Meet My Belly
I was inspired by a Facebook post of one of my friends that asked us to embrace our heavier, imperfect older bodies. I want to feel comfortable in my body. But, always, my belly gets in the way.
This is my belly. On my more humorous days, I call it my “Winking Anchor,” but most days I just think of it as my lumps.
This belly holds faint scars of a gallbladder surgery and a tubal ligation. The bottom of my “anchor” is the result of two emergency c-sections. Nothing is ever easy with my belly.
The gash down the middle of my belly, though. That’s the one that keeps me from loving my belly.
In April of 2010, I was in the best shape of my life. I weighed about 130 lbs., which was very thin for me, and I was finally bold enough to wear a bikini and pour myself into body hugging dresses. I went shopping for a wedding gown and picked out an elegant, lace-covered beauty that dipped low in the back and held fast to my waist and hips. I felt beautiful.
Fast forward to August of 2010 and I was admitted to the hospital for what we thought would be a few days of IV steroids and a liquid diet to calm down a flare of my Crohn’s disease. By midnight that first night, I was crying with the pain. I actually asked for pain medication, which I never do because opiods usually make me vomit and give me horrible headaches. But ibuprofen was not helping, and I just couldn’t take the stabbing jolts to my gut.
That whole night I writhed in pain, moaning and just waiting for the next dose of pain killers and steroids. My roommate complained that I kept her up with my noises, so in the morning they moved me to my own room until they could get a c-scan of my intestines. I couldn’t get the fluid down that they needed me to drink to get the pictures they needed, but they took me down to the basement for the scan anyway. Every time the elevator stopped, I let out a little yip of pain, and my wheelchair driver looked at me like I was the biggest baby he had ever had to transport.
One x-ray and another excruciating ride back up the elevator, I was in my room again waiting for more meds when the doctor burst in with a team of nurses and told me to call my emergency contact. “We’re taking you down to surgery now. You have a liter of fluid in your gut. Your intestines have perforated.”
I remember calling my husband and having the tube shoved through my nose right after hanging up. I remember the ride down to surgery being less painful while lying down. Or maybe I was just distracted by the new pain of a tube down my nose and throat or the mortal terror of knowing my intestines had burst. I remember seeing everyone around me in the surgery room and then closing my eyes.
I woke up screaming. In the haze of partial recovery from anesthesia, I remember the nurse coming over and telling me I was scaring other patients. I think they went out to get my mom to calm me, but I was still pretty out of it. At some point I became a sentient being again and felt all of the pain that came with consciousness.
It took me a few weeks to recover in the hospital, and I almost died again when they took me off of steroids abruptly, causing a kidney failure that resulted in a drop in blood pressure while I was in the shower. I managed to pull the cord before I fell to the floor, and suddenly half the nursing staff was picking my naked body up and taking my blood pressure, which was something like 40/14. I remember telling them I didn’t know blood pressure could get that low. “It can’t,” said one of the nurses. I tell you, after having twenty or so men and women looking at your naked body in the course of a week from surgery and a naked shower collapse, you really don’t have much modesty left to care about.
But still, my belly. At the end of all of this trauma, I had the giant vertical gash down the middle of my belly. It was not pretty. It was not designed to be pretty. It was designed to save my life. And what of the “wink” of my Winking Anchor? That was my stoma.
What is a stoma, you ask? It is an ingenious way to bypass the normal intestinal process for voiding excrement. Basically, you pull a loop of intestine outside of the body and put a bag over it to collect what would normally go through the colon and exit the anus. It’s a poop bag.
Unfortunately, my poop bag would not stay on. It barely made it to the six weeks required for my intestines to heal because my skin develops a severe rash when it has extended contact with adhesive. Even adhesive specifically designed to work with human skin. My rash was so inflamed and the stoma site so sensitive by the time that they reversed the stoma that I had to hold the poop bag on with medical tape that stuck to fresh skin a good four inches from the original bag site.
My little wink is a reminder of the bag, the rash, and it caused another dimple in my now very lumpy belly.
In January of 2011, I went to get my first fitting for my wedding dress. I put the dress on and sobbed. From all of the trauma of surgery and from being unable to eat normally for so long, I had actually lost weight in the last nine months. But it didn’t matter. All I saw was the lumps under what had been perfectly flat lace when I bought the dress.
The seamstress was flummoxed. She fluttered around me making measurements and assuring me that she could take the dress out so that you couldn’t see the lumps.
But the whole point of the dress was that I had felt comfortable in my body. The surgery had taken that away from me. It wasn’t just the marks themselves and my vanity, it was also the trauma of almost dying because of the malfunctions of my own body.
I did finally get somewhat used to my new belly, Winking Anchor and all, and I lived with it grudgingly for a good eight years.
But then the Crohn’s disease reared its ugly head again. Another stay in the hospital. Another dose of steroids, but this time no surgery and a longer set of steroids. By this time, the toll of multiple chronic illnesses was already breaking down my mental processes, so I messed up my steroid dose at home and had to start the whole course over again. I was older now and my body couldn’t recover from the weight gain. And my other systems were beginning to fail, so exercise was too difficult to continue. I gained forty pounds and didn’t recognize my face in the mirror.
Which brings me to today. I’m still trying to kick that forty pounds. But at least I can exercise now, and I’m starting to feel better day by day. The problem is, when I look at my belly in the mirror, I still see all of my body issues. My image issues as well as my medical issues. My belly is the root cause of all my trouble.
It’s hard to love trouble, but I’m trying. I’m trying to love my body again.
