Chapter 14: in Sickness and in Health

September 2022

“How was your trip?” asked Kelly once I sorted out Seamus and Riley bickering about something.

“Pretty good. Straightforward, anyway. Just not successful, so to speak.”

Kelly gave me an odd look, but before I could answer, the kids started up again. Seamus was teasing his older sister about something. I reached out and grabbed him by the back of the neck and asked, “Do I need to give you a lesson in barnacle clearance?”

He grinned at me. “Think you can catch me? I’m not the one with the bad leg!”

Kelly rolled her eyes and pointed towards the lake. “I’ll get the door.”

Seamus suddenly decided he had poked the bear through the bars of the cage once too often and tried to get away. I grabbed him. “Wait! No! What...” I threw him over my shoulder, and with Kelly leading the way, carried his struggling carcass down to the water. Boxie was chasing after us, barking merrily. At the end of the dock, I threw him as far as I could, all while he squawked and complained. Boxie jumped in after him and began swimming around.

Riley was laughing and grinning when her mother and I came back to the house. “I got it all on camera!” she said, waving her phone.

“Whatever you were doing to get him going, stop doing it!” I ordered.

“This is going on Facebook!” she replied, heading back down to her room.

Seamus came back to the house, dripping wet and not smiling, though Boxie seemed to be enjoying himself. Kelly directed them both around to the side and in through the laundry room. She made Seamus strip down to his undies and throw everything in the washer. He looked like a drowned rat as he came through the kitchen and headed towards his bedroom. I smiled as he came through.

“That wasn’t funny!” he protested.

“No, it was hilarious! We definitely have to do that again!” I responded.

“There’s going to be some payback, Dad!”

I stood up and smiled. “You up for that?”

He backed away. “Just remember who’s going to be picking out the old folks’ home you end up in!” I made a move to chase him, and he ran down the hall and we heard the lock click on his door.

I sat down on a barstool and looked at my wife. “Well, that was fun. I think I need a drink. You?”

“Sounds good to me. What were you saying about your job being good but unsuccessful?”

I pulled a bottle of whiskey out of the cabinet and grabbed a can of Seven-Up. Then I explained that the job was a good job and the client wanted it to fail. That took a longer explanation.

“So, you need to write up a report showing that the department can’t create a SWAT team, and that’s what the sheriff wants, but it’s not what the council wants?” she asked.

“Pretty much. It’s legitimate, though. Sheriff Conway knows he can’t afford a real SWAT team and he knows he doesn’t need a SWAT team. It’s the county council president who thinks it’s a great idea. I just need to write up the report and maybe make a presentation and let the county council know they’re going to have to radically raise taxes for this. I’m the bad guy and the sheriff looks good.”

“And it’s good that you look bad?” she asked.

I shrugged and smiled. “I look bad but my client - the sheriff - looks good. He’s happy. Happy clients are clients who give you good referrals. That’s good.”

She just shook her head and smiled. “Make me another drink. This makes my head hurt.”

I laughed and made her a drink, then sat around and kibitzed while she made dinner. After dinner we just watched some television while I reviewed the latest edits and revisions on To Protect and Serve: A History of Policing in America, the title Simon & Schuster was planning to use. Around eleven or so it was bedtime, and I followed my wife down the hallway in the hopes of enjoying a bit of conjugal bliss before falling to sleep with my beloved in my arms.

That was the theory, anyway. Kelly was wearing a sleepshirt when she crawled into bed and seemed interested in fooling around, but after a few minutes of foreplay she made a groan, and not a moan. There was enough light coming in from outside that I could see that the look on her face was not a look of impending ecstasy. It was more a look of pain. I pulled away slightly and asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. It’s sort of a stomachache, but not really.”

“Something you ate?” We’d all eaten the same food, chicken riggies and some veggies, with a few cookies later on.

“Uh, a little lower down.”

It took me a second to realize she was referring to her ‘lady parts’. “Something I did?” I hadn’t been doing anything we hadn’t done before, and that Kelly was normally quite enthusiastic about.

She grimaced and said, “No. Just not feeling quite right tonight. Maybe I just need a night’s sleep.”

“Okay.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Not a problem. Get some sleep and we can try again tomorrow.” I kissed her and rolled onto my back with an arm around her.

Only we didn’t try again the next night. Kelly didn’t say anything in the morning and went off to Matucket State as normal. I stayed home and began working, first on the book, sending my latest revision off to the publisher, and then on SWAT problem, creating the spreadsheets that would allow me to do the costing. That evening Kelly still had a stomachache and wasn’t interested in fooling around.

By the weekend, whatever was bothering Kelly seemed to be getting a lot worse. She tried making light of it, but it was obvious that she was in some real pain by Saturday. I forced her to take it seriously by threatening to tell her mother.

“I’m not five, Grim!” she protested.

I wasn’t impressed. “And then I’m going to tell my mother!”

