Squickable Warning: (Noah, this means you). This post is about an operation. It was scary. There are details of the scariness. If you don’t like to see the word ‘blood’ or think about the thing it represents, you shouldn’t read this.
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I watched my first operation – an emergency c-section in a hospital without running water, oxygen, blood or suction. The room was at least 100F, the only light from a bare fluorescent bulb hanging above the table. The anesthetist couldn’t stop shaking, the mother wouldn’t stop screaming, he tried four times to get a needle into her spine and, failing, put her under with a syringe of ketamine and a bottle of ether. While its familiar, solvent cabinet smell floated sticky and sweet over the room I stood back, trying not to get in the way (until the surgeon said ‘come over here, you can’t see anything from that far’), trying to imagine her dreams… falling asleep she kept talking to Jesus and with that much ketamine I wonder if she met him. So much blood. Everywhere. Dripping over the table, onto the floor, they ran out of towels to soak it up and had to squeeze out the old ones and use them again. In the face of such sharp knives, the woman seemed so fragile, and then there was a baby, blue and small and whole and strange, and one layer at a time the surgeon pieced its mother back together. Huge ugly nylon stitches to push the temporarily outside back in, and I realized my thoughts about fragility have been backwards all this time. The frightening thing is not the fragility of life, but its sheer unstoppable clawing abundance, the baby in the woman and the brutal, unglamorous sutures closing a gash that should have killed her, and the IV antibiotics because just for having the operation she was ‘already massively infected’, and outside life going on as it always had. I kept thinking ‘no one can live through this’, but… they did. They do. The woman lived. The child lived. We washed our hands and changed back into normal clothes and everything looked exactly the way it had before we went into the operating room and no one seemed to think it at all miraculous, what happened. A woman had a baby.
People make it alive to the end of every day. Millions of them.
Still in Kampala. Such a strange thing, asking new faces, new words, unwalked roads to fill in the spaces ordinarily occupied by home, lovers, friends, work. There are moments, bent double kneading the last traces of soap from my by now all-too-familiar little pile of laundry, where I want to set it all on fire and leave through the back door, pick a direction and start walking. To the airport. To Lake Victoria. Anywhere.
And how we sang in the kitchen last night! Washing nine kinds of starch and leftover greens off our stack of plates, until Vicky said No! I’ve gotta stop this before I go into the Spirit! It’s not fair to the Lord! He deserves to get some rest! Every sentence an exclamation as she told us not to talk about god anymore or we’d go mad, and it seemed like a real risk, three girls in the kitchen dancing and singing and telling stories without endings, red clay earth crawling in over everything. The rains haven’t started yet but every faucet in the whole house leaks to make up for it, out own private flood dripping from the bathrooms to the kitchen while mosquito noises pass back and forth electric picking up sparks from faraway thunderstorms. Every time I crush one between my hands I think the power might go out again.
