This is part of an unpublished manuscript I’m working on. Feel free to leave feedback and comments, although none will likely be published here.

Trigger Warning: medical trauma, disordered eating

My fluoride-less tap water at home and my mom’s unfettered ADHD meant that neither the city government nor my caretaker was attending to my dental hygiene. Every dentist I met scolded me for having the wrong mouth. I needed a wider one in which to grow. The family would often comment on how quiet I was, and I preferred reading books over making conversation. I still wonder if I had chattered like an adult, would my mouth cavity have expanded naturally?

I was eight, and I hated dentists. At some point, my grandmother hauled me to the dentist, and the dentist placed a spacer on the roof of my mouth. The pink resin part of the device sat snugly against the roof of my mouth. A metal bar ran through parts of the resin, ending in loops that circled my molars. The dental glue applied between my teeth and the metal loops was supposed to keep everything immovable and cemented. I was to return to the dentist every so often so someone could put a key into the bar part of the spacer and crank. The bar would expand, push on my molars, and eventually, I would have a broader, more right mouth.  

This new pink alien comrade inhabiting my mouth was ever-present. My tongue was not fond of the intruder, and I persistently poked at that plastic resin. Eventually, I wedged the spacer off my molars. The dental glue failed, and I had a fun fidget to pop around my mouth. I was delighted with my secret source of entertainment.

I swallowed the spacer before anyone could take me to the dentist again to judge my too-small mouth. Maybe I was on the playground catching bees with my single pair of tennis shoes. Maybe I was absentmindedly staring out the window, waiting for the school day to end, when I swallowed. Maybe I was on the toilet. Regardless of the exact location of my dip into an emergency medical situation, my sense of assuredness and baby-bird-brain logic about the situation couldn’t be shattered. Could I feel the retainer in my throat, and did it hurt? I can’t recall. I suppose my conversation with myself in my parent’s floral, wall-papered bathroom went like this.

An unruly brunette shoulder-length bob that I wouldn’t let anyone else brush fanned across the back of my t-shirt, and I swung my feet while I sat on the toilet. While praying for my poop, I put my right hand on my neck, counted squares of Angel Soft toilet paper with my left, and thought.

A dental device in a body where one was not supposed to be would cost money to remove. My family talked loudly about money; if I needed to spend an extraordinary amount, they might fight me. I decided to keep the scenario to myself. So, instead of letting any adults in my life know my super-secret, I decided to be like The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly, who always died because she swallowed a horse. I hadn’t swallowed a horse, so I was not going to die. Resolute and self-assured, I swung my feet one final time before wiping my butt, hopping off the toilet, and closing my gold-flecked brown eyes, and I vowed that I would never eat a horse.

I turned on the sink faucet to wash my hands even though I didn’t like how the soap made my hands feel and thought spacers must be like watermelon seeds. Adults said that they stayed in your stomach and became plants. That never happened to me or anyone I knew, and I had eaten a billion watermelon seeds. I decided adults were liars, and everything I swallowed had to come out.

I wiped the drips from my wet hands on my mud and paint-flecked black basketball shorts and diligently began blocking my memory of swallowing that spacer. My secret would remain and did remain intact. I told myself again in the mirror that I would be fine, but I remembered I hadn’t flushed. I flushed and turned off the bathroom light.

When someone took me to the dentist again, I told the dentist I lost the spacer playing. Why was I not fitted with another one? I didn’t know and didn’t ask. My tongue taking up real estate in my mouth was enough to handle. Only once did I have trouble swallowing as a kid. I tried to swallow a whole green grape. I was shocked when I couldn’t, so I spit up the entire grape and bit it in half. I was able to swallow it then. I thought it was cool that I could bring my food back out of my throat like a bird. After the grape fiasco, I decided to chew until the food became more petite than a whole grape. After that, my traumatized baby-bird-brain logic persisted, and I forgot about the spacer entirely until 2021.

At the beginning of my teaching career in 2014, I started to choke on many things. I avoided eating in front of other people. I grew tired of excusing myself to go to the bathroom and throw up. Everyone probably thought I was trying to hide an eating disorder. After watching me disappear into the bathroom one too many times, my co-worker suggested I see a doctor because I started to lose an unreasonable amount of weight. At 98 lbs, my face was too lean and angular, and none of my pants were hugging my ass in the right way anymore. The back pockets of my jeans sagged to such a degree that I looked like I shit myself. I constantly drank Dr. Pepper, juice, and coffee to compensate for the calories I lost at mealtimes.

