If a science fiction writer’s abdomen explodes, shooting pus and bile onto the dinner table, is it a sign?
Last night, I visited the aforementioned SF writer, who had undergone an emergency appendectomy two Saturdays ago, at a hospital near his apartment in Philadelphia (he stays down there during the week, where he teaches at Temple U).
A week after the surgery, he somewhat deliriously asked me to come get him and bring him up to his home in NYC. We were about halfway down to Philly when he called to cancel the trip, since his daughter had convinced him to stay down there for a scheduled doctor’s appointment on Tuesday.
The official VM girlfriend and I shook our heads, got off the Turnpike, and hung out in Princeton for a little while. I cut friends lots of slack when they’re under stress, so I didn’t get too put out by his vagaries.
Which turned out to be for the best. A day later, after his friend John made dinner for them, the writer got up from the table and his abdomen exploded.
I only have his description of this to go by, but it appears that the post-surgery pus and bile didn’t vent anywhere, and built up in his abdomen, putting stress on the staples that held his incision closed. In addition, he was growing feverish and weakening at a time when he should’ve been on the mend.
The pressure on the staples got too great, and they burst. The writer thought his number was up, for obvious reasons. “Geez, man,” I said last night, “not a lot of people are going to look down at their own exploding abdomens and say, ‘This’ll all work out for the best!'”
He laughed. “Yeah. I didn’t exactly look at John and say, ‘This is easily treatable!'”
An ambulance got to his place within two minutes of the rupture (he lives a few blocks from a hospital), and doctors got the wound cleaned and the infection treated. The downside is that the writer now has a GAW.
“GAW?” I asked.
“Gaping Abdominal Wound,” he replied, clearly milking the moment for all it was worth. He added that, if this had happened in my car on Saturday, he’d probably have died, and I’d have probably felt like crap for the rest of my days.
The GAW has to be cleaned and packed twice a day, and it’s going to take many months to heal. According to him (and I have to check on this), as many as 10% of appendectomies yield this sorta result. That number sounds pretty high, but people also project that 10% of the population is gay, so what do I know?
I sound flip about this, I know, but I do take it pretty seriously. So much so that I drove into NYC last night for a 10-minute visit with the old guy, since a friend drove him up from Philly earlier in the day. He seemed pretty well, just tired. Not as debilitated as I feared.
So if a male writer whose major works involve the ambiguity of gender now has a vaginal-looking gash in his abdomen, is it a sign?