You got a urinary tract infection when you were at school. You divulge the details to me over coffee, leaning in against the edge of the table, the two top buttons of your cardigan in view. You laugh out loud because it’s been so long since you’ve talked about piss. Because the infection is gone, you feel as though you have swallowed a golden nugget of experience which is now dissolving inside of you. You champion cranberry juice and beets. You grin with an air of personal mission when you stand over the salad bar. Tonight, making spoon circles in the place mat, wearing fresh eye-shadow, you are so good and simple with your infection now swallowed, managed, complete. You were the hero and, having slain your monster, you want to boast, but are modest about your accomplishment. You say you do not get things like herpes, just things like UTI and you lean forward with a huge pirate grin that contradicts your pink sweater and neat keys resting on the table, a blushing laughing face as if your smile is busting from a belt. One in three women gets a urinary tract infection, the nurses told you, and you, they said, had one of the worst cases they’d ever seen. You finished by saying you called your urinary tract infection Utie, for short.
I share too. I talk about last year’s digestive scare and how I vowed to be gentler with myself in the powder room, no more “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I tell my friend about the single drop of blood that made me think a tiny man was curling red birthday ribbon with scissors just inside me. The single drop of blood that sent me running into my doctor’s office, jumping onto the metal table, curling into the fetal position and begging for a colonoscopy.
“But it’s only a scrape,” said my Doctor. “I can see it with my magnifying glass. It’s a tiny scrape right here on the surface.”
He was right. The scrape ended up healing before I even came back the next day for my flexible sigmoidoscopy, a better-safe-than-sorry procedure I decided to go for. Turns out I had the cleanest colon the doctor had ever seen. Maybe you think I overreacted but the experience afforded me the chance to see, if only through my imagination and false predictions, the dark side, and so ultimately I came away with something very special: a newfound appreciation for the very elegant state of existing without a scrape. I drove home all smiles.
Remember how hard it was to find a good swinging vine back in the day? The children at my bus stop, me included, didn’t realize just how lucky we were to have a long secure vine hanging from the trees above where we’d wait. We’d take turns gripping the vine and pulling it as we scaled the tiny hill. Then, turning to face the small crowd, we’d run and leap, and as the hill dropped ever so slightly beneath us, we’d lift ever so slightly into the air. One day the vine began to feel a bit loose in our hands, and the mother on supervision duty decided to involve herself. She butted-in with her jogging suit and her short, mean curls hugging her head and began pulling at the vine with her cold little fists. She was yanking the vine in order to “test its security,” but we knew she was really just trying to rip it down so there could be no question, no issue, no liability and no swinging. It took her a few days to make the vine fall and coil as it eventually did, so sadly like a snake on the grass, but since we had been demoralized during her first intervention, we didn’t put up much of a fight. It was tiresome to argue and stress over getting your turn anyway and we assumed there would be other vines.
I took for granted the idea that if something sprung about naturally in the universe, then there were bound to be multiple examples of it. This principle that nature is always generous is not entirely true. It took a couple of years of reaching up and finding no vines in various waiting locations for me to realize how lucky my bus-stop group had been. We didn’t realize the exact precious beauty of the possession until it was pulled down. So the story went with my gastro-intestinal possessions, that grace of easy digestion, or my friend’s urinary tract?Take something for granted and wait for it to fail. Then you will learn its usefulness. Fail me, friend, leave me alone in a parking lot. Maybe then I will begin to properly love you.
Jackie Novak is a junior in the College. She’s from Mt. Kisco, N.Y.
