EDNA | Ann Bebensee
No one wanted to talk about Edna. Not that she’d care. She could give a shit. Talking about her made people uncomfortable. Meeting her made them squirm in their seats and smile stiffly. They tried not to look away, just to be polite, but their eyes darted to the sides, glazed over and then looked beyond her.
I didn’t want to meet Edna either. Unexpected guests have never thrilled me, and she struck me as a pain in the ass. Before I met her, I pictured a little old lady with white hair and a cane that she would swing around in shops of breakables, just to get quicker service. Knowing her now, I’d say that assessment is pretty accurate. They said she’d be with me six months. They lied. It took a year. She saved my life.
***
“See,” Krista, the stoma nurse, pointed to her apron, which had a large cartoon drawing of a gastrointestinal system on it. Stomach to small intestine to colon to anus. “First they will cut your colon here,” she pulled out a piece of red tubing, “and sew it onto here.” She pulled the tubing high up on the picture. “Then they will pull it out…here.” Krista struggled to shove the end of the tubing through a hole in her apron. “And this will be your stoma! The stoma will empty into this ostomy bag.”
It all seemed unreal. Having a piece of my gut hanging out of my body seemed like a bad idea. “And here’s how you’ll put on the bag.” She smiled again and brought out the equipment and made me go through the motions on the apron. It was clean, and brightly colored and harmless. I knew the real thing would not be that simple. “Good job!” She exclaimed. “Now where shall we put her?” Krista looked at my belly, palpated. Had me sit up to see where the rolls of fat fell, and finally drew a purple circle below my right breast. In two days, it would be a hole.
“Some people like to name their stomas,” she said. “It helps them separate from it, makes it more acceptable. I thought about that for a moment, wasn’t sure if it was for me. We finished the visit and I gave her a weak smile. “It’s just poop,” I said, like it was no big deal. “It’s just poop,” she agreed.
I woke up in the hospital alone. It was COVID time, and not even my husband could visit during my four-day stay. I hurt, but not too bad. I was weak and wanted to go back to sleep but the urge to peek overcame my drowsiness. I picked up the sheet. There was Edna. Edna the Stoma. She was pink and wet, and covered in brown goo. She was warm enough to cause condensation in the bag and it was hard to see her. The brown goo continued in a trickle into a clear plastic bag. She didn’t seem a part of me, but it didn’t really matter. I needed to sleep.
The hospital ostomy nurse visited the next day to show me how to change Edna. She stood me, still weak and wobbly, in front of the mirror in the bathroom. It seemed to take forever. I was afraid I would fall. I removed the bag, about a third full, and threw it into the garbage. She had me clean Edna before putting on a new bag. Edna pulsated a little. I took a Kleenex and began to wipe. My fingertip brushed her and I winced. I couldn’t feel anything on Edna’s side, but on my finger, she was warm and wet, like a delicate sponge. She felt alive, apart from me, but still irrevocably attached to me. I patted some stoma powder onto her edges to help her stick to the bag, touching her again. She squirted at me. I wiped her, reapplied the powder, put on the bag. It made me queasy. The nurse grabbed my hand and patted around the bag. “Not like that! Like this!” She frowned at me in the mirror. I wanted my Krista nurse back.
Edna lived up to her cranky old lady reputation. She bulged proudly under my clothes as she filled, announcing herself, entering the room before me. She secreted acid along with her normal content. The acid helped break down food, but it also broke down the skin around Edna, making it as red and angry as Edna herself.
From the get-go, I was at war with Edna. She was prolific, an attention whore. As I started chemotherapy, she earned the name ‘high output,’ great for a productive worker, but the kiss of death for a stoma. She demanded that I empty her every fifteen minutes, as opposed to the usual three to five times a day. She made sure I lost enough fluid loss to require hours of IV infusion, where I had time to think about her and curse her name. It didn’t make a difference. I grew weaker each day, until, one day, I stood at the bathroom sink and knew that if I sat down, I would not be able to rise again. My husband had asked me every day, “Don’t you think you should be hospitalized?” Every day I said no. That day I admitted that, maybe, Edna had won.
I spent fifteen days in the hospital. My nurse thought it would be only two. I lay there and Edna worked her magic. Five liters of magic a day. A huge amount of fluid to lose. The nurses hooked up a urine collection tank to take it all in. It couldn’t keep up. Edna would leak triumphantly out of the set up and I would push the nurse call button again and again.
Only a few nurses knew how to change her. One night, Juan, a slight, older nurse came in to change her for the umpteenth time. Edna defied him at every turn. He glared at her. She squirted at him. “Her name is Edna,” I told him, as if that would make it better. Juan cleaned Edna for the third time. “Be good Edna, be good Edna, be good,” he whispered like someone chanting a rosary as he bent over her. An hour later, she was good, at least for a little bit.
“Reggie needs a challenge,” the nurses said. Reggie was the nurse that handled all the difficult ostomies in the hospital. I didn’t want to be a challenge. I wanted to be the most boring ostomy patient in the world. Reggie would jury-rig Rube Goldberg arrangements of bags and tubes, and Edna would rejoice at figuring it out in a few hours. He’d invent another contraption, to no avail.
No one could understand why Edna was so angry. The gastroenterologists blamed chemotherapy. The oncologist said it was a gastroenterology problem. They fought, and Edna produced, and I got weaker. After a week, the GI doctor put a scope in Edna. “Chemotherapy-induced ileitis,” he pronounced. Edna, and the piece of gut she was attached to, was inflamed. Everything else having been ruled out, my oncologist agreed it could be the chemo. “It’s very rare!” She told me. “Publishable!” I was given the $80,000 antidote. The nurses would mix it in applesauce and hover over me while I ate it, ensuring I didn’t waste any. It was grainy and bitter, but I gagged it down. A few days later, I ate a small bowl of Rice Chex, the first food I’d had besides the applesauce in a week. I still have a photo of the empty bowl that I sent to my husband and my oncologist to show off my victory.
Sixteen days after I was hospitalized, Edna relented, grudgingly, but gave me the gift of a month of TPN, IV nutrition. We came to a tentative ceasefire, but she never made life easy. Edna got me through twelve rounds of chemo. She labored while I slept fourteen hours a day.
She stuck with me through the days I didn’t want to stick through.
Thirteen months later, on my fourth wedding anniversary, Edna was reversed. She left only a small but impressive scar behind.
I didn’t know Edna meant ‘rebirth’ when I named her. I just thought the name was appropriate for a cranky old lady. I suppose she did offer me a type of rebirth, one into a world I didn’t ask for, and didn’t enjoy, but which kept me alive. Edna was tough, gritty, a survivor, all things that I wanted to be but didn’t feel like during the days of TPN and infusions and chemo. Once she left, the world got worse because of side effects from the previous surgery. I became incontinent and acquired a mean Imodium habit. I became housebound.
It’s been two years since Edna left, and I miss her enough that I am inviting her back, not to save my life this time, but to restore some quality of life. I thought of naming my new stoma something different, but I feel it would be a disservice to Edna. I find it hard to believe I am looking forward to seeing her again, but I am. I thanked her in the past, but it always seemed a little bitter, a little ungrateful. Now I can say, without reservation…
Thank you, Edna.
Ann Bebensee is a retired neurologist and writer. Her work appears on The Keepthings. She lives in California with her husband and Bernese Mountain Dog.