St. Range: Fracture
- Oct 7, 2016
- 5 min read
The doctor excuses himself, leaving her alone in the quiet room.
It’s hard to follow the passing of time here without a clock. The window, as always seems to be the case in these rooms, overlooks a parking lot with a lot of empty spaces shaded by gentle trees, and no one passing through to confirm that the outside world is real. Her phone is in the adjacent office. She could get it before he came back probably, just pop next door, no one would notice. Doctors never tell you to stay put, they never make the rest of the office off-limits. They just close the little curtain to give you privacy and somehow that seems so generous that you feel like they’re excusing themselves from your office so you just stay there.
An indeterminate amount of time passes. The silence is complete. How do they get the room so clean? She could clean her house forever and it would never be this devoid of dust and scratches.
Where do they order the wall art? Is there an overarching agreement about the kind of bland, innocuous decor that quietly corrects any stretch of white wall too vast to be comfortable? ("It's an exam room, not a sanitarium, silly.") Or maybe it’s just the taste of people with the disposition to survive this environment. The pale blue of a morning sky rendered peacefully in blotches stares back at her; the longer she stares the less of a sky it is. An undercover Rorschach test.
A knock on the door and she looks down at her wrist to check the watch she’s never worn. Some time has gone by, probably.
“Come in,” she says, starting too hoarsely and clearing her throat, “Come in.”
“Hi, thank you. Let’s get to it, shall we?” He has a lot of teeth. A tongue running over tight lips whose corners turn up into a smile. She brings her eyes up to meet his. Pale blue of a morning sky.
“Yes, please. Thanks. Sorry, yes.”
“It’s merely a heel spur, perfectly treatable.”
“Ah, okay!” Drops shoulders she didn’t realize were tense. Smiles.
“There is however another matter that I’d like to discuss with you, and we have a number of options regarding next steps.”
“I’m sorry?”
He opens the file in his hands, turns it around to her so she can see it right-side up. A
moment passes.
“Oh I think you’ve mixed this up with someone else’s. I don’t have, I’m not wearing anything
with a—”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying." He gestures to the file still in front of her. "That’s...what I think we need to discuss. Would you mind sharing with me when you had major surgery? As a note for future visits, this is the sort of thing you’ll need to disclose when reviewing your medical history, particularly when undergoing examinations of this nature—an X-ray is fine, but if this were an MRI? Metal is problematic.”
“I’m confused, I don’t understand what you’re saying. I...haven’t had major surgery, I assure you this scan belongs to someone else.” “Ma’am, that is simply not possible. You're the only patient we've had in radiology the last several days.”
Silence. A slight chill begins to settle in, prickling the back of her arms. She clears her throat.
“You're saying this is...that’s attached to my leg.”
“The fibula, yes, that is what appears to be the case.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You needn’t be embarrassed, between you and me I will do everything I can to avoid investigating the legitimacy of previous work, but I am concerned as to how this might potentially affect your body. It’s not a typical...frankly I haven’t seen it myself before, and rationale aside, I am concerned about what will happen if your leg rejects this, given that it’s fairly recent as far as I can tell.”
She’s shaking her head slowly, an unformed sentence resting between parted lips. She takes the folder from him, staring uncomprehending.
Another moment and she bursts into laughter, shaking her head and handing the file back.
“I get it, Happy Halloween, ha ha. Thank you for the conclusive news about my foot. Is there anything else before I go?”
She makes to stand up. The doctor’s hand is on hers.
“I have to insist that we discuss this.”
She looks at him, searching his eyes for a clue. He’s looking at her in a way she can’t quite place.
“This isn’t funny.”
“You’re right, I didn’t know how else to introduce this.”
She understands now his stilted, tight-lipped discomfort. He is scared.
A cold sea is welling up, creeping icily through her chest and throat until it’s hard to breathe.
“This is inside me? There’s nothing here, I don’t feel—” she reaches down to her calf, running fingers up prickling skin, “—anything.”
Her hand is frozen. Under her fingertips, the slightest raised bump. Fingers continue slowly, a millimeter at a time. Another ridge. And another. Identical, symmetrical, a line of tiny raised ridges along the outside of her leg, threatening to break through the thin, unmarred layer of dermis.
“I don’t…”
The doctor is absolutely still.
She cannot move. Her hand hovers just below her knee, fingers faintly grazing, wonderingly, the tiniest stretch of flesh. She meets his eyes, surprised. He swallows.
“Ma’am, I—”
“I need you to do something.”
“Yes—”
“No I need you to GET THIS THING OUT OF ME TAKE IT OUT THIS DOES NOT BELONG HERE” a violent outburst, piercing gasps graduating quickly to hyperventilation, her left hand desperately clutching the outside of her calf and the other fluttering and frenzied reaching up for the doctor and she’s trying to stand up, retching repeatedly before she hunches over the floor and throws up. The doctor is backing up, muttering half-formed words of mollification and apology while groping behind him for the curtain guarding the door. He’s slipping out, shouting instructions to anyone nearby. Two nurses are striding down the hallway to her room. One is trying to pry her hand open and close the cabinets at the same time, while the other is on the wall phone insisting in a rising voice that someone come immediately.
There is blood.
By the time the other doctors and nurses have made it into the tiny room, she is passed out. Her leg is rent open, red rivulets slipping down mottled skin like wine legs on glass, pooling at her foot where the skin is still in one piece. The rest is a confusion of tissue, flesh carved into strips and flaps, rough edges lost in underlying fat that bubbles out of the gaps in that fragile membrane. And amidst the quagmire of living, dripping tissue and stringy red muscle, is a large metal zipper. It gleams, coldly snaking down exposed white, the half that has been forcefully ripped from bone draped in her loosely curled fingers, the end trailing out, attached to nothing at all.
Notes: The font is EB Garamond. Special thanks to my sister Isabel Seneca for continuing to be the best editor I can imagine, and to my colleague Nancy Keizer-Cohen for the X-ray above that unnerved me greatly and inspired a fresh tale of body horror that connects terribly to a yet unpublished piece I've been working on for the better part of this year.
Comments