaters, but I still have a functional right eye and the satisfaction of knowing I survived a rare cancer relatively unscathed.

My paternal grandmother, whom everyone said I strongly resembled, died at 39, three months after being diagnosed with leukemia. Medicine came a long way between 1952 and the 1980s when her brother was diagnosed with the same disease. He lived to die of something else years later. Nevertheless, when I passed my 40th birthday, I sighed with relief to still be breathing.

I might have died again at 50, but I definitely would have at 52. My first bout of diverticulitis, which felled me at my nephew’s high school graduation, resolved after a brief hospital stay and a hefty dose of antibiotics. A year later, the second episode perforated my bowel. I failed outpatient antibiotic treatment and ended up back in the emergency room. After another hospital stay, another dose of hefty antibiotics, and yet another hospital admission, I underwent my third life-saving abdominal surgery. Four days later, the spot where the surgeon reconnected the healthy parts of my bowel failed. Partially digested food seeped into my abdominal cavity. I remember screaming, screaming incoherently with the intense, burning pain, and nurses trying to restrain me.

Peritonitis, which inevitably causes sepsis within 24-48 hours, killed all its victims before modern surgical techniques and antibiotics. It killed my 24-year-old great-grand-aunt Kate Reinhardt a month after her 1902 wedding. Had I not still been in the hospital, it would have killed me in March 2014.

A week later, I woke up in the ICU after my fourth life-saving abdominal surgery. The surgeon had split my abdomen in a jagged line from the old caesarian scar to a point several inches north of my belly button. I did not leave the hospital for five weeks.

The surgeon had not stitched or stapled me back together. I had to heal “from the inside out.” In addition to a colostomy bag, I had a wound vac. My surgeon told me he didn’t know whether I had enough of a colon left to reverse the colostomy. Regardless, I would not be strong enough to survive another surgery for months.

Several weeks later, my son and I walked around our neighborhood as I tried to build strength. As we climbed Oak Street toward Hill Road, I felt something pop in my abdomen just above the bag that hung from my left side. I made an appointment to see my surgeon. Despite what was evident to me, he seemed mystified that I suspected the soft protrusion from that spot might be a hernia. Yes, I had a stoma and a still-unhealed surgical incision running most of the length of my torso, but surely the integrity of my abdominal wall had not been breached. He shrugged, pronounced me mistaken, and sent me home.

I resent gaslighting. There was no way I would allow that jackass to cut into me again. I found a different surgeon to reverse the colostomy. He assured me he would repair the hernia at the same time. I was relieved to wake up from my fifth abdominal surgery without a bag. I was disappointed that the surgeon had neglected to repair the hernia, which protruded from my belly like a cantaloupe when I stood. When I asked why, he shrugged. Doctors seem to enjoy shrugging.

I hired a personal trainer. I worked to regain core strength. Another enormous hernia popped out from the lower right side of my abdomen. Eventually, it grew to the size of a honeydew. I asked my doctor about surgery to repair them both. I was uncomfortable and limited in movement because “melons” clung to my midsection. The last thing I wanted was another abdominal surgery, but this was ridiculous. “Lose weight,” my doctor told me, and shrugged. Oddly, I could find no evidence to support weight loss as a cure for hernias. Perhaps my Google-fu was insufficient for the task.

Two years later, my gallbladder had to come out. The surgery typically takes about half an hour. Because of the extensive scarring and adhesions from the third, fourth, and fifth abdominal surgeries, my sixth abdominal surgery took over three hours.

I’ve lost weight, although I still have virtually no core strength because of these impeding hernias. I haven’t tried to die recently, and I’ve been cancer-free for over 20 years. Plus, I have a new doctor who doesn’t gaslight or fat-shame me. Last week, she ordered a CT scan of my abdomen to pave the way for a referral to a surgeon to repair three hernias – I added a third one last summer. Yesterday morning, she called me with the scan results.

I’m not going to be able to have the hernias repaired yet. First, a gynecological oncologist will have to remove the three-inch tumor the scan discovered on my remaining ovary. I wish I had endured early menopause instead, but hindsight and all that.

I’m glad I got the scan. Otherwise, it might have been too late before I learned that I had unlocked the cancer trifecta achievement and that I needed that seventh abdominal surgery to save my life for the fifth (or is it the sixth?) time.

“Good thing you’re a cat person,” my sister told me earlier this year. “You need to borrow all their extra lives.”

Last Updated on December 29, 2023 by Anne