Ether

I was belly down on a gurney. A nurse had me look out the window. This will be like a huge mosquito bite, look for the little red cars below, I picked out the weensy cars 23 stories below and she vaccinated me in the ass. Then I got wheeled down the gloomy green-tiled hallways.

A metal mask resembling a colander was placed on my face by a turquoise-masked surgeon, covering my nose and mouth. A horrible smell! My mother waved goodbye smiling Her toothy smile, a red-lipsticked mask. She was walking backwards disappearing into a million dots. I was five and had to have my tonsils out. I was operated on in the adult ward of a NYC Hospital. After my surgery there was no ice-cream as promised but there were two mean angry old fat nurses who scrubbed me down with rough white wash-cloths. At the hospital my mother slept in the bed next to mine. We stayed together in the adult ward.

At age three-and-a-half I had surgery in the adult women's GYN ward. It was Christmas. When I woke from the anesthesia I told my mother "A boy was here to talk to me."
"That was the doctor!" my mother laughed. I woke up exhausted with my groin covered in red-orange Mercurochrome. Later, I had to pee in a bucket. The next day my biological father, a giant at six-foot-four was brought in to accompany me down the hall to the bathroom to pee in a bathtub. I had five steps for every stride of his. I had no idea this was a war between my parents. I was their sock-monkey.

I was six and it was summer. I was having an appendectomy at Rye Hospital. My mother decorated the head and foot of my metal hospital bed with red purple and orange crepe-paper flowers that she constructed and attached with pipe-cleaners. Then she sprayed them with perfume. She decided I would become close friends with two black girls on the ward who were in wheelchairs. She photographed us together and put the pictures in the family photo album. Then she gave me a present: a kids book about a girl in the hospital with an appendectomy. I was there for a week and I couldn't stand up straight or laugh when I had to walk up and down the halls with a nurse holding my arm. I felt 110 years old that week. The day I got home my mother entered me into the swim test at Pengilly Day Camp. I had to swim all the way from the shallow end to the deep end of the pool. I did so with a great deal of struggle while my fellow campers were cheering for me. Afterward I was in agony crying clutching the tall chain-link fence around the pool, begging my mother to take me home. My mother was furious, she ignored me and walked away.