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.
Anna Hamilton | Writer 