It was nearing the end of the summer before my sophomore year of college. I sat in a plastic beige dentist chair and my mom sat across from me against the opposite wall. Her hands fidgeted with the thick manila folder labeled “EM’S MEDICAL HISTORY” that sat in her lap.
Stock photos of butterflies hung on the walls in frames that were trying too hard to make their contents look classy. Pamphlets about hair transplants lay open on the counter. Dr. Hurley was an Ear, Nose and Throat surgeon, but he also did plastic surgery and hair restoration. I’m sure he had his prestigious diplomas and certifications hanging on the walls in that office, too, but all I can remember are those butterflies—the strange details that crystallize as memories on the bookends of a traumatic event, like commemorative tassels of Before and After.
When he came in, his dark grey Sketchers squeaked over the linoleum. I remember looking down and noticing that his left sneaker was starting to wear, the stitches broken and fraying around his big toe.
Dr. Hurley casually flipped through the papers on his clipboard and then pushed my tongue aside with a giant wooden popsicle stick to gaze down my throat. “It’s a very simple procedure,” he said. “And given your past medical history, it’s certainly not something to be overlooked.”
My mother asked him if this was our best option. When she tried to offer him her collection of documents in the manila folder, I shot her a look.
“Mom,” I spoke sternly to get her attention. “He’s the doctor. I think he knows what he’s doing.”
“Okay, well.”
“It’s just a tonsillectomy. It’s not that big of a deal,” I insisted.
As usual, my mom was going overboard. She always does too much. She’s too accommodating, too nice. Like when I was younger, and I’d have friends over after school. I would cringe at how uncool she acted, being so overly friendly, offering them an array of food, or drink, or rides home. Or whenever she’d see someone who needed help in public, she’d drop everything to assist. One time, she helped an elderly woman in the parking lot of Stop & Shop and then somehow ended up taking her to doctor appointments for the next two years until the woman died, and then my mom helped plan her funeral. How does that happen? My mother: defiant only in the face of the bystander effect.
I used to feel angry and embarrassed about her seemingly unnecessary kindness.
“You’re probably making people uncomfortable, Mom.” Or, “If you’re too nice then people will walk all over you, Mom.” Or, “You didn’t need to bring that whole folder in for the doctor, Mom.”
Hospital visit number one is really the only one that I don’t confuse with all of the others. I sat next to my mother in the waiting room thoughtlessly watching CNN on the mounted TV up in the corner, my large, inflamed tonsils still intact. Though I didn’t want to show it, I was dreading the moment soon to come when I would have to part ways with my mother. For whatever reason, getting wheeled away from her on a hospital bed while wearing an oversized gown and treaded socks felt so much harder than watching her drive away after dropping me off at college for the first time. Why can’t she come into the operating room and hold my hand while they put me under?
“Just breathe deeply,” the strangers instructed. As I drew in breaths of plastic-flavored sleeping gas, the fluorescent lights and masked faces faded into a blur of pale shadows. With the last bit of consciousness left undrained by the anesthesia, I wondered what my mother was doing. Is she worrying about me right now?
I awoke into an instance of pure confusion followed by the sudden realization of beeping IV bags and nurses standing near me. Unfamiliar latex hands unhooked wires and tubes on my arms as I struggled to open my eyes wider. I was shivering and sharp pains shot up through my neck to my ears and nose. Upon remembering that two chunks of tissue had just been sliced out of the back of my throat, the stinging seemed to intensify. Speaking, or even swallowing, felt entirely out of the question.
I didn’t know how to get the attention of the strangers milling around the room. Finally, a nurse made eye contact with me. I rubbed my arms to show her I was cold, and held my throat to tell her I was in pain. As she pulled a blanket over me and pushed more medicine into my IV, I tried to think of a gesture to communicate “Where’s my mom?”
Back home, a bed was already prepared for me on the living room couch. The next couple of days were a miserable process of trial and error. The chocolate pudding was slimy and got stuck in the back of my throat. The juice of the fruit flavored popsicles was sharp and acidic, stinging with each attempted swallow. Tirelessly, my mom brought me different flavors, different textures, and different tastes to test out. It was like being in the sixth grade again, when my friends would come over and be offered different snacks every hour. Only now, I felt deeply grateful for it.
Communication was another challenge. She found an old clipboard in my dad’s desk and clipped in a short stack of computer paper. She would sit by my side and help me take my medicine as I would write to her on the clipboard. All over the paper, at different angles and in different places, phrases like “need more medicine” and “hurts too much to swallow” jumbled together and overlapped like desperate graffiti.
I wasn’t home for more than a couple of days when the complications began.
When I drank the liquid Vicodin, I felt sick to my stomach, and when I didn’t, the pain in my throat became unbearable. I spent hours in our guest room bathroom vomiting as my mother brought me fresh glasses of ginger ale from the kitchen. Vomiting shortly after throat surgery is something I would not wish on my worst enemies.