Despite my insurance coverage being terrible, I visited an ear, nose, and throat (ENT) doctor. He put a small scope down my esophagus and could not see anything other than “a bit of cobble stoning in the back of my throat, probably due to soda consumption.”

The official verdict from the healthcare official was that I had acid reflux and owed him $400.52. After the omeprazole he prescribed failed to stop me from throwing up any of my food, I decided that I must just have severe anxiety. I married at 21, taught high schoolers, and acquired $38,456.47 in student-loan debt from undergrad. Undoubtedly, one of those things was causing my dysphagia. I started doing yoga, and I also stopped eating gluten. Marketing did a number on millennials, and I was sure that bread was to blame for my barfing. Soup became my favorite food. 

In June of 2021, seven years after that initial ENT visit, I taught summer English composition classes at a small charter school in Denver, Colorado. My amicable divorce from my ex-husband was final on April 1^st of that year, so at that point in the summer, I had had a few months of making my meals in my own apartment as a single woman. My kitchen pantry was full of Progresso Hearty Chicken Rotini cans.

After leading a group of summer school students through how to craft an intro to a personal narrative, I went home. Exhausted, I opened a can of soup to heat up in the microwave. I sat alone on the couch in my one-bedroom to eat soup and watch an episode of Once Upon a Time. I shoveled a spoonful of noodles into my mouth, but I must not have chewed well enough for my anxiety-ridden body. Before the recently bought-from-Ikea spoon could leave my lips, I choked.

I ran to the bathroom. I violently projected noodles, flecks of carrots, and chicken broth into my clean toilet. I moved to the sink and turned the water on. I tried to swallow some warm water but couldn’t. The light in the bathroom was still off. I started to sob.

Water dribbled onto my shirt from my chin, and I slumped onto the laminate bathroom floor. I crawled to the couch, grabbed my phone, and returned to the lightless bathroom to turn on one of my panic SOS breathing exercise apps I’d used when having panic attacks. My corgi-mix, Sunny, followed me into the bathroom this time and sat beside me. After five minutes of blowing out candles with a little bear friend on my phone, I dried my tears and got up off the floor like the trauma-informed boss-bitch I’d become.

I thought sleep might be the best option to assuage the lump in my throat since sobbing and breathing hadn’t helped at all. I crawled into bed, got underneath my weighted blanket, and cuddled Sunny. I ran my hands through his fur and shut my eyes. I woke up to the sound of my alarm going off, reminding me it was time to get up, get ready, and leave to teach summer school English courses. 

When I arrived at the school on June 15^th, I still couldn’t swallow anything, including water. The girl I was dating at the time was hiking the Colorado Trail without cell service, so texting her to alert her of my predicament seemed fruitless. Although my ex-husband and I ended our relationship on excellent terms, I didn’t want to contact him for help either. My mom called me often, but I didn’t want to ask her for advice either. I also had no time off, so qué será, será.

I walked into the classroom and started teaching. At lunchtime, I tried to swallow some water in the staff bathroom. I gagged and spat into the sink. When I opened the door to the staff bathroom, the assistant principal was in the foyer outside the English classroom, watching the students transition back into the school after lunch. My face must’ve been splotchy because she asked me what was wrong. I told her. She said I should go to the ER, so I left.

The ER I started to drive to was about thirty minutes away, but going to a closer hospital wasn’t an option. I had been on the receiving end of too many expensive medical bills after seeking treatment at facilities that were “out-of-network” to risk going to a hospital that might not work with my insurance. While contemplating the total cost of this visit, I drove up Wadsworth Boulevard until I got to the Lutheran Medical Center off West 38^th Avenue. I parked my grey 2002 Chevy Trailblazer in the visitors’ parking lot outside of the ER, dug a disposable blue face mask out of my glove compartment, put it on, and then walked into the hospital. 

The COVID-19 pandemic had killed scores of people, so I was not sure the nurses would admit me to the ER. The buzzing of the vending machines was the only thing that filled the waiting room. Otherwise, the space was devoid of patients. The nurse doing intake at the front desk wore teal scrubs. I handed her my insurance card and ID. She told me to sit behind her in a room with two other nurses, one with curly hair and one with purple scrubs. From my hospital paperwork from that day, I know that one of their names was Joy. 

