Years after Sesame Street, Elmo has become a published scientist and very highly ranked in his field. Yet he still can’t shake the stigma of being both a former child star and a muppet.
He was tired of the jokes. Tired of the teasing and the disgusting comments on his former life. Tired of being asked where the puppet master was. Tired of being told her never be more than a t.v. clown.
“It’ll really be Elmos World now.” He chuckled darkly as he finished the last peices of his nuclear machine.
It turns out, knowledge truly is power. Now, the more knowledge a person knows/possesses, the stronger, faster, and more powerful they become.
Books had become a status symbol.
The more books you had the more knowledge you must have accrued. A library of facts and power at your fingertips at all times. People began to avoid confrontation with those that had the books. Librarian faces were well known and respected for the strength they held.
You had gained quite a reputation yourself. You had managed to fill every room in your house with dictionaries and scientific studies. You had a large window in the front so on lookers could see how powerful you were by the novels stacked high in every visible space. You were a force to be reckoned with, they said.
It was a good thing they never challenged you because you couldn’t read anyways.
I dont know if I’m a hypochondriac
Or if i just want to find some where i belong.
I dont know if I’m autistic but it feels right
I dont know if i have chronic pain, but this doesn’t feel ‘normal’
I dont know if i am manic depressive but you’d can’t be what every one feels
I dont know if i have generalised anxiety but why else would i be this way
I dont know if i have ptsd, but why does this feel like a conditioned response
I dont know if i have did, but so many symptoms would make sense if i did.
i want to write the kind of short stories you read in english class that are on this weird level of surrealism that they still haunt you years down the road
Early on a Wednesday morning, I heard an anguished cry—then silence.
I rushed into the bedroom and watched my wife, Rachel, stumble from the bathroom, doubled over, hugging herself in pain.
“Something’s wrong,” she gasped.
This scared me. Rachel’s not the type to sound the alarm over every pinch or twinge. She cut her finger badly once, when we lived in Iowa City, and joked all the way to Mercy Hospital as the rag wrapped around the wound reddened with her blood. Once, hobbled by a training injury in the days before a marathon, she limped across the finish line anyway.
So when I saw Rachel collapse on our bed, her hands grasping and ungrasping like an infant’s, I called the ambulance. I gave the dispatcher our address, then helped my wife to the bathroom to vomit.
I don’t know how long it took for the ambulance to reach us that Wednesday morning. Pain and panic have a way of distorting time, ballooning it, then compressing it again. But when we heard the sirens wailing somewhere far away, my whole body flooded with relief.
I didn’t know our wait was just beginning.
I buzzed the EMTs into our apartment. We answered their questions: When did the pain start? That morning. Where was it on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being worst?
“Eleven,” Rachel croaked.
As we loaded into the ambulance, here’s what we didn’t know: Rachel had an ovarian cyst, a fairly common thing. But it had grown, undetected, until it was so large that it finally weighed her ovary down, twisting the fallopian tube like you’d wring out a sponge. This is called ovarian torsion, and it creates the kind of organ-failure pain few people experience and live to tell about.
“Ovarian torsion represents a true surgical emergency,” says an article in the medical journal Case Reports in Emergency Medicine. “High clinical suspicion is important. … Ramifications include ovarian loss, intra-abdominal infection, sepsis, and even death.” The best chance of salvaging a torsed ovary is surgery within eight hours of when the pain starts.
* * *
There is nothing like witnessing a loved one in deadly agony. Your muscles swell with the blood they need to fight or run. I felt like I could bend iron, tear nylon, through the 10-minute ambulance ride and as we entered the windowless basement hallways of the hospital.
And there we stopped. The intake line was long—a row of cots stretched down the darkened hall. Someone wheeled a gurney out for Rachel. Shaking, she got herself between the sheets, lay down, and officially became a patient.
We didn’t know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has.
Emergency-room patients are supposed to be immediately assessed and treated according to the urgency of their condition. Most hospitals use the Emergency Severity Index, a five-level system that categorizes patients on a scale from “resuscitate” (treat immediately) to “non-urgent” (treat within two to 24 hours).
I knew which end of the spectrum we were on. Rachel was nearly crucified with pain, her arms gripping the metal rails blanched-knuckle tight. I flagged down the first nurse I could.
“My wife,” I said. “I’ve never seen her like this. Something’s wrong, you have to see her.”
“She’ll have to wait her turn,” she said. Other nurses’ reactions ranged from dismissive to condescending. “You’re just feeling a little pain, honey,” one of them told Rachel, all but patting her head.
We didn’t know her ovary was dying, calling out in the starkest language the body has. I saw only the way Rachel’s whole face twisted with the pain.
