We make no secret of our freakishness: we are progressive in our politics, green in our consumption, and vegetarian in our cuisine. So, what would you get a family like ours for Christmas? Why, a McDonald’s gift card, of course. And that’s what we got—$45 worth, from my in-laws.
Believe everything you’ve heard, and stay well hydrated for the love of all creation.
Could be worse. One of my sisters got Comet from her mother-in-law.
Curiously, I managed aplomb, especially for having passed my first kidney stone just hours before. Yes, that’s right. I have been thoroughly initiated into male middle age. No red convertible for me. I’ll take the hard road, thank you. Never mind that I am a 30-something female. I am in the club. Believe everything you’ve heard, and stay well hydrated for the love of all creation.
I thought I had been poisoned by my mother’s artichoke dip. Before going to the emergency room, I could gauge my pain by the complexity of my profanity. Effusions of cuss words gushed from the penetralia of my soul. Thankfully, my husband had taken our son to my parents, so the (then) three-year-old was spared this premature vocabulary building experience. Eventually, complexity gave way to repetition: just the same very bad word over and over and over.
On the way to the ER I became convinced it was appendicitis. After signing in, waiting, pacing, clutching my side for the longest, most unrelenting three minutes in the history of the cosmos, I decided my appendix had ruptured, toxins were pouring through my body, and I was going to die. In the ER. With no one doing anything about it.
Finally, I was led to a bed, or rather a cot. The cussing had long since degenerated to panting and growling. Pippy Longstockings peeked into my curtained cubicle. “Sweetie, you’re upsetting the other patients. If you would just relax it would hurt less.”
I did not say what I thought.
Instead, the growling changed to the word “Sorry.” Pant, sorry, pant, sorry, pant, sorry. Long after she was gone: pant, sorry, pant, sorry. I wonder now if that was any better for her.
Then there was morphine. Yay morphine!
Six hours after deciding something might be really wrong, the four millimeter stone finished scraping its way through my ureter. Whereas moments before I had wanted nothing else than for someone to knock me out and cut me open, I was now ready to go home, immediately.
The next morning, Christmas Eve day, we got up and collected Thing One from my parents. As scheduled, we spent most of the day with the in-laws. It was a good day, in spite of the $45 gift card. Earlier, when my husband’s parents had asked what I wanted for Christmas, I told them knives. These people are X-treme Consumers, so I knew they would find knives sharp enough to take off the ends of my fingers. They did, and I did.
Besides my reluctance to move and a few sharp exhales, the day passed pleasantly. My devoted and worrisome husband, however, thought I was in too much pain. He made me promise that the next day I would take the pills the doctor gave me in the ER. We spent Christmas day with my family, me immobilized except for tossing my Christmas cookies every four hours. Boo Vicadin.
A few healing days later, I took my boy and our gift card to my sister’s house, where she and her four kids were home on winter break. This sister and I are opposites. She was born the first day of spring; I was born the first day of fall. She’s blond and petite; I’m brunette and rotund. She owns two Suburbans; I eat lentils. Who better to take to McDonald’s on my in-laws’ dime?