 Joy asked me what was wrong, and I told her. She smiled and gave me a green baggie and a cup of water. She told me to try drinking the water, and so I did. I immediately threw up all the water back into the baggie, and she nodded while I wiped spit off my bottom lip. She asked me if I was on any medication. I told her I was on Wellbutrin, Vyvanse, Lexapro, and Guanfacine for ADHD, PTSD, MDD, and anxiety. After that, she took my blood pressure and asked if I had allergies. I said no and stepped obligatorily onto her scale so she could weigh me. I heard her pen click after she wrote down my weight, and then she handed me a hospital gown to change into. I changed, grabbed my insurance card and ID from the intake nurse, and followed Joy deeper into the hospital.  

“Don’t mind the screaming. There are a few patients on involuntary psych holds,” she explained.

I hopped up on the exam table in the room she had brought me to. The paper crinkled under me, and I put my black and grey Burton backpack on the floor beside me. She stood in the doorframe, leaned against the doorway, and tracked my swinging feet with her eyes. I wished I had socks, and I could have probably asked Joy for some, but I didn’t want to seem needy.

“Someone will be in to give you an IV so we can get some fluids in you and curb the dehydration. After that, we will try to get you into the endoscopy lab,” Joy explained. 

 I nodded at Joy and then texted Liza, one of my friends in Denver, to tell her where I was. I wasn’t sure whether I could drive home, so I wanted to arrange for help sooner rather than later. My shoulders and head slumped toward my phone. I noticed my tongue was heavy and stuck to the top of my mouth. The fatigue from low blood sugar made forming the words I needed to say to Joy and Liza hard. Liza texted me back almost immediately. Since she wasn’t teaching summer school in the summertime, she was ready and willing to get me later that afternoon.

I met Liza at a school staff meeting. The principal sat with all the staff around a large rectangular table, and then he asked us to explain what we had learned over the summer. I can’t recall what anyone else said except Liza. To my delight and surprise, she elatedly told everyone that she had learned how to roll the perfect joint. I knew we would be fast friends, and we were.

A chestnut-haired, string-bean-looking male nurse put an IV into my right arm. I watched the saline drip once he hooked that into my IV.

“Have you ever had an endoscopy?”

“No.”

“Okay, we’ll need you to sign some waivers, and then we can get you on our schedule.”

He went over the waivers with me, and I signed. He wheeled me back to pre-op, and I went under general anesthesia for the first time. I don’t know how much time passed between getting my IV and being wheeled back to where Joy had first deposited me.

String Bean was holding more papers in his hands and was smirking a little when I woke up. He noticed I was awake and brought the new papers over so I could see. The medical report from my endoscopy had one-by-one-inch square images of my upper gastrointestinal tract labeled 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Pictures one and two were of the upper third of my noodle-filled esophagus. Pictures three, four, and five, I narrated with an, “Oh, fuck.” My secret spacer surfaced.

“Is that familiar?” he asked, turning to me wide-eyed.

Thankfully, the screaming that overcast my initial convo with Joy had subsided while I was in surgery. String Bean’s breathing kept pace with my heart monitor. The four fluorescent lights overhead hummed. I shifted my weight, crinkling the paper again. I pulled the blanket someone had laid across me to my chin, uncovering my still sockless feet. The memories I’d buried flashed across my consciousness and pulled me into them.

“I thought I had passed that,” I whispered. 

“What do you mean?”

“I think I was eight. I’m not sure,” I mumbled, dissociating and glancing toward my feet.

The tan lines the Colorado sun had etched into my skin from wearing Chacos made crisscrosses and triangles on the tops of my feet. I played a game of tic-tac-toe with myself silently while he contemplated what I had said. He could read on my chart that I was twenty-nine, but I wasn’t sure if he had. String Bean continued going over the report with me.

The gastrointestinal doctor had cleared the partially dissolved noodles out of my throat. Then, he found a hard, resin-type foreign body blocking 75% of my esophageal lumen. He’d found a curvilinear, metallic foreign object stuck in my mid-esophagus anterior to the T2-T4 vertebral levels. He saw a metallic bar running through the resin and bare metal bars exposed on either end. He tried to use rat-tooth, snare, and regular forceps to dislodge the device. His attempts were unsuccessful, and so he aborted the procedure to prevent further damage and perforation to my esophagus.

I rubbed my right thumb gently over the dip between my collarbones on my chest, noting where the metal bars had embedded in my throat.

“That has been in your throat for twenty-one years,” String Bean concluded. 

“Can I drive?” I asked. 

He smiled and said, “You can do whatever you were doing before you came here.”