The look on her face was one of pain. “Alright, I’ll call Doctor Pawlensky. It’s a Saturday, so I probably won’t reach her anyway. I might as well wait until Monday.”

I pulled my phone out of my pocket. “You want me to call my mother?”

Kelly flipped me off but called her OB/GYN. Like she expected, the doctor was out, but she left a message with her service and got a call back in an hour. She needed to head over to the clinic right away. That was the Harriman Women’s Clinic, which was a full-service hospital in East Matucket devoted to women’s health. Both of our children had been born there, and they also did stuff related to gynecology and breasts and anything else related to possessors of only X chromosomes. When I commented that my brothers and I had all been born at Matucket General, she replied that maybe that was why we had turned out the way we had.

We ended up calling her mother after all, to get somebody to keep Seamus and Riley from burning the house down. We drove them over to her parents’ house and then continued to the clinic. By then, Kelly was in some very serious pain. She moved to get out of the car but gasped and cried out when she moved. Bad leg or not, I reached down and picked her up and carried her to the door. The automatic doors swung open, and I stepped inside with her. “I NEED SOME HELP HERE!” I called out.

There was a woman at a reception desk who looked up and then hit a button on her desk. “What’s wrong?” she asked. A nurse came around the corner and repeated the question.

“My wife’s in a lot of pain. Her doctor told her to come in,” I said.

The nurse grabbed a stretcher and I laid Kelly down on it. By then she was starting to cry, and she threw up into a small bucket they provided her. The nurse called for an orderly to assist and they pulled the stretcher deeper into the clinic with me following. We got Kelly into a room and got to the questioning phase where we gave her name and explained what was happening. Another call was made to Doctor Pawlensky, who was still about ten minutes out. I just answered questions and held her hand.

My wife calmed down a fair bit when the doctor showed up, though she was still in pain. I was sent away at that point, so I went out into the hallway while Kelly was dressed in a hospital gown and talked to Doctor Pawlensky. After a few minutes, the doctor came out and said, “We’re going to need to run some tests. We’ve done an ultrasound and I’ve ordered up an MRI and a CAT scan.”

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked.

Doctor Pawlensky smiled and replied, “That’s what the tests will tell us.”

The next few hours were a lot of hurry-up-and-wait. Both Kelly’s mother and mine called me to ask what was happening, which I couldn’t really explain. We just promised to call as soon as we knew something. It was mid-afternoon before we got the results. Doctor Pawlensky gave Kelly a shot of Toradol, which she explained was a non-opiate painkiller. Kelly began feeling better almost immediately. Then we got the results. “Okay, I think we have a pretty good feel for what is happening. We won’t know for sure until we can look inside, but I think what happened is that you have several large ovarian cysts and the cysts have caused an ovarian torsion.”

I looked at Kelly in confusion, and she didn’t seem to have any more answers than I did. “What’s that?” she asked.

Doctor Pawlensky took a tablet computer and called up a program on it. She turned it to face us and said, “Here’s a diagram of a woman’s reproductive system.” She expanded it and pointed out the salient features. “This is the uterus, the womb, where the fetus grows and becomes a baby. Up here are the ovaries, where the eggs are, and the Fallopian tubes, which connect the ovaries to the uterus. Down here is the vagina. Now, you two already have two children, so you know that the sperm goes in from this end and the egg comes down from this end, and somewhere in the middle you end up with a baby.” She smiled as she said that.

“Sounds familiar,” I admitted. Kelly agreed.

“That’s the basic version, but like a lot of things, it gets a little trickier when you look at the details.” She changed the picture on the screen. “Women frequently get what are known as cysts, little pockets of fluid that build up on the ovary. This is quite normal, and they mostly go away all on their own. Occasionally, though, something can go wrong. The cyst doesn’t disappear. It can keep growing, or maybe it bursts, or it can even turn cancerous.” I turned white hearing that and Kelly gasped and grabbed my hand. “Now, don’t worry about that. Some of this is worst case thinking. I don’t think that has happened here, but it’s still serious.” She changed to another diagram. “Sometimes the cyst doesn’t shrink but starts moving around inside and twists the ovary it’s attached to. That twist is what we call a torsion, and until we can fix that, you’ll be in pain.”

“How do you fix it?” I asked.

“Surgery. We’ll need to do what’s called an exploratory laparoscopy, which involves inserting several very small and thin tools inside you and looking around. That will allow us to figure out what is happening for sure. We can remove the cysts and untwist the ovary. In the worst case, we can operate and do it by hand, but we won’t know for sure until we look around first.”

I looked at Kelly, who looked terrified, and I muttered “Jesus Christ!” What had started as a little discomfort when fooling around was suddenly a whole lot more serious!

Kelly asked, “When do we do this?”

“The sooner the better. I want to admit you to the hospital today, right now. Did you eat today?”

Kelly shook her head and admitted, “No, I just wasn’t feeling like eating. I didn’t think I could keep anything down. I just had some juice.”

