Chapter 2
It’s bright and early on Monday morning and already my hospital room is too crowded. I don’t know how all of these people were allowed visitor passes at the same time. I’m going to be putting in a formal complaint to the hospital gods, right after I’ve used up all my painkiller allotment.
Gail, my editor-in-chief atUPCLOSEmagazine, is perched on the edge of my bed staring at me over the rim of her bright red glasses. “Darling. If you wanted time off, you could have just told me. No need to get your fallopian tubes in a twist.”
I’m immediately sorry I told her what I had surgery on.
Julia is squashed next to me on my hospital bed. “That’s not funny. I’m still traumatized from it all,” she whines.
I whip my head in her direction. She was traumatized? What about me? I had a girl part explode inside my body and then it had to get yanked out of me through a small hole they cut in my oncealmost-flatscar-free stomach.
Oh my God, I wonder what they did with the part they took from me!I see future research and an in-depth morbidly comedic article about this.
Heath, one of my colleagues from the magazine’s art department, gives Julia’s arm a reassuring rub. His boyfriend, Jared, stands behind him offering her a pair of plump pouty lips. He’s holding a bouquet of flowers that he’s forgotten to hand to me.
“It must have been just awful for you, Julia. But thank God you were there,” my mother chimes in, “who knows what would have happened. That one never takes care of herself.”
I’ve been reduced to being calledthat oneby my own mother. Great.
My father, pretending to be just going for a yawn and stretch, reaches across my rolling table and pokes my plastic fork at my tray of hospital gruel. “Margie, you think she’s going to want to finish the rest of this?”
“I doubt it, she looks pretty full,” my mother answers him, fanning herself with the medical chart that is supposed to stay clipped to the front of my bed.
Gavin, another writer from the magazine laughs, “Actually, Jane looks like she just has some really bad gas she has to pass.”
I sigh loudly. Nobody notices my discomfort is from them all being here, ping-ponging conversations past me, as if I weren’t in the room.
They then get into a heated debate about the importance of passing gas after a surgical procedure which snowballs into a contest of who had the most surgical procedures which escalates into a shouting match on how often surgeons accidently leave scalpels inside their patients after surgery. Gavin and Heath and Jared declare it an urban legend. Gail pulls up Google on her phone to check the validity of the statement and my mother schools her on how cell phones interfere with critical care equipment in the hospital and how somewhere in this building she most likely caused someone’s pacemaker to rupture just like my defective fallopian tube.
“You just Googled someone to death, Gail.” My mother is dead serious right now.
“Thousands upon thousands of people leave the hospital with all sorts of things stuck in their bodies! Google’s got nothing on me! I’m a walking-talking encyclopedia,” my father yells, turning red in the face.
Dr. Ames walks in at that precise moment, clipboard in hand, awing the unwelcomed guests of my room with his blinding smile. Everyone falls silent. “There is some truth to that statement,” Dr. Ames says, pointing to my father.
My father beams and crosses his arms over his chest.
My mother rolls her eyes.
Gail slips her cell phone quietly into her pocket.
I don’t want to listen to this anymore. I fist the edge of the bedsheets and try to pull them up over my head, but there are too many bodies sitting on my bed weighing it down.
“So, how do we know our Janie, here, doesn’t have a stomach stitched full of medical supplies?” my father asks, slurping at my bowl of hospital-brand Jello.
“Don’t worry about a thing,” Dr. Ames assures him. “I looked up how to perform the operation on YouTube right before I did it. Her insides were perfectly packed back up.”
My mother’s hand flies to her chest. The rest of the room laughs. “And what sort of medical license do you have, young man?” my mother demands.
“He has a magic talisman. Mom, meet Dr. Ames, the stranger that cut me open while unconscious and fiddled around with my lady bits. Dr. Ames, meet my mother and all the other crazy people that snuck up here to see meall at the same time.”
He chuckles and clicks at his pen. “This is a lot of people.”
“Waaaaay too many, right? Isn’t it, like, hospital protocol to call infirmary crowd control to make them all go away?”
He scans the faces around the room. They seem all transfixed on his gorgeous looks and hypnotic smile. “My patient is correct, it is hospital protocol to call,” he looks back at me and winks, “crowd control.”
Gail melts off the bed and gives him a flirty smile and glides out of the room, as do Heath and Jared. I cover my hand over a giggle. Julia climbs over my body and climbs off the bed in front of him and bites at her bottom lip, “Okay, doc. You’re the big man in charge.” She saunters out of the room as well.