Brow crinkled, I thought. I couldn’t black out that there was a child-sized dental spacer in my body again. I might be able to eat solid foods, but I was too scared to try. Two days of failing to pass any food or liquids was harrowing. His expression suggested he didn’t believe I had not known a foreign object had been in my throat. I doubt my memories would have surfaced without seeing the pictures.

Joy came back and leaned against the cabinet adjacent to my hospital bed. While I was out, she had called a cardiothoracic surgeon named Dr. Mitchen. He told her that his office would contact me tomorrow to set up an appointment, and then Joy asked me if I was okay with being discharged from their ER. She told me to stick with a liquid diet until I could address the blockage. My phone buzzed in my hand because Liza was calling. I answered and told her where I was in the hospital. She joined me as I signed my discharge paperwork, cracked jokes, and left the hospital at 5:09 p.m. Liza drove behind me until I parked safely at my apartment. I reassured her I wanted to be alone and thanked her. She hugged me and left.

My bed was the best place to wait for Dr. Mitchen’s office to call. I sent an email to work from my phone, informing my principal and my HR liaison that I would not return to teaching summer school for personal reasons despite String Bean telling me I could return to whatever I had been doing. I passed out after I hit send on my email. My alarm that I hadn’t turned off woke me. I’d forgotten to take out my contacts. Bleary-eyed, I reached toward my nightstand for a cup of water and to snooze my alarm.

My hands shook as I brought the cup toward my cracked lips. I wanted to make sure I could swallow. Water hit the back of my throat. I swallowed and didn’t choke. I breathed, set my cup back on the nightstand, and spread my arms and legs like a starfish under my 15 lb whale-patterned blanket. Sunny stretched with me and yawned. He jumped off the bed, and I knew he needed to go on a walk soon.

My discharge paperwork and a sticky note with Dr. Mitchen’s office phone number sat on my nightstand beside my cup. I grabbed the sticky note, saved Dr. Mitchen’s contact information into my phone, and noted the time—7:18 a.m. 

I suspected no staff would be available to help me schedule an appointment. I shuffled into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and realized I wasn’t comfortable eating anything in my fridge. Sunny scratched his nails three times on the front door. He whined until I hooked a leash to his orange collar, went down the stairs, walked one loop around the apartment complex, and back up the stairs to our home. I always locked the door each time we left. While keying open the deadbolt, my shirt stuck to my back. We’d barely walked half a mile. Sweat ran down the backs of my legs and beaded on my face. I hadn’t showered since before I’d gone to the ER, and I wanted to. First, I needed to sort out my now liquid diet.

I turned on the A/C unit and shut the blinds on my patio door so that sunlight wouldn’t heat my living room. The pandemic made grocery delivery more convenient and affordable than ever, so I went to my Instacart app and bought a variety of liquids from King Soopers. I double-checked that my address and delivery instructions were correct in the app and then showered.

After my liquid diet delivery came, I spent the rest of the day waiting for a phone call that never came. I called Dr. Mitchen’s office the next day, hoping to schedule an appointment. A nurse picked up the phone, took my message, and said they would call me back. They didn’t.

I called his office again the next day, and another nurse answered. She asked why I was calling and put me on hold. After two minutes, she returned to the line and said Dr. Mitchen wasn’t the best fit. He thought my case would be better off with the gastrointestinal department at UC Health, not the cardiothoracic department. I rubbed my thumb over my throat again, upset he had forwarded my case to another doctor without letting me know. The nurse gave me the contact information for the new doctor and hung up.  

After three weeks of asking a small army of medical professionals to give me an extraction date, I drank thirty-four bottles of Gatorade, six gallons of apple juice, eight cartons of tomato basil soup, and countless bottles of Ensure. The hours I spent arguing with Kaiser employees and hospital staff felt fruitless, but I finally had preauthorization and an appointment scheduled for my next esophageal surgery.

The gastrointestinal surgeon, Dr. Tachi, finally called. He felt I needed to know the risk I was taking by getting the dental spacer removed. He couldn’t guarantee that he could remove it. He couldn’t guarantee that I would recover from the holes that would be present in my esophagus. He couldn’t guarantee that I would survive the surgery. I politely informed him I would rather die than live with 75% of my throat blocked by a piece of plastic and metal for the remainder of my life. I accepted the risks, and he agreed to put me on his surgery schedule.