“That will make it easier. You’ll be under general anesthesia.”

“You mean you want to operate today? Is this an emergency?” I asked. This seemed to be moving awfully fast.

Pawlensky nodded. “This is serious, but I don’t want you to worry. Ovarian cysts are very common, and an ovarian torsion is quite treatable. If that is all we find, you’ll be home tomorrow or the next day with just a few Band-Aids to worry about. You’ll be back on your feet in just a few hours.”

“What do you mean if that is all we find?” Kelly asked.

The doctor simply shook her head. “Once we can look around, we’ll know what we are looking at. There might be complications.”

“Like?” I asked.

She sighed. Doctors don’t like being pushed on that sort of thing. “There could be complications from either the cysts or the torsion. Now, I don’t want you to worry.”

“Please, what complications?” I pulled out my phone and said, “Or do I google it?”

She groaned and said, “Put it away. Those sites are worse than useless!” I put away the phone. “Okay, in some cases an ovarian cyst can rupture and cause an infection, just like a burst appendix. Sometimes a cyst can be cancerous or pre-cancerous. Sometimes the torsion is severe and can cause a necrosis condition, where some of the surrounding tissues can die from lack of blood supply. We just won’t know until we can go in and look around. That’s why we need to do it sooner rather than later. It won’t get better on its own, but this is really standard surgery. I want to call in a surgeon and get to this today.”

“You won’t do this?” asked Kelly. Doctor Pawlensky was Kelly’s longtime gynecologist and had delivered both of our children.

She shook her head. “If I had to, I could, but I have in mind another guy. It’s one thing for me to do an episiotomy or a Caesarian, but this is different. Laparoscopy is a totally different sort of surgery. I’ll gown up to assist, but he’ll be the primary.”

Kelly looked at me, but I didn’t have any answers either. I shrugged and nodded. Kelly said, “I guess I have to.” I just nodded.

“I need to make some calls. We’ll need to transfer you over to Matucket General and do some scheduling. Who’s watching your children?”

“My mother.”

“You should call her and let her know what’s happening, maybe see if she can watch them until later.” She left us in the exam room.

I looked at Kelly. “Jesus, babe, I guess you really were feeling bad the other night!”

“I sure hope that wasn’t you trying to be funny,” she said.

“Yeah, that kind of sucked. Sorry.” Kelly squeezed my hand. “I don’t know what to do. All those times it was me in the hospital and you taking care of me ... now what do I do?”

“Grim, don’t worry. This is probably pretty minor. She’s right. Lots of women have ovarian cysts.”

“Do you want to call the expert, or do you want to wait for her to call you?” The expert, of course, was my mother. Mom might have retired, but she was still a nurse and knew more about this stuff than I did. Just as I finished the question, my phone rang again. I glanced at the display, which said MOM. I showed the screen to Kelly. “Here, it’s for you.”

Kelly groaned. “Asshole!” She took the phone and answered it. “Hi, Mom.”

That got me about a fifteen-minute reprieve.

I didn’t even bother talking to my mother, because after five minutes she was going to ask for Kelly again. After hanging up, my mother was going to head over to the house and pick up a bag for Kelly, and then bring it to the clinic. If we were gone by then she would follow us to Matucket General.

That was where she found us. Shortly after we hung up with her, an ambulance showed up and Kelly was loaded into it. I followed it over to Matucket General. Mom showed up half an hour later. She immediately hugged Kelly and me. Then she began going into some medical detail about what was going to happen. That was where Pawlensky found us, bringing in another doctor, this one a man. “This is Russell Whitaker. He’s both a gynecologist and a surgeon. He’ll be the one doing the operation.”

Doctor Whitaker was a young man, in his early teens, or at least he looked that young to me. He stepped forward and held his hand out to Kelly. “It’s nice to meet you, though I wish it wasn’t in these circumstances.” Then he shook my hand and nodded to my mother. “Maureen, are you related to Mrs. Reaper?”

“She’s my daughter-in-law.”

He nodded. “Well, be assured I will do my very best.” He turned back to Kelly. “Mrs. Reaper, I know that Doctor Pawlensky has discussed what we think is going on inside you, and I have seen the scans and ultrasound results. I think she is right, but we just won’t know until we look inside you. The most likely outcome is that we’re going to be able to remove your cyst and reverse the torsion, and by this time tomorrow you’ll be resting at home.”

“That sounds good,” she said.

He nodded but added, “You have to understand that other things might happen. We might find other cysts. We might find other problems, things we can’t be sure of until we look inside.” He began to describe the procedure, where small incisions would be placed around her abdomen and different tiny instruments would be inserted through the holes. Then gas would be blown inside her belly, inflating her and giving them room to look around. They would do their work and then remove the instruments and let her deflate. She’d be a bit bloated and uncomfortable, but it was a lot less intrusive than the alternative. That was the old-fashioned surgical method, with scalpels and sutures and a lot more muscle and tissue damage.