“So they are going to give me gas?” I try to distract him with a little joke, but it doesn’t work.
“Only you won’t call it a stomach anymore,” he says. “It’s a pouch.”
“Now I’m a kangaroo?” I mumble. It doesn’t slow him down. He whips into the parking lot and turns down the row looking for a space.
“The pouch is designed to hold approximately one tablespoon of solid, unchewed food. Your teeth compress the food to about one-fourth of its unchewed volume.”
“Fascinating,” I say. I point out an empty parking spot. “There’s one.”
“So, if you chew every thing up really well, you can hold approximately three tablespoons of food in your new pouch, which would be about the size of a golf ball or a hard-boiled egg.”
Three tablespoons of food? That’s all? It should be scary enough to make me turn back, but it isn’t. Nor is the first thing I glimpse when I enter the conference room: a scale.
A tiny woman with a fuzzy white halo of hair measures my height and checks my vital signs. Rat follows along with a little green notepad and records every thing. I squint my eyes to let him know how serious I am, then try to mouth the words for him to go sit down, but he ignores me. The scale gets closer, and Rat stays glued to my side. I start to feel panicky, my breath coming in short little puffs. Don’t make me do this. Don’t make me do this. Don’t. Make. Me. Do. This.
“Go away,” I say, but Rat is already waiting beside the scale with his notepad in hand.
“I have to record the starting point,” Rat says, flipping the paper over to a new page.
“Please,” I whisper, not ready for this part. Not wanting Rat to see what’s coming. “I can tell you what I weigh. You don’t have to measure it now.”
“Get up on the scale,” the fuzzy-haired woman says, smiling kindly but totally ignoring my pleas to Rat. She’s probably heard every excuse in the book, and she’s not buying it. I take a deep breath and step onto the hated metal platform. She slides the weights over and over and then over again until they finally balance at 302 pounds. Rat peers over her shoulder, and I wait for the gasp of horror.
“Oh my God. I can’t believe a human being can weigh this much!” Skinny whispers Rat’s thoughts in my ear and I cringe with embarrassment.
I glance over at Rat, my cheeks hot with shame, but he is evidently able to keep his disgust well hidden. He never looks up as he records the weight in his notebook.
After I complete a survey about my eating habits and finish the check-in process, I look around, and Rat is nowhere to be found. Now that I actually want him with me, he disappears? I mumble, “Jerk,” under my breath and try to find two empty chairs in the rows of seats. I sit on the end so I don’t have to be squashed up against other people and put my purse in the seat next to me. Rat will probably show up again soon. In the meantime, I glance around the room. There are about ten other people. It’s easy to tell who is there for the surgery and who is there for the support. I’m definitely the youngest in the room.
A huge woman wearing purple stretch pants slides slowly into a seat in the row in front of me. Plastic tubes are attached to her nose and lead down to an oxygen tank on wheels at her side. She isn’t that old, but she breathes so heavily I can hear her rhythmic gasps for breath. The acne-faced teenage boy with her leans over to ask if she’s all right. She nods, but she can’t say anything. The effort of walking into the room has made her so short of breath, she can’t speak.
“That will be you. Soon . . . soon.”
I don’t want to keep looking at purple-pants woman. It just makes me sad. I twist around in my chair, looking desperately for Rat and finally see him over in the corner talking to my doctor. He’s scribbling frantically in his notebook, nodding, while Dr. Wilkerson talks. I try to catch his eye, but he is as oblivious as ever.
The fuzzy-haired woman steps up to the podium and welcomes the crowd. The others applaud, and Rat looks up from his notebook at last. I motion frantically for him to come sit down. He writes in his notebook all the way over to the seat, but at least he finally joins me.
Fuzzy-haired woman introduces Dr. Wilkerson, or Abe Lincoln as I think of him, and then takes her place behind a waiting projector. The doctor steps up to the stage, welcomes everybody, and the small crowd again applauds politely. The first slide shows up on the pull-down screen, and Dr. Wilkerson gets immediately into the nitty-gritty of why we’re all here, pointing toward the drawing of a stomach on the slide.
Rat continues scribbling in his notebook. Sometimes drawing pictures, sometimes making various grunting noises in agreement. I try to ignore him.