My friend volunteered to take me to and from the hospital the day that Dr. Tachi agreed to operate. Blair, a detail-oriented former history teacher, brought a notepad with her and sat beside me in pre-op. I typed up and printed the passwords to my bank and social media accounts, how to care for my dog, and who to call if I did die. I specified in Times New Roman 12 pt. font, the most serious of fonts, that I was only willing to be in a coma for 100 days, and after that, anyone was welcome to pull my plug.

I handed that paper to her, and she stuck it in her backpack. I’d given Blair the phone number to my girlfriend’s Garmin In-Reach so she could text the Garmin an update once I was out of surgery. Blair took notes on her notepad each time the nurses came by. Dr. Tachi stopped by, reminded me I could die one more time, made me sign a waiver, and then disappeared. I was busy existing outside my body. I contently floated above my bed, watching Blair question the nurses about my medical care.

I hovered over everyone while they rolled me down the hallway into the surgery suite, where a few different people were waiting. One of them lowered the guardrails that I hadn’t noticed anyone had raised with gloved hands and started talking. I watched over the shoulder of who I thought was the anesthesiologist as she grabbed my IV and explained that my arm would sting from a sedative she was about to administer. I nodded.  

She covered my mouth and nose with an oxygen mask and depressed the plunger full of propofol she’d hooked into my port. I slammed back into my body. The burning in my arm subsided quickly. I giggled and noted the distinct absence of my ever-present psychosomatic symptoms. I closed my eyes and melted into the metal table they’d transitioned me onto after they told me to count backward from 10.

After I was under general anesthesia, the medical team turned my body face-down. Then, Dr. Tachi inserted a scope into my throat and dislodged the dental spacer from my esophageal lumen. The spacer fell into my stomach, and he fished the fidget out of my body with rat-tooth forceps. Afterward, he placed a 100 mm (about the length of the long edge of a credit card) mesh, slinky-like stent in my throat to stop the bleeding. The metal that used to circle my molars left holes in me that needed patching for a bit. The stent provided a stable tube so that when I kept consuming only liquids, I wouldn’t accidentally drown in chicken broth leaking into my lungs.

I keep the dental spacer in the collection cup the hospital initially placed it in. Sometimes, I put the cup on my desk in my home office. Other times, I set the cup on my dresser in my room. Most of the time, I keep it out of sight in a drawer. I have no memory of speaking with Blair as I woke up from that extraction surgery.

Once I was awake enough to hold things, Blair handed me the collection cup, snapped a quick photo to send to friends as proof of life, and sat next to me to chat. In the photo, a blue hospital gown lay crooked across my chest. I’m under a mound of white hospital blankets, sitting straight up, holding the collection cup level with my right eye and smirking. I’d call my expression in the photo a semi-surprised shit-eating grin.

Many nurses around the hospital had been stopping by to ask how I was. Each time a new nurse would stop by, I would tell them about why I was in the hospital in a new way. Blair’s favorite version of why I had a 20-ish-year-old dental spacer in a cup was because Texas lacked comprehensive and inexpensive health care. She said I made her and most of the nurses laugh, and I’m sad I don’t remember those conversations because I can’t mine them for stand-up material. Blair left when nightfall came and visiting hours were over.

I stayed in the hospital for three days post-op. My room was at the end of the ICU hallway and had no attached bathroom. The room did have a TV, but I never turned it on. I ate mashed potatoes, oatmeal, Jell-O, and broth, but not in that order. The nurses stopped administering narcotics to manage my pain on the second day. Once the painkillers wore off, I quietly insisted I might be dying.

I wasn’t sure if I had been getting my mental health meds, and my panic grew with the pain. I took shallow breaths. Each time I tried to breathe deeply, my fire-filled chest throbbed with cramps, and my heart hurt. The stent widened my esophagus to a diameter I hadn’t ever been familiar with. Any acid reflux I’d ever experienced had never been this severe. No matter what position I pulled my exhausted frame into, I hurt.

My night nurse came and noticed my eyes were bloodshot, slightly swollen, and wet. I explained the type of pain I was feeling. She wanted to check on the stent placement. She was kind and covered me with warm blankets before wheeling me to the CT scanner. She told me I was the most exciting part of her night. I laughed. As soon as my diaphragm contracted with the giggle, my chest smarted. I clutched the armrests of the wheelchair and tried to lengthen my torso to alleviate the sharp stabs. She pushed a button on the wall, and the door to the CT room swung open. Another nurse stared at me from inside the control room. He was adjacent to me and the giant donut-looking machine I was staring at, and he joined us to help administer some medication.

