jessie o’dea walker
redundant
I had just drifted off to sleep on a rigid, metal-framed cot when there was a light knock on the hospital room door. A young doctor I had not seen yet entered the room and flipped on the fluorescent overhead lights, flashing me a soft smile. Maybe it was just the setting, but he reminded me of Patrick Dempsey.
“How are we doing, Miss Walker?” he asked.
“Okay,” was all I could manage. I had just spent twelve hours in the emergency room after exorcising demons into a toilet all evening. When my abdomen still throbbed after hours of this and I looked in the mirror to see that my pink skin tone was, for the first time ever, without color, I knew it was time to seek medical guidance beyond Google.
The doctor introduced himself as Dr. D and said he would be taking over for the other emergency gastroenterologist who had seen me earlier. He shuffled through a pile of X-rays and looked at me, confused.
“May I press on your stomach?” he asked.
There was finally morphine coursing through my veins thanks to a kind nurse, and I couldn’t help but find this question funny. I imagined him using this as a pick-up line at the bar.
“You have my consent,” I said.
I looked up at the ceiling and listened to machines beeping. The moment struck me as intimate, and my eyes started to well up as I wished my husband Dan was with me here instead of on a business trip. Dr. D said to tell him when I felt pain, but nothing felt that bad after what I experienced earlier today. Or was it yesterday at this point?
Dr. D stopped pressing on my stomach and returned to my medical file. He paused on one X-ray image, looked at me with a furrowed brow, and then repeated the action. He sighed and shut the file folder, taking a seat on the swiveling stool beside the bed.
“We’re still waiting for the results of a few other tests, so for now we just need to keep you comfortable until we know more.” I gave him a nod.
He picked up the medical file and dropped it into a compartment on the back of the door. When he turned back around, the corners of his lips rose. He looked deeply into my bloodshot eyes, and for a moment, I thought he was going to ask for my phone number.
“Has anyone ever told you that you have an abnormally large colon?”
“Has anyone ever told you that you have an abnormally large colon?”
I imagine Balloon Man received a similar question. I first met Balloon Man on a middle school field trip to the The Mütter Museum, a medical institution in Philadelphia. I was attending the Friends School of Baltimore at the time, which was known for being avant-garde in its approach to education. In addition to the Mütter Museum, we also toured the supposedly haunted Eastern State Penitentiary on this trip. I’m still unsure how this trip related to anything we were learning.
At The Mütter Museum, a bespectacled man in a checkered vest ushered us inside the building, which reminded me of the interior of a Victorian mansion rather than a museum. He led us from one oaky room the next, pausing to point out shelves of skulls or a table of what they called wet specimens—biological samples preserved in jars of fluid. It felt like we were touring a mad scientist’s laboratory.
The exhibit that has stuck with me to this day was the last one on the tour—a large glass case holding the eight-foot-long Giant Megacolon. Our tour guide showed us a black and white, grainy photo of a mustachioed man glaring at the camera with a stomach that made him look pregnant. Why did this man look so angry, I wondered? Well, for starters, the guide told us he was nicknamed Balloon Man and often appeared in freak shows in the 1890’s. But the more valid reason for this scowl was that he had forty pounds of feces stuck inside him. He was found dead in a bathroom at age twenty-nine, attempting a bowel movement.
As a naïve middle schooler, I believed that the display case in front of me at The Mütter Museum was Balloon Man’s actual feces-filled colon. But when I look at the museum website now, I discover it was a dried human large intestine with straw and fabric stuffing. But even if this wasn’t actual feces sitting in front of me, the display left a permanent imprint in my memory. As a kid with what my doctors called “stomach issues,” the image of a large brown, coiled blob flashed before my eyes every time I had a stomachache. I’d look down at my protruding stomach and fear that I’d be shipped off to the freak show at the Maryland State Fair.
I’d look down at my protruding stomach and fear that I’d be shipped off to the freak show at the Maryland State Fair.
I was eight years old during the summer of 2000 when my mom took me and my brother to the fairgrounds the week before school started. We met my twin friends, Tory and Francesca, at the entrance with their mom and rushed inside to scope out the organized mayhem. We hit up the petting zoo first where we got to hold baby chicks, went down a giant slide in burlap sacks, and then paused for lunch. While feasting on greasy hot dogs and cans of soda, I pointed to a booth shaped like a globe. It was covered with the illustration of a woman sitting in the palm of a large hand.
“What’s that?” I asked my mother. Mom studied the booth from our picnic table and looked at Jackie, the twins’ mom.
“I didn’t think fairs did this kind of thing anymore,” she mumbled, giving Jackie a confused look. She redirected her attention to me, “Well, Jess, the smallest woman in the whole entire world is in there.”
That was all she had to say; the kids demanded this be our next stop after lunch. I imagined a woman the size of my Barbie doll, or maybe even smaller, like a Polly Pocket. My mom and Miss Jackie weren’t as excited. They conversed in hush tones, then Miss Jackie said, “How about we play a few games and then see how we feel?” The idea must have been that we’d forget about this booth, but they were mistaken.
After throwing darts at balloons and trying to toss a basketball through a small hoop, we all insisted it was time to go see “the lady.” My mom and Jackie shrugged at each other, and we headed towards the blue booth. They shelled out a dollar admission for each of us, and then a carnie unhooked a velvet robe and announced, “Please step inside and meet Tiny Tasha, the world’s smallest woman.”
