By: W.A Coleman

She never told me her name but she told me lot about Julie. Unlike most of the people that came to us because they had no choice, she did and yet she still came. As for why, well, I really couldn’t tell you why, and at the time I never thought to ask her. Maybe I should’ve. Or maybe it was the obvious. Maybe it was because she looked at me or my guys as a part of her tribe, just another bunch a crazy fuck-ups, like her that just so happened to have some medical training. Maybe she thought she wouldn’t be judged or looked down upon as much as say some south side “white bread” M.D. Who knows. Either way she didn’t seem to mind the dogs barking.

Truth was she wasn’t like us at all. She wasn’t really a fuck up. Far from it. She didn’t talk much about herself but she did allude to being an attorney at one point. She was well spoken and had nice teeth and an ever so slight northern dialect that brought back memories of home. She came to us in septic shock and on the verge of death. She almost died on my large breed exam table. Her request was simple. She wanted the hurting to stop but the dying to continue. I told her it didn’t quite work that way. I told her we’d be happy to try to take the edge off of her pain but we really weren’t set up for hospice. There’s no such thing as hospice for dogs or cats. To make her feel better we had to fix her. I finally got her blood pressure up and in check but she still was in real bad shape. This was gonna take some time. I suppose I talked her out of calling it quits at least a little. After all she was a pretty little thing and the world can never have too many pretty faces.

When I first began removing it, I thought I was going to have to sedate her because she was crying so much. I had to remove the rotting flesh of a small, roasted chicken that she had put up inside of her just a couple a weeks after the delivery of her daughter, Julie, a stillborn. The smell was unbearable and reminiscent of week old decaying road kill on August asphalt. She demanded, against my wishes, to have some time with the chicken. I swaddled the two halves of the bird and put it in her arms. She held it and hugged it tightly and rocked it in this firm embrace and cried for a good forty-five minutes and I’ll tell you this about that girl’s crying,… it sent shivers down my spine. It’s the kind stuff that’s scary enough to scare away your scariest nightmares. All I can say is thank God for those two, recently spaded hound dog sisters that howled against her cries. They did a swell job of drowning out most of it. I was a medic in Vietnam. Now this isn’t me bragging or trying to toot my own horn. Just because I was one of the many drafted teens running all over the jungle with a bag of gauze, that didn’t for a second make me out as some bad ass soldier boy. Far from it. But what it did mean was that I knew what it was like to be ran through a certifiable shit and misery cycle, one that had been stuck on repeat for a good couple of years. I’ve seen the type a misery and pain that makes the sight of stone cold death seem like a truly beautiful thing, a holy thing. But I swear to God, the way that woman sounded when she was wailing about, while rocking that swaddled up rotten chicken, it was like the moaning sounds of agony coming from hell. I’ll never forget it but I sure wish I could.
After that horror show was over and done with, we discreetly purged little Ms. 1 lbs six ounces of rotten bird and thoroughly flushed her vaginal cavity and treated her the best we could. We began an aggressive antibiotic therapy both intravenously and by packing.
Apparently, this woman knew about us because she was the favorite niece or cousin or whatever of some friend of a friend of my boss’ best friend and main colleague. So we knew money wasn’t the lady’s issue. Making her survive was the issue and it was going to take some creativity on my part. Adding the unneeded stress of my boss Roger and his annoying little hatchlings breathing right over my shoulder didn’t make it any easier to work.

Funny thing about serious, systemic infections is that it’s a toss up. Sure, age and prior health all play a part but really, it’s just ends up depending on how the body reacts to the treatment. Will her kidneys hold up? Can we control her fever? When should we be considering dialysis? Can we get her to heal? The big problem was gettin her to want to survive. I don’t think she set out to commit suicide. I just think her dyin was an added bonus. I’ve always believed healing was just as much mental as it was physical but she needed sleep, and food and most of all, hope. She was in pain, immense emotional pain that all my little opiods and their fake friends couldn’t seems to touch at all, and with her blood pressure the way it was, I shouldn’t have really given her the amount of meds I gave her. The heart break was crushing her and it was gonna end up killing her. She just wasn’t gonna allow herself to get better without her baby.

But even though she seemed to be on this fatalistic path, she was, by no means, an introvert. She talked. A lot. She talked my ears off. She wore her feelings on her sleeve and I listened. To sum it up she basically had never finished mourning her loss. The doctors handing her that dead baby just didn’t do it for her. That lifeless child, as much as she loved that lifeless shell and as much as she held and kissed and rocked that lifeless shell, it just, still, was just a shell. It wasn’t her daughter, not the daughter that she knew, or got to know, or got to feel. Julie to her, the real Julie, the only real Julie she felt she knew, wasn’t the dead child she held her arms.

