essay | Anna Hamilton

Image of a white woman in a hospital setting. She is pointing her phone at a mirror and scowling.

I took this picture shortly after my surgery, which explains the scowl.

I had my gallbladder removed last January. Here is a humorous essay about that experience. There are a ton of racialized disparities in pain management, which I do not cover in this essay.

It started with a salad.

My mom and I met for lunch on a Friday, at a pizza place that I had never been to, but had chosen because I was ravenously hungry. I ordered a Greek salad. It was not very good, but since I was hungry, I ate it anyway.

I couldn’t eat the next day, save for a scone and some water. It was the salad, I thought. I ordered a salad from a pizza joint. Of course it’s making me sick. At some point, I started throwing up and couldn’t stop. The vomit looked like sand; when I had nothing left in my stomach, clear bile came out of my mouth and streamed into the toilet bowl, making me look like world’s worst fountain. Imagine the famous Belgian “Mannaken Pis” statue, except it was my unlucky self bent over the toilet bowl, with a stream of yellow bile instead of water coming from my mouth.

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Beyond Human: The Heaven’s Gate Cult, Transhumanism, and Me

A selfie with one of the Heaven’s Gate (post-mass suicide) photos, as shown in John R. Hall’s excellent 2000 study on new religious movements, Apocalypse Observed.

[Originally published on Disability Intersections on March 21, 2014.]

Heaven’s Gate was an American UFO religious Millenarian group based in San Diego, California, founded in the early 1970s and led by Marshall Applewhite (1931–1997) and Bonnie Nettles (1927–1985). On March 26, 1997, police discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group who had committed mass suicide in order to reach what they believed was an alien space craft following the Comet Hale–Bopp, which was then at its brightest.

–From Wikipedia’s entry on Heaven’s Gate (content warning on link for description of suicide and photos)

I’ve been fascinated with the Heaven’s Gate cult ever since I saw–as an 11 year-old–a huge photograph of the members’ dead bodies, apparently peacefully posed on bunkbeds, on the front page of my local paper, under the rather alarmist headline (and all-caps) headline HOUSE OF HORROR. As I picked up bits and pieces of information on the group that the news media breathlessly reported throughout April and May of 1997, I began to wonder if the “house of horror” headline was overblown; yes, these folks had committed mass suicide, but they had also found people to whom they could relate and live with peacefully (albeit in a fringe religious group). Was that so horrifying? To most people–and to the media–it seemed like the answer was a resounding yes.

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Anna Hamilton | Writer

Tag Archives: essay

My Gallbladder Removal Adventure

Beyond Human: The Heaven’s Gate Cult, Transhumanism, and Me