He explained that he was a technician and that he would be injecting IV contrast, which would make me feel like I had pissed myself. He told me not to worry and that if I did piss myself, hospital gowns aren’t hard to change, and stainless steel was easy to clean. I jumped a little when the night nurse grabbed under my elbow to help hoist me onto the flat, narrow table jutting out of the donut hole. I clutched at my gown to prevent my bare ass cheeks from hitting the cold table. Still, the cold shock through my gown distracted me from the ache radiating across my chest. I laid back, and the technician injected me.

While I felt like I had pissed myself, I had not. My groin was hot and not in the way that one might hope. The night nurse and the technician entered the control room to stare at me and give directions. The table I lay on moved back and forth, and I slid in and out of the donut hole. Holding my breath wasn’t hard, but lying flat and still was. Fifteen minutes passed, and my night nurse wheeled me back to my ICU room. She told me she would be by in a bit to share the verdict and suggested I try and sleep off the pain.  

I tried. She came back and told me that my stent had not moved and was still covering the holes in my throat well. She could give me Tylenol for the pain, but she couldn’t give me any additional narcotics. I told her I would take the Tylenol and then try to sleep. At first, I asked permission from the nurses each time I needed to go to the bathroom because it was in the hallway, and I felt like I needed their permission to move around anywhere in the hospital if I left my 8×8 room. The constant aches made each interaction with a person I had almost unbearable, so I stopped asking anyone anything. I shuffled back and forth from my room to the bathroom and back, all the while clutching my hospital gown and growing tired of retying it so that my body would stay hidden. I resigned to laying on my side in my angled hospital bed and waiting for someone to come and inform me I had been discharged.

On my third day post-op, a nurse told me I could expect my discharge paperwork to be ready to sign around noon. She suggested I have someone come and pick me up from the hospital. I wished Blair were there, but she had left for a trip to Missouri to visit family. Before I could text a few friends to see who was available, another nurse with a wheelchair showed up at my door. She told me that they needed to do one final x-ray to ensure I wasn’t bleeding or leaking fluid into my lungs. I nodded, got in the wheelchair, and closed my eyes. When I opened them, a grey-haired, ancient man stood in front of me and started asking me questions. He stopped after he realized I wasn’t as responsive as he wanted and then told another nurse what to do with my body. The nurse helped me lay on another metal table and turn onto my sides for a series of X-rays.

Once the ancient doctor determined I wasn’t bleeding or leaking into my thoracic cavity, another nurse wheeled me back to my ICU room and gave me my discharge paperwork. I signed the forms and handed them back. I asked her if I could change back into my regular clothes now. She said yes and left my room. I pushed the door shut, ripped off my medical bracelet, stuffed it in my backpack, and pulled out the dark-wash jeans and blue t-shirt I had worn three days prior. I didn’t feel like wearing a bra, nor did I feel like wearing dirty underwear, so I didn’t. I slipped on my Chacos, put on my backpack, scanned the room for any of my belongings I might be leaving behind, and opened my ICU room door.

The charge nurse told me where to go so I could get more Tylenol from the hospital pharmacy. I texted my ex-husband, Aaron, and asked if he could pick me up and drive me home. He knew I was in the hospital, and he knew he was still the beneficiary of my life insurance policy. I figured if I did, in fact, die, some good could come out of that, and he could pay off the mortgage we owed on the house neither of us wanted anymore.

He had also been caring for Sunny, so picking me up was a win because he could drop me and the dog off simultaneously. Seeing his face was comforting, like cherry pie with ice cream. He was thankful I wasn’t dead and drove me back to my apartment. He made sure I was okay being alone like Liza had, and I told him I was.

I had to prop my pillows to lay at a 60-degree angle that night. Breathing was more manageable, but trying to sleep was a nightmare. The doctors said that I needed the stent for a month. Images of chocolate-flavored Ensure, chicken broth, and mashed potatoes oozing into my lungs haunted me. I stared at my apartment ceiling and tried to wish the intrusive thoughts into oblivion. When that didn’t work, I grabbed my phone and started to read about what symptoms might occur if the stent failed. If a person begins to bleed into their lungs from their esophagus, they can cough up what looks like coffee grounds. Neat.

The holes that the dental spacer had left behind were disconcerting. I had to have confidence that my body would heal itself across that month. I was worried that the medical professionals would insist I needed the stent longer. They reassured me they could not leave the stent in for over a month. If they did, they would have to rip it from my throat. They said something about epithelial cells building their bridge into the stent material.

