November 7th, 1997, The Human Animal
Laura finds me wherever I'm living, she rings me up after each birth, I call it the 'hour of
gore', she says, "do you watch ER?, I was watching it last week, they brought a woman in
for a caesar, the same thing happened to her as happened to me, the shoulders got stuck,
you know if the shoulders get stuck the baby can die, after he was out I said to the nurse,
"what could have happened?" she wouldn't answer me, I said to her, "I think we both know
what could have happened, but you won't tell me," that was the longest two minutes of my
life!, the baby came out blue, "he's blue!," I shouted at her, the woman on ER got rushed
to emergency, anyway the shoulders got stuck then they had to cut her open, she stayed
awake under a local and watched the whole thing, I didn't know how she could have done
that!, what they do is, they cut you open up near the stomach, then they grab hold of the
baby's head and push it right up back inside, and drag the feet out of the surgical
opening, with this woman it was a rushed emergency job, blood everywhere and they had
to cut in, and cut things out in order to get to the baby, unfortunately they cut straight
through the aorta, that's the main artery and they killed her, it wasn't a pretty sight," "I
thought the aorta was near your heart!" "no," she said, "it starts at the heart and runs
straight down through your bowels and back up your spine into your skull," suddenly I felt
like my body had become the bowels of the earth, it felt very deep down there and out of
control, like something that happened beneath the earth's crust, catastrophic events but I
was only 5'8, Travis said, "I used to wake up shocked that I was in a body, I felt all the
blood squirting through it underneath the skin, but now I love living, I treasure every
moment of it," I knew how he felt, one night just before a Melbourne Symphony Concert, I
saw everyone turned inside out, my eyes were lighting up people's bodies like an x-ray
machine, on nights like this I heard the bubbling, pumping, swishing and whoops just
beneath my skin, I felt like a balloon with something immense inside, all held together by
a very fragile surface, I began to cry into my hands on a step, until I went inside and the
music took me away from it all, I was able to travel inside those violins and above those
players like wind, I had a little cry when I watched that show RPA (Royal Prince Alfred)
hospital on the surgery procedure in Sydney, there were all these doctors standing around
with hairnets on, eating the hospital food that made me sick to watch it, the program was
mainly on this huge fat man having triple bypass surgery so that he would live, he'd had a
heart attack, then his face went under a big sheet on a silver tray table like a carpenter's
bench, they cut through his bones with a saw and later stitched it up with wire like they
were mending a fence, they ran their gloved surgeon's fingers right around his slippery
greasy heart, the heart was coated in fat, it looked like a butcher's shop in there, they
were grafting a new unclogged vein onto his heart, I suddenly felt like squeezing the fat
out of the artery, I got frightened, then they were mopping up fluids and blood with big
towels, he woke up later and someone rang his family, there was also a woman who'd had
a mastectomy, they sewed a breast back on, they said, "in a few months we'll stitch on a
nipple and then a few weeks after that we'll paint it pink, that should be lovely for you!",
"thank you," she said, grateful for anything, but she looked like Frankenstein, it was the
sight of her poor body stitched to pieces lying in that bed that made me cry inside for life
on earth, I cried on my hands and knees in the dirt in my garden, where I had often cried
as a child waiting for the spaceships to come, there was another woman, a smoker, they
had cut her throat and immersed a plastic pipe, she spoke like a robot, they must have
done it before, because the doctors looked down and said, "we changed you from Daffy
Duck into Darth Vader", this appealed to her sense of humour, she was jovial, making
jokes and eating hospital curry after a year of no solid food, at the end of the program
they showed a lot of photos of her, they said she had come back three months later, they
said the cancer had spread to her liver and she had died shortly afterwards, they made
her human to us and then killed her off, they put us through what they must go through if
they become attached to patients in a hospital, Laura said "why aren't you having
children, again?" I said, "for many reasons", that's all I say, she doesn't really want to hear
why, we live in different galaxies, she said, "this time I gave birth in the bath, there was
all stuff in the water, you know what I mean, blood and guts, I felt like a cow, then when
the waters broke, the baby shot straight out into it and the placenta burst open, it was
amazing!", I have always been frightened of vomiting, when something from deep inside
the body's mantle begins erupting like a volcano, I'm trying to hold it together, I guess
that's the same as rigid women who don't like sex or eating, they just want to remain
solid and wooden like a closed closet, with no entries or exits, Laura continued while in
the background her ten-week-old baby boy opened his lungs like a sundew, to cry out in
that helpless way that affects us all, I said, "congratulations, he sounds beautiful", I felt
the sad joy, "there's nothing delicate about my boys," she said, and hollered at the other
two toddlers dropping the phone piece, the kettle boiled dry in the kitchen and stuck to
the hotplate, "So I'd forget about having a caesar if I were you, although if you stay
conscious, you can look down as they pull the baby out, but it feels like they're doing the
washing up in your stomach, well it does!", I said, "what if they put them back in the
wrong way?, all the cords and organs and stuff?", Laura said, "come on, they're doctors!" |
