What is the saddest you've ever been?
For me of course I would have to say the saddest periods in my life have always been after a loss in the family or a lost love.
But there is something especially cruel about a loss of function; the loss of feeling completely whole that comes with a major illness or after being injured.
OK, before I continue I want to say I'm not trying to belittle people who've lost limbs or have suffered permanent damage. I can't even come close to imagining what that must be like. But my loss was a real loss, one that you can't possibly understand until you've been with it.
Let me start at the beginning. Just around my 27th birthday, while I was working at an English language school, I started waking up in the middle of the night with intense stomach pains. It was like a bad stomachache but worse. The easiest way to describe it would be to say it was like someone had shoved a steel tube into my gut just below the ribs and pumped me full of liquid hard and fast. The ripping sensation of a gut injury was also followed by aching muscles and a sore lower back (and for anyone who's had these symptoms I'd recommend getting checked out - it can get serious).
After a few months and a few more attacks I went to the hospital and was diagnosed as having a gallbladder chock full of stones. And it all had to come out. But in all honesty it didn't really mean much to me at the time; I just wanted the pain to stop.
The surgery went mostly well and besides the frightening experience of getting to watch an old man be revived and flatline over and over for an hour, all was OK. I stayed on in the hospital for a week afterwards, because my liver had all but shut down before my surgery and they wanted to keep an eye on me (and no, it's not due to some failings in the Japanese medical system; Japan has top notch medicine in most areas - I'll post more on this later).
What hit me hardest was right after I was let out. Or more specifically a month after I was out.
While I was in the hospital I heard from the docs that my diet would have to change; it was a constant intake of shitty fast foods and greasy late night meals that had caused the stones to form, and that would have to stop. And not only that - my body now was simply not able to process as much as it had been before. I talked to a few friends that were sans gallbladders, and they all told me the same thing: after a month or a year you'll be able to eat almost anything, except a few things that'll be out for good. One girl said she just can't eat spicy stuff anymore. Another had mostly gone vegan because meats seemed to screw her up big time. It's different for everyone.
So for the first few weeks I just took it easy, subsisting on as plain and easy to digest foods as possible. And it was good. I was eating healthy, and for the most part didn't have any problems.
Except with breakfast. Right after getting out of the hospital I had some eggs for breakfast and it killed me.
The problem is after losing your gallbladder your body has to make a regular amount of bile because it can't store it for an emergency anymore, and if you eat a lot at an odd time or if you eat something greasy it can screw you up. So you're left unable to fully digest things sometimes, and that can hurt bad.
For me the first thing that did that to me was those eggs, and after a few more timid tries I discovered to my horror that it was pretty much all breakfast foods that don't sound like corn flakes would chop me up and spit me out.
It was right around this time that I went to Taiwan for a small vacation. It was fun but also frustrating at the same time. I honestly wasn't in any condition to fly anywhere, but I did anyway and messed my guts up several times while I was there.
And the weekend after I got back they had Se7en on TV. I love that movie so I watched it, even though I was in a bad state to begin with. And then there's the scene where Gwyneth Paltrow goes to get advice from Morgan Freeman at a diner. It's a shitty little greasy spoon kind of place, and the conversation they have is of loss.
Then it hit me, when they showed the cook crack open some eggs on the griddle: I was done. I would never be able to enjoy that again: the eggs, the bacon, ham and sausage - all gone. Two months ago I was fine. Now I wasn't. I wasn't whole anymore. A piece of me had been torn out (at age 27 no less) and I would never be able to recover, not fully. I could learn to live with it, but the me that had been happy and complete was no longer there. Of course it didn't help that I'd lost a lot of weight on an IV drip for over a week - the face I saw in the mirror, the gaunt sickly me, looked back and I couldn't even recognize myself.
I fell into a whole. That's the only way to describe it. I'd been sad in the past, or depressed over stuff like people get, but this was different. It was overwhelming. It was blackness, and empty. I knew it was just eggs and bacon (and who knows what other foods I hadn't tried yet), but it was more than that. I was no longer there, in a sense, and that feeling of utter emptiness and helplessness was... too much to handle. All over some eggs and bacon.
As a postscript to this story, things have gotten better. Of course I got over the depression. That was more of an expression of my feeling of loss from the surgery and helplessness with being abruptly confronted by my own mortality more than any one concrete thing. And I actually can eat eggs now, and bacon and all kinds of things. I can't eat a lot of greasy food, though, not all at once. My limits are strict and I live by them. But I still do get hit by an upset stomach from time to time, and when it hits I know instantly what caused it; it's a "shit I shouldn't have eaten that 2nd hashbrown" kind of post-gallbladder surgery stomachache that I'm sure I share with everyone who's gone through the same ordeal as me.
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