Fiction Fix Seventeen

Gut Feelings 56
Can I get some Valium or something?”
The nurse just smiled as she walked away.
“Sorry, sweetie. We only hand that out
before the procedure. Post-operative sedatives
are not covered in your plan.”
I felt the fear rise in my throat like a bad
review.
I learned later that the doctors had to
save what was left of my book by ripping
out the bulk of it from my intestinal lining.
The good news is that they were able to stitch
the perforations, so I will not have to wear
this colostomy bag the rest of my life—just
until I finish healing from the surgery. There
was a preface under the diaphragm that they
weren’t able to save, but at least they were
able to remove it. (Apparently, it had been
the cause of the fiendish heartburn and reflux
I’d been suffering from.) Sadly, they couldn’t
even find the epilogue—some of the surgical
team thought it had long ago been absorbed
into the reproductive system and flushed out
through menses. And, in cases such as mine—
where the book had festered inside too long
and started to wither and decompose—they
didn’t even bother looking for a table of
contents (which was probably the section I
needed the most, since so much of what was
retrieved was fragmentary and deteriorated).
After extracting what was left of my book
from my torso, the doctors then packed the
resulting intestinal cavity with emergency
supplies of stem-cell-created regenerative
membranes, which were wrapped in a long,
dissolvable cotton coil. They left the end of
this cotton wick sticking out of a slit in my
anterior abdominal wall and gave me instructions
to pull out an inch of it every day. That
is, as the internal cavity healed and filled itself
up, I would pull out the cotton coil to give the
membrane room to heal further.
This was disgusting to me—the very
thought of pulling something out from my
body reminded me of a bad sci-fi horror
movie and made me almost faint. And it was
also very painful. I finally discovered, while
taking a shower, that getting the area around
the wound very wet helped to diminish considerably
the pain of pulling out the cord—that
way I wasn’t breaking the scab-like crust that