Soon, I started to realize—in a kind of panic—that there was no system of triage in effect. The other patients in the line slept peacefully, or stared up at the ceiling, bored, or chatted with their loved ones. It seemed that arrival order, not symptom severity, would determine when we’d be seen.
As we neared the ward’s open door, a nurse came to take Rachel’s blood pressure. By then, Rachel was writhing so uncontrollably that the nurse couldn’t get her reading.
She sighed and put down her squeezebox.
“You’ll have to sit still, or we’ll just have to start over,” she said.
Finally, we pulled her bed inside. They strapped a plastic bracelet, like half a handcuff, around Rachel’s wrist.
* * *
From an early age we’re taught to observe basic social codes: Be polite. Ask nicely.Wait your turn. But during an emergency, established codes evaporate—this is why ambulances can run red lights and drive on the wrong side of the road. I found myself pleading, uselessly, for that kind of special treatment. I kept having the strange impulse to take out my phone and call 911, as if that might transport us back to an urgent, responsive world where emergencies exist.
The average emergency-room patient in the U.S. waits 28 minutes before seeing a doctor. I later learned that at Brooklyn Hospital Center, where we were, the average wait was nearly three times as long, an hour and 49 minutes. Our wait would be much, much longer.
Everyone we encountered worked to assure me this was not an emergency. “Stones,” one of the nurses had pronounced. That made sense. I could believe that. I knew that kidney stones caused agony but never death. She’d be fine, I convinced myself, if I could only get her something for the pain.
By 10 a.m., Rachel’s cot had moved into the “red zone” of the E.R., a square room with maybe 30 beds pushed up against three walls. She hardly noticed when the attending physician came and visited her bed; I almost missed him, too. He never touched her body. He asked a few quick questions, and then left. His visit was so brief it didn’t register that he was the person overseeing Rachel’s care.
Around 10:45, someone came with an inverted vial and began to strap a tourniquet around Rachel’s trembling arm. We didn’t know it, but the doctor had prescribed the standard pain-management treatment for patients with kidney stones: hydromorphone for the pain, followed by a CT scan.
The pain medicine started seeping in. Rachel fell into a kind of shadow consciousness, awake but silent, her mouth frozen in an awful, anguished scowl. But for the first time that morning, she rested.
* * *
Leslie Jamison’s essay “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” examines ways that different forms of female suffering are minimized, mocked, coaxed into silence. In an interview included in her book The Empathy Exams, she discussed the piece, saying: “Months after I wrote that essay, one of my best friends had an experience where she was in a serious amount of pain that wasn’t taken seriously at the ER.”
She was talking about Rachel.
“Women are likely to be treated less aggressively until they prove that they are as sick as male patients.”
“That to me felt like this deeply personal and deeply upsetting embodiment of what was at stake,” she said. “Not just on the side of the medical establishment—where female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggerated—but on the side of the woman herself: My friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic.”
“Female pain might be perceived as constructed or exaggerated”: We saw this from the moment we entered the hospital, as the staff downplayed Rachel’s pain, even plain ignored it. In her essay, Jamison refers back to “The Girl Who Cried Pain,” a study identifying ways gender bias tends to play out in clinical pain management. Women are “more likely to be treated less aggressively in their initial encounters with the health-care system until they ‘prove that they are as sick as male patients,’” the study concludes—a phenomenon referred to in the medical community as “Yentl Syndrome.”
In the hospital, a lab tech made small talk, asked me how I like living in Brooklyn, while my wife struggled to hold still enough for the CT scan to take a clear shot of her abdomen.
“Lot of patients to get to, honey,” we heard, again and again, when we begged for stronger painkillers. “Don’t cry.”
I felt certain of this: The diagnosis of kidney stones—repeated by the nurses and confirmed by the attending physician’s prescribed course of treatment—was a denial of the specifically female nature of Rachel’s pain. A more careful examiner would have seen the need for gynecological evaluation; later, doctors told us that Rachel’s swollen ovary was likely palpable through the surface of her skin. But this particular ER, like many in the United States, had no attending OB-GYN. And every nurse’s shrug seemed to say, “Women cry—what can you do?”
Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours.
“My friend has been reckoning in a sustained way about her own fears about coming across as melodramatic.” Rachel does struggle with this, even now. How long is it appropriate to continue to process a traumatic event through language, through repeated retellings? Friends have heard the story, and still she finds herself searching for language to tell it again, again, as if the experience is a vast terrain that can never be fully circumscribed by words. Still, in the throes of debilitating pain, she tried to bite her lip, wait her turn, be good for the doctors.
