The Guatemala Story

In which part of my colon is removed during emergency surgery in Guatemala

 

My mom visiting me at the hospital in Guatemala.  I still have that monkey.

When I started seeing a new nurse practitioner several years ago, she asked me about the scar on my stomach.  It's fairly thick and about eight inches long.  The scar is from an emergency colon resection that was done on December 14, 1989 at Hospital Herrera Llerandi in Guatemala City.  My nurse told me that she had recently read Alan Alda's autobiography Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned, and that he had similar emergency surgery in Chile.  In October of 2003, while filming an episode of "Scientific American Frontier" on a Chilean mountaintop, he experienced an intestinal blockage.  Without emergency surgery, he would have died.  Same for me - without emergency surgery in Guatemala, I would not be writing these words today.  For Alda, the experience was a life-changer.  He was sixty-seven years old at the time and started looking back at his life and writing his autobiography.  I had only just turned twenty-one when I had my colon resection.  I was too young (and too naive and too wild) for it to be a life-changer for me.  Although I have always been very grateful that the crisis came at that exact time.  In Guatemala, I was staying with my friend Celeste's family who helped me get the care I needed.  A few days earlier, we had been hitchhiking through Nicaragua and Honduras, and we might not have been able to find the medical attention I needed.

In December, it'll be twenty-five years since I had that surgery.  Probably about twenty years ago, I wrote a story about my experience for a writing class.  Rereading it now, I don't actually remember some of the details I've written about!  But I'll trust that my account from twenty years ago is fairly accurate.  I've edited a bit, and here it is.

*****

We board an old yellow school bus with hard green bench seats.  The bus is already full of campesinos.  I squeeze on the end of a seat with a young couple and their baby.  Soon another man squeezes on.  We are four adults and a baby on a seat that in the U.S. would typically seat only two.  I'm wearing knit pants with sneakers and a huge, washed out t-shirt.  I look like a bleached-out Medusa after what the sun and humidity have done to my hair.  My friends and travel mates are of Puerto Rican, Jewish, and Mexican heritage.  They blend in a bit more than I do.  This is why I was elected to stick out my thumb and get rides.  It's also why I was targeted by a little street gang a few days earlier and had my camera stolen.  The bus is literally packed and takes off.  I'm not thinking about my stomach.  I'm more concerned about the way our driver is swinging around those narrow curves.  Plus he's talking to his buddy rather than watching the rode.  The picture of La Virgen Maria on the windshield, together with a pin-up of a bikini-ed blonde, does not make me feel any better.

The stomach pains are worse.  Intense pains every ten minutes.  Something inside me feels like a wet rag that's being wrung out really hard.  I'm clutching my stomach with my arms, and all my facial features are squished into the middle of my face.  I turn to Celeste, sitting in the sit behind me, "If I faint, don't let me fall into the aisle."  Because there are people sitting in the aisle.  I decide that I must go back to the city and see a doctor.  Celeste and I say good-bye to Marni and Yolanda.  We still think that I just have amoebas.  I'd made some questionable choices about drinking water and eating ceviche in the last few days.  We had all been dealing with some stomach issues.  Still, this feels worse.  Celeste and I get off the bus and are left behind in a thick, black cloud.  We wave down the next bus heading back to the city.

Celeste's father picks us up at the bus station.  In the parking lot at the doctor's office, I stop and double over because the pain overwhelms me.  They make sure I'm all settled at the doctor's office, and then Celeste leaves to drive her father back to work.  I am called in to see the doctor.  I explain in both English and Spanish, "Me duele el estómago."  That's all I can explain, that my stomach hurts.  What I remember of this doctor's office is brown.  A big brown desk and brown chairs.  I'm sitting in one.  Certificates framed in brown.  A brown examining table.  I'm lying on that table, and the doctor is touching my stomach.  It's hard.  Now the twisting pains are almost constant.  I start yelling in Spanish and English.  "Me mate, por favor, me mate.  Kill me, please, kill me."  The tiny, grey-haired doctor is trying to calm me with his choppy English.  It's not working, and so he injects me with something.  A sedative?  A pain killer?  I have no idea.  Another man comes in, puts me in a wheel chair, and takes me away.  Surely the little doctor is glad to get rid of the screaming gringa.

I am taken into the attached hospital building, and Celeste finds me there.  We're wondering what's going on.  An x-ray technician wheels me away and returns me after they take photos of my guts.  A doctor walks in, and he speaks English perfectly.  He speaks calmly and gently, like a hypnotist.  I'm glad he speaks English, because now we're talking about surgery.  Celeste immediately calls her dad and asks him to come back.  After the consultation, Dr. Calm (I can't remember his actual name) explains that my colon is abnormally long and not attached to the stomach lining.  So it's all twisted, resulting in a bowel obstruction.  The surgeon, Dr. Garcia-Gallant, is also now present.  He's half German and half Guatemalan and speaks English with a heavy German accent.  He will operate on me within a couple of hours.

We start trying to contact my father at work.  He's at a business lunch, so we ask his office to page him.  He returns our call at the hospital.  Dr. Calm gets on the phone and explains that I need to have surgery.  My dad is remembering the medical advice we had been given.  We were told to return to the U.S. for any major medical situations.  Dr. Calm tells my dad, "You don't have that option.  We must operate immediately."  I remember it more like, "You may not see your daughter again if we don't operate soon."  But that may be a dramatic touch I've added to the story over the years.  My dad and I then have a brief conversation during which I could barely speak because of the pain.  I desperately want his help and he desperately wants to help me, but geography and time do not allow. 

My colon is twisted so badly, that it's about to burst.  If that happens, gangrene will set in and I'll die.  They started prepping me for surgery immediately.  I remember lots of needles and a young nurse trying to put in the intravenous line.  A man is asking me to stick a tube through my nose and throat, into my stomach.  I try and then refuse.  The last thing I remember is being mad that he asked me to do that!

I wake up that night in a dark room.  Tubes are sticking out of many places, including the stomach-draining tube that goes through my nose.  He stuck it in after I was out from the anesthesia.  A nurse is in the room with me.  "Is it all over?" I ask her.  "Si," she replies.  It's over, but now that the intense pain is gone, I'm really afraid.  What actually happened to me?  There is general soreness.  The nurse administers pain medication.  I wish for a familiar face and cry myself back to sleep.

The next morning I am transferred to my own private room.  The doctors report that everything went well.  They did a colon resection.  Dr. Garcia even offers to show me what they removed, which was stored in a jar.  But I don't think I ever saw it.  He also mentions that they had to make a "big door" for the surgery, which is the big scar I have today.  I was only in the hospital for a week.  My mom and sister flew down to Guatemala to visit me but returned home for Christmas.  I continued to recuperate and spent Christmas with Celeste and her family.  Actually, just days after the surgery, I was out and about, dancing at a nightclub and traveling around the country.  In mid-January, I returned to Costa Rica for my second semester abroad.  My life changed very little, except that I have a big scar and an interesting story to tell!