When I went to the hospital again a month later to get the stent removed, the intake nurse for the endoscopy lab told me that Kaiser hadn’t sent a preauthorization for the stent removal. They handed me a form that said I would be liable to cover the entire surgery cost if Kaiser didn’t issue a pre-auth. I handed the form back to the nurse and walked into the hallway. I got on the phone with Kaiser, and I bullied my way to speaking with someone who helped push an emergency pre-auth through the system. Once I had all the codes I would need to fight any insurance battles I might face, I returned to the endoscopy intake nurse’s office. She explained that I had missed my appointment window and would have to return another day. Blair was back from Missouri and drove me home after I told her what happened.

I’ve blacked out my memories randomly from several seasons of my life, including this one. The mosaics that my broken brain has pieced back together with the help of EMDR and my mental health meds are questionable. In this instance, I can’t recall what happened after Blair dropped me off at my apartment that day. I do know that I was able to reschedule, and I took a half-day off work that week in August to go in for the removal surgery. I had not told anyone at work what I had been going through except one person in HR. My principal seemed curious about my absences but was lawsuit-leery, so he didn’t ask me any questions related to why I needed to be out again.

My semi-absent for the summer girlfriend at the time had finished hiking the Colorado Trail at the end of July, right after my initial stent removal surgery hadn’t happened. She and the friend she had hiked it with celebrated by getting champagne drunk. She called me the night she finished the trail in an inebriated panic. We chatted until she was calm, and then she told me she loved me and hung up. She flew back into Denver from Durango the next day and said she’d take me to the hospital for my next procedure.

I drove to her apartment, parked my car, got into hers, and headed to UC Health. She accompanied me back into pre-op, where I had been a few weeks prior with Blair floating. She giggled when the nurse insisted that I take a pregnancy test. I told the nurse frankly that I hadn’t fucked a man since October of 2019, but whatever.

The pregnancy test came back negative, so the nurses approved me for another dose of blessed propofol. My girlfriend left for the hospital café to work on her computer, and a male nurse, Teddy, came and stood beside me. He had one painted nail, a rainbow pin on his lanyard, and the sort of movement that queer people sometimes have in their mannerisms that’s hard to explain to straight people.

He looked at me and said, “Your chart says you have PTSD, MDD, and anxiety.”

I giggled and asked, “Does it now?”

“Would you like anything before we take you back to remove that stent?”

“Could you put down that I have acid reflux and ADHD, too?”

He smirked, added that information to my chart, and clarified, “Mindy, would you like any medication before surgery to help with any of the conditions we’ve discussed.”

I looked down at my hands, wringing the hem of the warm blanket he had just laid across my body. I wasn’t used to hospital staff being proactive or helpful toward my alphabet soup of diagnoses.

“Yes. I would,” I said.

He nodded, added a note to my chart, and asked, “Okie dokie, are you ready to get this stent taken out?”

I nodded wide-eyed and said nothing, so he pulled the guardrails of the gurney I was on to full attention. Then, he wheeled me back to the same endoscopy lab I’d not died in. Teddy was paying attention to my vitals, IV drip, and eyes while he put the guardrails on my gurney back down. I think he could tell I had been floating again, so he injected something into my IV that helped me melt back into my body. I started to giggle while he pressed an oxygen mask to my face. He gave me the spiel about counting from 10, and I passed out. 

When I think about the doctors removing the stent, I picture Teddy making sure I’m not too far under anesthesia or panicking. I picture my throat offering no resistance to the tube’s departure. I woke up in the pre-op area that also functioned as the post-op area for endoscopy procedures. I was relieved that I wasn’t in an ICU room, meaning that I could go home today. Teddy asked if I would like my phone, and I said yes. I texted my girlfriend, and she came to see me. She thought I was adorable in my anesthetic haze.

I lifted my right hand and pulled my thumb and pointer finger closer to look at her through them. I quietly asked her for just one small kiss. She laughed, obliged, and then returned to working in the hospital café while I continued to come out of sedation. Her month-long foray into the wilderness meant she had a full work email inbox to handle. I was grateful for a ride to and from the hospital, and she was jazzed to see Sunny again when she drove me home.

