Last night found me curled up in the fetal position. My stomach’s hungry bellows reverberated off my spinal chord and rib cage. Lately, to add to the already hectic fiasco I’ve had shoved upon me, every time I get just a little bit hungry my stomach lets me know with wave and wave of crippling pain. Then it decides to swell and bulge slightly like a starving African child before it’s pain subsides enough for me to force food down my throat.

I’ve decided it’s stress related and not worth the $15 co-pay to investigate. Besides, I probably couldn’t even get an appointment at my doctor’s office for another week or two. This isn’t the first time stress has caused me pain. I’m slowly discovering that when I fall, I fall hard and not just to the ground but past it, deep into the crust of the earth.

During my separation from my husband of five years things began to slowly fall apart for me. Mainly because I knew I didn’t want to be married anymore but the coldness of how it all went down shocked me to my toes. I wound up in the Navy Hospital emergency room on Camp Lejeune’s Marine Corps base. After receiving my bachelor’s degree one month prior, the separation loomed puckishly. We owned a house, two dogs, two cars and a mountain of “stuff.” We had civilly divided it all, but there was the matter of selling the house before he deployed to Iraq. Oh yes I am that woman, my defense against evil was weakening and I knew 8 or 9 or 10 months without my husband would cause terrible things to happen. So I decided to cut off any romantic ideas of deployment at the knees. Our marriage was not strong enough to survive an indefinite deployment to Iraq. Instead of deceiving my husband that I would wait for him patiently in an empty house, with two dogs, in a town with no friends, I decided our lives would be better spent apart. I initially wanted to get back together or at least try to work it out when he returned. But he cut that off at the knees half way through the deployment when he started dating his high school sweetheart through e-mail.

In any case, I was in a hospital bed positioned on my right side. While some type of officer in uniform Charlie held my hand and braced my back. When the needle went in, my immediate reaction was to straighten my back. Until that point, my back was arched like a very irate cat. I also screamed bloody murder as the needle found a home in my spinal disc. Without warning, I was crying and screaming. The officer pressed my shoulders back down and I dropped his hand and squeezed the life out of the metal railings on the bed. I was sure the pain would turn me into the hulk and I would glow green and muscular and crush the railing like string cheese. Instead the needle was pulled out of my back and jammed back in at a different location, deep into another disc. I screamed and cried and there was more pressure for me to arch my back. After the fourth jab from the needle into my spinal cord I had lost my voice. They thought I had meningitis. The only way to check for that is with a spinal tap. However my back was not being cooperative and they couldn’t get a good sample. Seven puncture wounds later they gave up and stopped. They rolled me onto my back and gave me a morphine drip then left what was considered a room, but it was really a bed divided by the bed next door with a curtain. Five minutes later, they came back and told me they could not get a sample and that they will have another doctor come in and try again in a little bit. I began to cry. I called my husband. But as the phone rang the morphine kicked in. He answered but I couldn’t feel my mouth moving,

“I’m in the hospital.”

“What, are you okay?” He was in Charlotte, NC visiting family.

“They gave me a spinal tap.”

“Are you okay?” He repeated.

“I want to go home. They’re giving me another one, soon.”

“What happened?”

“I’m sick, Colin, I’m sick and they think I have meningitis. I have to go. I love you.” I hung up and didn’t hear his response. They pulled back the curtain and said I needed to give them a urine sample. With the Morphine dancing through my veins, I stumbled and fell and tried to shield my backside from the exposing hospital gown. Blood had dried on the gown and made me look like a horror movie victim. I made it to the bathroom and realized I forgot the cup. Later, I found out that after a spinal tap, you’re supposed to lie flat on your back for two hours or it can cause damages to your spinal chord. When I returned to my bed, the curtain revealed a different doctor. It was like a game. I never really knew who was behind curtain number one.

The doctor sat down beside me and I braced myself for the prepping of another spinal tap.

“Well, your color has come back and you are no longer shaking.”

“Yep.” I said in my morphine stupor, but he didn’t hear me.

“Your vitals look good, how are you feeling?”

“Super.”

“I don’t think we need to do another spinal tap, do you?”

“Nope.” Please God No.

“Well, we’ll run your blood work and your urine sample, but your symptoms have seemed to subside. Perhaps you were just overly dehydrated, because the IV has helped.”

“So now what?” He spoke too many words.

“We’re going to release you.”

“Super, can I drive home?”

“No, not on Morphine.”

“Okay.” With that I was allowed to change and I was guided to the patient check out. While standing there, signing my names, my knees buckled and I asked if I could go to the bathroom because I felt sick. The morphine’s good intentions had worn off and I was now in a nightmare. After dry heaving for 15 minutes, I called my friend Jennifer, who was currently renting a room in my marital home. She picked me up and the night was blurred by feverish dreams and cold sweats.

That whole shivering, sweating event was caused by stress it was later discovered. Stress because I was moving to a town an hour away, but I had no residence lined up and worse yet, no job. Our house was being turned over to a new bright eyed military couple in a month and I needed to find a place to live and get a decent job, fast. I was also extremely depressed by the thought of losing my husband. It was all compounded by my fears of everything. I had developed a phobia of driving, of meeting new people, of birds. I was compensating for my stress and loss by shutting down myself to everything normal. I was a nervous, twitching time bomb of crazy, needy suffocating ness.

If we were to fast forward almost exactly two years we’d find me curled up in my bed, crying a little to myself as my stomach attempted to eat itself. While I may not be going through a divorce any longer or scrambling to find a place to live, that doesn’t diminish the stress. I am about $10,000 in the hole. I’ve worked at a job for about a year and make just enough to feed the money sharks and remain in debt. I recently moved – a stress onto itself. The move created an even larger hole in my pocket as deposits and fees built up. After being out of school for two years, I want nothing more than to return to the confines of its comfortable, knowledge-filled walls. However, for two years I have been denied my master’s program and I am so desperate to return I am reaching now for a program outside of my desires. I have been in a stable if not financially destitute relationship for about a year and a half and while I love the boy dearly, financially, I pay for everything and feed my debt lion more scraps of my fleshy humanity. My ex husband has remarried and in fact got engaged before the ink dried on our divorce papers. I’d give anything to be out of debt and to be doing what I love – Writing. But unfortunately I live in a town where there is one newspaper and a vast majority of mediocre writers and it’s come to my attention that I am not sure anymore if I am a good writer.

Besides dabbling in what I truly want to be I watch the days slip in an out. I stress over completing work at a job that doesn’t pay me well, and is in a field I never wanted. I have marched my way into a diluted version of Corporate America. And with my bills, my dog, and my debt it’s very hard for me to find the balls to march back out. I’d like to think that someday I’ll break free of the computer cords of a desk jockey, but in truth – throw enough money at me and I’ll do a jig. It has gotten to that point. Some nights are dedicated to nothing but my sniveling mourning of my life. Oh woes me, I have not found the strength to live simply and carry a big stick. In making myself sick and being a poor excuse of a woman, I am missing the point. It doesn’t matter if the job you work stifles you. It’s not your work hours that define you; it’s your playtime that nurtures you.

But I’ve come to realize life is about wanting things you can’t have and settling for things you can have. I would love to be poetic and say life is about a river whose course is not yet carved into stone, truth be told, I dare you to find an undiscovered, unnamed river.

Have you found one yet?

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