For hours, nothing happened. Around 3 o’clock, we got the CT scan and came back to the ER. Otherwise, Rachel lay there, half-asleep, suffering and silent. Later, she’d tell me that the hydromorphone didn’t really stop the pain—just numbed it slightly. Mostly, it made her feel sedated, too tired to fight.
If she had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited.
Eventually, the doctor—the man who’d come to Rachel’s bedside briefly, and just once—packed his briefcase and left. He’d been around the ER all day, mostly staring into a computer. We only found out later he’d been the one with the power to rescue or forget us.
When a younger woman came on duty to take his place, I flagged her down. I told her we were waiting on the results of a CT scan, and I hassled her until she agreed to see if the results had come in.
When she pulled up Rachel’s file, her eyes widened.
“What is this mess?” she said. Her pupils flicked as she scanned the page, the screen reflected in her eyes.
“Oh my god,” she murmured, as though I wasn’t standing there to hear. “He never did an exam.”
The male doctor had prescribed the standard treatment for kidney stones—Dilauded for the pain, a CT scan to confirm the presence of the stones. In all the hours Rachel spent under his care, he’d never checked back after his initial visit. He was that sure. As far as he was concerned, his job was done.
If Rachel had been alone, with no one to agitate for her care, there’s no telling how long she might have waited.
It was almost another hour before we got the CT results. But when they came, they changed everything.
“She has a large mass in her abdomen,” the female doctor said. “We don’t know what it is.”
That’s when we lost it. Not just because our minds filled then with words liketumor and cancer and malignant. Not just because Rachel had gone half crazy with the waiting and the pain. It was because we’d asked to wait our turn all through the day—longer than a standard office shift—only to find out we’d been an emergency all along.
Suddenly, the world responded with the urgency we wanted. I helped a nurse push Rachel’s cot down a long hallway, and I ran beside her in a mad dash to make the ultrasound lab before it closed. It seemed impossible, but we were told that if we didn’t catch the tech before he left, Rachel’s care would have to be delayed until morning.
“Whatever happens,” Rachel told me while the tech prepared the machine, “don’t let me stay here through the night. I won’t make it. I don’t care what they tell you—I know I won’t.”
Soon, the tech was peering inside Rachel through a gray screen. I couldn’t see what he saw, so I watched his face. His features rearranged into a disbelieving grimace.
By then, Rachel and I were grasping at straws. We thought: cancer. We thought: hysterectomy. Lying there in the dim light, Rachel almost seemed relieved.
“I can live without my uterus,” she said, with a soft, weak smile. “They can take it out, and I’ll get by.”
She’d make the tradeoff gladly, if it meant the pain would stop.
After the ultrasound, we led the gurney—slowly, this time—down the long hall to the ER, which by then was completely crammed with beds. Trying to find a spot for Rachel’s cot was like navigating rush-hour traffic.
Then came more bad news. At 8 p.m., they had to clear the floor for rounds. Anyone who was not a nurse, or lying in a bed, had to leave the premises until visiting hours began again at 9.
When they let me back in an hour later, I found Rachel alone in a side room of the ER. So much had happened. Another doctor had told her the mass was her ovary, she said. She had something called ovarian torsion—the fallopian-tube twists, cutting off blood. There was no saving it. They’d have to take it out.
Rachel seemed confident and ready.
“He’s a good doctor,” she said. “He couldn’t believe that they left me here all day. He knows how much it hurts.”
When I met the surgery team, I saw Rachel was right. Talking with them, the words we’d used all day—excruciating, emergency, eleven—registered with real and urgent meaning. They wanted to help.
By 10:30, everything was ready. Rachel and I said goodbye outside the surgery room, 14 and a half hours from when her pain had started.
* * *
Rachel’s physical scars are healing, and she can go on the long runs she loves, but she’s still grappling with the psychic toll—what she calls “the trauma of not being seen.” She has nightmares, some nights. I wake her up when her limbs start twitching.
Sometimes we inspect the scars on her body together, looking at the way the pink, raised skin starts blending into ordinary flesh. Maybe one day, they’ll become invisible. Maybe they never will.
This made me SOOOO FUCKING ANGRY
“You can’t be in that much pain! You wouldn’t be able to move at all!”
*pterodactyl screeching*
My experience is that doctor’s take women’s conditions less seriously-pain or otherwise-then men. When I was at college I found that my boyfriend (at the time) got pretty decent treatment at the college health center. Me, not so much. He’d get antibiotics while, when I caught the thing from him, I’d get nothing. ANYTHING was assumed a symptom of pregnancy despite the fact that I was and expressed that I was a virgin. A couple of times when I finally saw the doctor the wrong symptoms were given to him. They refused to believe I had asthma and would not treat me for it, despite having asthma my whole life and seeing a specialist for it my whole life.