It seemed that the nausea was my biggest problem until 1:30 in the morning on the third night. At first, I couldn’t understand why I had woken up. No one had nudged me, said my name; nothing had fallen or made any noise. But the taste in my mouth was too sweet and metallic to sleep through. I turned on the little flashlight my mom had been using to look down my throat and weakly spit into the white styrofoam cup on the coffee table. Bright red speckles gleamed from the inside. I sat up on our family room couch and shook my mother, who was asleep on the floor next to me, lying on three couch cushions with a small blanket draped over her. She could have easily slept in the guest room right down the hall, but had insisted on staying by my side. I choked out the words “Mom, I think I’m bleeding.”
A tonsillectomy is, in theory, a rather simple procedure—a few hours in the hospital, two weeks of soft foods, and voila! But with all simple procedures like this, there are those small chances and rare risks that must be addressed and then can usually be forgotten. Unfortunately, I will never forget the fact that five percent of tonsillectomy patients may experience postoperative bleeding—a complication that requires immediate follow-up surgery to cauterize the source of the bleeding or the patient will bleed to death.
Within minutes, the doctor had been called, the car was started, and I was sitting in the front seat with a bucket of blood and tissues in my lap. As my father sped through every red light in our path, the shade of red inside my bucket grew deeper and darker. If I tried to straighten my head and neck, the blood would seep down the back of my throat, so for the entirety of the 45-minute drive to the hospital my head hung down like a dying sunflower, spitting blood into a bucket. From the back seat, my mother reached her soft, wrinkled hand forward to hold mine, shaking and bloodstained.
Everyone in the ER waiting area stared at me, blood oozing down my chin and tears hysterically flowing from my eyes. The lady at the front desk asked me a couple of questions—all of which had to be answered by my mother—and attached a hospital bracelet around my wrist. Moments later, I was wheeled into an examination room and the doctors began their work.
“We are not going to go straight into surgery. If we can cauterize here and avoid putting you under again, then we will.”
I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant until one doctor handed the other what looked like oversized matchsticks. And it wasn’t until I heard the words “silver nitrate” that I started to panic. I knew silver nitrate. That was the burning chemical a dermatologist had used on the warts on my foot in middle school. It had been one of the worst pains I had ever felt back then on my foot, but that pain paled in comparison to the inside of my throat.
It felt like a branding iron fresh out of the fire was digging into the back of my mouth. And it wasn’t helping. The blood started to flow heavier and heavier, spilling down my chest and congealing into chunks in my molars. I spoke the loudest that I had been able to speak in the past three days when I cried to them to stop.
“Please, please just do the surgery.”
At this point, the scene had become so gruesome that both my father and sister had had to leave the room due to weak stomachs. My mother was the only one left to nod her head yes in agreement.
This string of events happened essentially in the same manner three more times in the following ten days. Just when we thought I was home for good, and that I was past the bleeding, I would get that sweet, metallic taste again. I spent the majority of my two weeks of “recovery” in the hospital. At night, I’d lie on the cot, sweating out the IV medicine and listening to my senile roommates groan. The familiar nurses would stop at my door saying “Not again!” or “You’re back?” My bruised arms took on the appearance of a drug addict, poked with needles for blood testing and IVs over and over again. No one could figure out why my tonsillectomy had gone so terribly wrong.
My mother, of course, refused to leave me alone in the hospital, watching TV with me during the day and sleeping on a plastic-cushioned chair by my side at night. After my third surgery, which took place at two in the morning, my father and sister went home to get some sleep. My mom waved goodbye to them then sat down by my side and took my hand in hers. Looking into her kind face, I noticed an opaque tint of grey darkening under her eyes, like small storm clouds. The whites of her eyes were turning pink and though she smiled at me from the plastic-cushioned chair, I knew I was not the only one suffering. I held back tears as I reached for the clipboard and wrote to her.
Through five surgeries, six different doctors, and a dozen different nurses, my mother was the one who remained constant. Up until my fifth and final surgery, I had to be wheeled out of the hospital in a wheelchair when I was discharged. Thankfully, after this last hospital visit, I felt strong enough to walk through the halls that I had only ever seen before from a rolling bed. When we stepped out onto the sidewalk and my dad pulled the car up, I turned to my mother. We hugged, both of us crying and smiling at the same time.
A little while after I finally made a full recovery, my mom and I were in CVS together, standing in line behind an elderly man with white hair and worn blue jeans. He was struggling to get the right amount of change out of his pocket while the young cashier stared on impatiently.
“Sir, I think I have the right change, here,” my mom said to the man. She was holding our plastic basket filled with everything I needed to go back to school, so she handed her wallet to me as the man graciously thanked her.
Months earlier, I may have rolled my eyes or heaved a sigh under my breath. I may have shot her a look, or grumbled to myself. But instead, I readily opened the brown leather wallet, thick with its familiar cards and papers, and noticed something new. A piece of paper, ripped around the edges, had been tucked in next to the faded family pictures. I handed the man a few coins before examining my mother’s wallet a bit closer.
A few words were scribbled across the small scrap of ripped computer paper.
“Thank you for staying here with me. I love you, Mom.”