We rushed in, expecting to see Tinkerbell. But what we found was a middle-aged little person sitting behind a plastic partition in a miniature easy chair. A television was playing in front of her, and she stared at the screen while she moved knitting needles in her lap. I went to school with a boy named Johnny who was also a little person, so my mind was dizzy as I realized that this woman wasn’t magical. In fact, I realized people had probably given her a hard time her whole life, just like with Johnny. No one whispered a peep.
Mom always commented on Miss Jackie’s big mouth, so luckily, she was there to fill the silence. “Whatcha knittin’?” she asked.
“A scarf,” Tiny Tasha said as she held up the fabric for us to see. “Would you like to take a postcard? They’re a dollar.”
Mom and Jackie tossed a few bills in a basket and took the postcards. They thanked Tasha for her time and then ushered us towards the exit. I had not moved since we entered the booth; my mom always told me it was rude to stare, and it just didn’t feel right to examine this woman even if we paid a dollar to do so.
Back out in the sunshine and sticky August heat, Miss Jackie led the group towards a cotton candy stand. As we started moving on, I tugged my mom’s hand to stay back for a moment.
“Mommy, that made me sad.”
“Mommy, that made me sad,” I slurred into my cell phone from the passenger seat of my husband’s Honda Civic.
“Jess, put Dan on the phone,” my mother said. I pressed the speakerphone button.
“Hi Heather,” Dan said while staring ahead, merging onto the highway.
“Dan, are you sure they didn’t find anything at all? I’m so confused.”
Dan was driving me home from a procedure that was supposed to remove something called a Meckel from my stomach. After nearly thirty years of stomach pain and recurring small bowel obstructions in my mid-twenties, the doctors thought they finally found the problem. In a special X-ray that required me to spend an entire afternoon lying in weird positions on a table while technicians photographed my abdomen from all angles, the radiologist called down and asked for more shots than he originally ordered.
“He’s never seen anything like this before,” the tech I’d been bonding with told me. “Maybe this means you’ll finally get some answers!”
I received a call the next morning asking when I could come in to discuss the test results with my surgeon, Dr. Apostilides. His secretary wouldn’t tell me what they’d found—she said it needed to be discussed in person. I scheduled an appointment for the next day.
I brought Dan along with me in the morning so we could receive the news together. A secretary walked us back to Dr. Apostolides’ office where he sat behind a stately desk scribbling in a file folder. The secretary motioned for us to sit down and then shut the door.
“Well, it seems that you have a Meckel,” Dr. Apostolides said in his thick Greek accent. Dan and I looked at each other—were we just not understanding his accent?
“A what?” I asked.
“A Meckel,” he repeated, like it was obvious. “Meckel’s diverticulum. Let me put it like this,” he continued. “It’s a useless pouch hanging off your small intestine. It doesn’t have a purpose, but it can cause your intestines to twist and obstruct the bowel. Mystery is solved!”
I had so many questions, but I found myself numb and mute. Dan stepped in to fill the silence with his questions while I made mental notes. I’d promptly begin my Internet search the moment we left. But more than anything, I felt relieved. There was an answer. Finally.
“Luckily, it’s an easy procedure,” Dr. Apostilides went on. “We go in, we cut the Meckel. Easy. Then we run the colon while we’re in there to check if there are any problems we can’t see through X-ray. Win-win!”
Dan asked questions until Dr. Apostilides kicked us out for his next appointment. “The front desk takes care of you from here,” he told us. “We’ll get the surgery scheduled and the next time I’ll see you is in the operating room.”
When I woke up from surgery three weeks later in a dark recovery room, I asked the nurse if I could see the Meckel. I wanted to place it in a jar like the ones at the Mütter Museum and display it in my living room.
“Good news, sweetie. They didn’t find a Meckel! The doctor ran your colon too, and everything looks great. There’s nothing wrong with you.”
“No, you don’t understand. There is something wrong,” I told her with tears in my eyes.
Due to COVID-19, Dan had been banished to a waiting room for the entire process. When they finally let him back and Dr. Apostilides came in to see us, he repeated what the nurse had told me. They found nothing, everything looked great.
“Oh, but we did confirm that you have a redundant colon,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do about that; you just have an abnormally large colon with lots of twists and turns. But that’s something you can live with; just takes you longer to digest things.”
The nurse came in with my discharge paperwork and instructed Dan to pull the car around to the main entrance. She rolled me out to the curb, parked the wheelchair, and wished me luck.
When we arrived home, I laid on my back in bed per discharge instructions and slept off the anesthesia. In my dream, Balloon Man invited me to join the freak show at the Maryland State Fair. He took me to dinner with his wife, the world’s smallest woman. Over hot dogs and soda, he looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and said, “Has anyone ever told you that you have an abnormally large colon?”
When I woke up, there was no knock on the door. Silence sat there patiently, knitting itself in my lap.
JESSIE O’DEA WALKER IS AN EMERGING NON-FICTION WRITER CURRENTLY BASED IN BALTIMORE. SHE RECEIVED HER B.A. FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND AND IS PURSUING HER M.F.A. IN CREATIVE WRITING AND PUBLISHING ARTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BALTIMORE. JESSIE IS A SWIMMER, WIFE, CAT MOTHER, EDUCATOR, AND LOVER OF ANYTHING THAT MAKES HER BELLY LAUGH.