This is a big flashback for me. I wasn’t in pain, but I was in the hospital for TEN DAYS, hearing things like “it could be this but you’re too young for it,” before someone finally said, “hey, she’s young and female, what if something’s wrong with her ovaries?” Lo and behold, I had a 30-pound tumor on my right ovary. Nobody could believe I was still ambulatory. And then, surprise! Ovarian cancer!
The individual specialists I saw were great (aside from one guy but that’s another show), but there was something seriously wrong with a system that tested a 33-year-old woman with abdominal swelling for cirrhosis of the liver before introducing a gynecologist to the game.
I have to wonder if this article had been written by Rachel herself, not “Joe,” if it would’ve gotten published at all.
I cried reading this. It breaks my heart to know so many woman go through this. How can someone decide how much pain you’re in? This is why instead of a pain scale, we need a device to attach to nurses and doctors that we can control and make it so they feel what we feel. And when it gets to the point that they’re screaming and crying, you can confidently tell them, yeah, that’s kind of what it’s like. Get the hell out of here with, “you can’t be in that much pain.” I can and, apparently, you can be that much of a douche bag, get out of my face.
When I asked my (male) gyn if it was possible that my pain was caused by endometriosis (since my mum had it too) he just said: “No I don’t think so. You wouldn’t be able to stand up if you had it, must be something else.”
Like bitch I’m on so many meds right now I should not be able to talk to you.
Oh, and when I told him after my surgery that it indeed HAD been endo he responded with: “Whoops, well to err is human haha.”
The saddest thing is this extends to children too. When I was in 4th grade I broke my hand and my teacher assumed I was being dramatic about it, that I would be okay, despite the surplus of elementary school boys that manage to break their arms on the playground. I sat through the last 30 minutes of the day in tons of pain, went to my after school program, and showed them my swollen hand. The director of the program took me quickly to the school nurse before she left for the day, and the nurse suggested I get an x-ray. I had a doctor’s appointment after school (this was a Wednesday,) where they confirmed that it was broken, but they couldn’t get me in to see a osteopathic doctor until Monday and I worked through school and the weekend with my broken metacarpal in a carpal tunnel splint.
I was in 10th grade, not 20 min left before school was out and i was sitting in the bathroom next to the toilet begging my mom to come get me. As soon as i got in her car I had to get right back out to throw up in the gutter. I was in so much pain I couldn’t stand straight, and everything i ate came right back up. I had a constant sharp pain in my side, and had a fever so high the only way i felt warm was if i filled the tub with water I’d boiled on the stove.
I had a lovely doctor at an urgent care who had my mom take me to the hospital for imaging. The doctor at the hospital, took one look at me, decided i was over reacting and it was just a virus that was going around. I sat in a hospital bed for a week and then they sent me home for Xmas.
I was of course not getting any better. So my mom finally took me to a better hospital, they did imaging as soon as i got there. And with in a few hours they found out I had a ruptured appendix and had grown a lovely abscess slightly larger than a grape fruit.
I dont trust doctors. I could have died if I’d beleive that one Doctor, and just waited to get better.
Your close friend having been literally robbed of all their emotions, you both embark on a quest to get them back. You’ve managed to restore one, but dear Lord, has this journey become way more annoying.
“What if we don’t find the rest of them? What if shotgunning happens with the next emotion and one of us gets hurt or killed? What if some one in the next town notices theres something off about me and tries to kill us or gives us to the soldiers? What if one of the kings spys finds us and takes us back to him! I won’t be the only one punished you’ll get I trouble for helping me! What if-” Rannoch continued with his what ifs, his body shaking slightly with nerves as you walk down the narrow path. You shake your head slightly as your dear friend rambles on and on about potential deaths, and tortures. Why was the first feeling you found fear. Why couldn’t it have been love? Or happiness? Even anger would have been better than this.
When you die, you appear in a cinema with a number of other people who look like you. You find out that they are your previous reincarnations, and soon you all begin watching your next life on the big screen.
If I shared anything with my reincarnations, it was in our belief in fate. Though each previous version of me held a very different perspective of it. The me that had died in the Great Depression thought it a terrible thing, wicked and omnipotent. The me that had lived as king in the middle ages thought it a gift presented by God. Me, I believed it a promise.