I don’t know what I ate first. Maybe I got soup from somewhere. I told most people the first thing I would eat was a hamburger. If I were to think extra hard, I would say the first thing I ate post-stent-removal was a Little Debbie’s Cosmic brownie. I was still furious that a month earlier, I had tried to eat one and thrown it up. I needed to rectify the tragedy of spitting a brownie’s chewed remains into the toilet. I’m not sure what I expected my new diet would become once the stent was out, but I underestimated the psychological impacts of this entire scenario. The chest pain was gone, but the chewing things into small bites and worrying if I was going to choke on something was not. At the time, I felt I couldn’t slow down to process the events of that summer either.

The insurance policy that the school paid for when employees had to be out suddenly only covered pay if a person was out for more than 15 days. Since I had only been out 15 days in June and wasn’t contracted to work the month of July, I had a lean August paycheck. I had no additional paid time off to cover many of those days in summer, so the school had taken money out of my paycheck. My therapist consoled me about many of these things and let me know that I could ask the initial ER I saw for financial assistance to pay the $2,500 medical bill present in my mailbox. I had no idea that sort of thing was possible, and to my surprise, they agreed to waive the bill after I turned in an application detailing why I was nearly penniless. Right after I sorted that bill, my apartment complex informed me via a letter on my front door that my rent would go from $1,150 to $1,665 in October when my lease was up. I called their office to see if I could negotiate, and the apartment manager said no. I told my girlfriend at the time about the apartment rent raise, and she and I decided that moving downtown into her 17^th Street flat with her in October wasn’t the best idea. We’d only been dating for a few months, my car wasn’t super reliable, and I needed to bike to work sometimes.

A few weeks into September, I found a room for rent listed on Facebook marketplace. After meeting in her garden-filled backyard, I moved into Kristen’s spare room that October and put my retainer container on the windowsill behind my curtain. The curtain featured a desert scene in rainbow tints, and I loved when the sun hit that window in the morning. After I settled in, I invited my girlfriend at the time over. We celebrated, just the two of us, with a game night.

When I woke up in the morning, I stretched and rolled over. She was smiling at me.

“You’re beautiful when you sleep,” she whispered. The surfaces of her eyes reflected the rainbow from the curtain. I couldn’t look away or say anything in response, so I didn’t. She leaned into me, and we kissed. When she pulled back, I flipped over to face my bedroom window.

“Can you hold me?”

I fell asleep in her arms until the smell of her making bacon and coffee woke me up again.

In October of the following year, I broke up with her. She’d cheated for the second time in a few months. Before she left my house for the last time, she had made two weeks’ worth of food for me. She’d often commented that she wanted me to take better care of myself, and at the time, I couldn’t see that my relationship with food was problematic. I left those containers in my fridge for three months and threw them all away in January of 2023. In April that year, I started a job with incredible benefits, including comprehensive insurance coverage. I’m thankful because that summer, at 32, I decided to play full-contact rugby. I am still playing and treating the few fingers I have broken very well.

When my rugby team joined the Midnight Summer 7s tournament this summer, I decided I would drive to Anchorage for the tournament. My ex-husband is currently biking across the United States, so in exchange for keeping his dog and belongings at my house, I get access to his truck and camper. I took his dog and my two corgis with me. My world shifted across those 10,000 miles, maybe somewhere in British Columbia. I felt safe next to the grizzlies, giant beavers, and visible constellations to confront issues I’ve spent years, maybe decades running from.

Despite no longer having a 75% esophageal blockage, eating anything that isn’t liquid still gives me pause. If I am not paying attention, I still chew my food into paste before swallowing. I rarely finish an entire meal in one sitting, and eating around other people occasionally makes me nervous. Lastly, I got used to not using cookware or stoves, so I feel woefully inept in the kitchen most days.

 I’m okay admitting that my relationship with food is problematic, and recently, I discovered that I no longer need a referral from a PCP to visit an outpatient specialty clinic. I’m finally taking my mother’s advice to slow down and make space for my grief, even if I grieve different. I’m sure I don’t look like I struggle with disordered eating, but I don’t look ADHD or autistic, either. Ask my friends what happens when I open my mouth if I haven’t taken my meds, though, and they can vouch.

My community is integral to my healing, and I need professional help. I completed an assessment with the Eating Recovery Center in Denver, and I start a partial hospitalization program tomorrow. I know what to expect schedule-wise. As for how these holes in my soul left from lack of access to comprehensive healthcare and being gaslit will heal, I do not know what to expect. I’m hopeful that I can find places to expand in Denver like I expanded in BC. I’m confident I will be able to articulate what my favorite food is instead of just choosing soup. If nothing else, I will continue to be funny, but I hope to be funny and a bit more whole.