My next reincarnation was a baby with deep blue eyes and pink skin named George. He started his life alone. George cried so much that they had to put him in a separate room, devoid of the other infants. A nurse checked in on him every few hours. Nobody blamed her. She had more pressing matters to attend to, such as George’s mother, whose heart rate was steadily growing out of control and her breathing stuttered.
When the young lady died, she did so whispering her son’s name. I wasn’t sure if she ever even got a look at him. In that hospital room, with the flat-line beep of a heart rate monitor, the nurse checking on George stood, lips quivering and fists clenched.
In this world, children were supposed to be loved by their parents. If not the mother, who else would? For George, it was nobody, not even himself.
The orphanage boasted posters of smiling blonde-haired boys and girls with deep blue eyes. George could’ve been a literal poster boy if he ever smiled. But no matter how many stuffed animals they threw his way, how many hugs and smiles they offered him, they could never get those lip-locked edges to curve up.
By the time he had hit thirteen, he had already smoked his first cigarette and drank his first beer. Nobody wanted to tell him, but everybody knew. Nobody adopted teenagers. He would be a lifer, an unwanted child turned into an unwanted adult.
And on his seventeenth birthday, he bought a gun.
None of us watching were worried at all for other people. Despite everything that happened, George was a gentle boy and that was his problem. Nobody could reach him through his overpowering politeness. It took a mother’s love to chip away at the boy and all he had was an old photo of a ghost who once loved him.
He snuck out when the moon had hit its apex, left all the money he had in a small package with a letter. It read: Thanks for taking care of me. And that was it. He didn’t sign it, didn’t address it to anyone, he wrote it all in a cheap pen and stuffed it inside with twelve-hundred dollars cash.
The spot he chose was out of the way. Nobody was nearby to be disturbed. No runners would come this way to be scared. The only selfishness he allowed himself was that it was by a river, a black canvas of glittering moonlight.
“I was never meant to live,” he told himself and us. “This is fate.”
Some of us nodded with him. Others shook their heads. I stared, my neck stiff, eyes unblinking as he put the gun to his temple.
“No,” I whispered. “Don’t do it.”
Some of us, the more boisterous ones, cheered along, egging the boy to pull the trigger. They had seen a thousand lives and would see a thousand more until all of mankind vanished. A single life in a single point of time meant nothing to them. But for me, this was my first.
“No,” I said and stood from my seat. “Please.”
The screen flickered to the tremble of his finger. Soon, it would go completely black. He would fulfill his fate.
“No!” I screamed. “This isn’t how it should go!”
The boisterous ones were no longer laughing. The others around me turned away their eyes. At one point in time, they had all been me. They had thought that life mattered, that our pain had meaning. But after a thousand shows of a thousand lives, most of them only slept through the show.
I clenched my fists, the words swelling in my lungs. Then, I took the breath to give them life and I prayed, that somehow, I wasn’t just a dead man with a loud mouth.
“Don’t pull,” I yelled, tears pouring down my cheeks and snot from my nose. “Not until you have a chance. Maybe you never will, maybe this will be how it always is, maybe I’m wrong about everything, but there’s meaning in your pain! I can’t tell you if I’m right or if I’m certain.” My voice dropped low. “I can only promise.”
George closed his eyes. He hadn’t heard me, of course he wouldn’t.
I held my breath.
Then, George broke down, the gun still pressed to his head. “So cruel,” he whispered to nobody. “After all this, all I have is a promise. That’s all my fate has to offer.”
My eyes went wide. My jaw dropped. “And that’s enough,” I said, my voice too low even for myself to hear.
There, George stood, the gun rigid in his hand. And when his tears fell, so too did his gun.
Shoutout to autistic people who don’t know whether they have high or low empathy
To the autistic people with alexithymia who can barely figure out what they’re feeling, let alone what others are feeling
To the autistic people with fluctuating empathy that changes from day to day or moment to moment
To the autistic people who feel some things so strongly and other things not at all
Shoutout to the autistic people with low empathy
To the autistic people who don’t feel what other people are feeling
To the autistic people who are driven to help anyways
To the autistic people who have no idea what other’s are feeling unless it is explicitly stated
Shoutout to the autistic people with high empathy
To the autistic people who feel so strongly for animals or objects but feel little for other humans
To the autistic people who feel the emotions of others way too strongly
To the autistic people who can’t sort out their own feelings from the feelings others
No matter how you experience empathy, it’s ok. You’re not a bad person for experiencing empathy differently from neurotypicals. You’re not cold or uncaring if you have low empathy. You’re not too sensitive if you have high empathy. It’s ok to not know how you experience empathy. It’s ok if how you experience empathy changes. No matter how you experience empathy, it’s ok.
ImmortalWave 