Instead, it was Utero Julie, that was her Julie. That was her daughter; the Julie that she never held alive, but would rock to sleep by rocking herself. The Julie that she may have never seen alive but felt alive, always kicking away. The Julie that loved Tex-Mex cause that’s what she craved all the time when she was pregnant. Not Mexican, mind you, but specifically Tex-Mex. The Julie that was a devout night owl that wouldn’t even begin to start stirring around until after Letterman, and then wouldn’t quit until somewhere in the wee early witching hours. The Julie that had the propensity for hiccups in the afternoons, and the Julie that she seemed to be athletic and strong because she kicked low and hard as if she was trying to kick open her cervix and get out. The Julie that was excited about life, and ready to get started. Maybe she wanted to go back and talk to that Julie, to put her hands on her belly while she was alive and well and kicking against her palm, and be able to tell her precious daughter that it was ok to leave if she wanted, that it was ok to go if she felt like she had to.

I don’t know really. I’m not a psychologist. Hell, I’m not even a doctor, at least not the kind you’re thinking, but I really wanted to get this right. I wanted to save this woman, I wanted to score some points with the boss man cause I’d been in the hole for points lately. And I did genuinely like her. It wasn’t everyday that I got to talk someone that seemed as messed up in the head as me. So I got this idea, but I didn’t know yet exactly how I was gonna go about it.

First, we experimented. We tried several tools but they felt cold and/or too hard, too mechanical and inorganic in movement but she was patient and she could see I was trying. Eventually we both decided that I would use my hand. I would lube up heavily, and while donning the thinnest latex glove that I could possibly find I’d slowly work my whole hand inside of her and move up close to her cervix where I’d begin closing my hand and making a tight, trembling fist before opening it back up. I’d then push up close to her cervix and make firm, un-rhythmic pokes with my fingers, doing the best I could to simulate Julie’s once firm little kicks. Now, even though I wasn’t in her uterus and that “the baby” was essentially kickin’ on the wrong side of the door, to momma, it was enough. A lot of things could have gone wrong with this amateur psych maneuver. What if it hurt her? Even though she was still stretched from the birth it was still a possibility. What if it seemed sexual? What if it made it worse? But I knew I was onto something when, the first time we tried it she just began looking at me with tears rolling down her face, her bottom lip quivering. And that was just the beginning, just a test. After that I went all out.

First I’d get Nam or Missy to run up and get us some Tex-Mex and fill ol momma to the brim with some good ol fashion, grease loaded, shitty Texas infused, crappican . We’d eat, and try to get her to laugh and then I’d give her a little something to get her sleepy and she’d lay her head down and burp Tex mex. I would then perform my medically prescribed fisting every night. Upon her request I put headphones on and turned up my Walkman and listened to classical while reading BOW HUNTER magazine. Turning the pages with one hand was difficult but Missy helped when she was there.

“Doin great, Doc.” Missy’d tell me with a grin while shakin’ her head and walking away.
The woman wanted privacy. She got that, I suppose. I mean how much privacy can you say you want to a man that’s already inside of you? Sometimes I’d swear I heard the faint crying sounds of a woman in the distant background of Beethoven’s Opus 36 in D major or perhaps a bit of Mozart, preferably any works in the Salzburg-era. Sometimes I’d feel the pressure of an exterior hand rubbing the belly. It never took me more than twenty or thirty minutes and she’d be asleep, out like a light. Twenty minutes soon turned to fifteen, then ten, then five.

One night I walked in. She was sleeping and she looked well. So much so it was as if she was morphing into this incredibly beautiful woman. I just stood there and looked at her while tossing my latex gloves on my shoulder. She opened her lovely eyes and just looked at me. She didn’t say anything. There was just the faintest of a smile. I gave her one right back. She closed her eyes and I left and threw the glove in the trash.

* * *
I believe it was a Thursday. I couldn’t be for sure but let’s just say it felt like a Thursday. It had been a busy morning and an even busier afternoon at the kennel. That day I had, let’s see, a yellow tabby named Taco that had pulled off and eaten the end of a door stop, which of course had gotten lodged in her intestines and required surgical removal. Had another cat with an infected uterus that needed a complete excavation, and a feisty fox terrier that picked a fight with a boxer and had a lacerated liver that needed immediate emergency care. Finally I had a senile, sick old dachshund that was as mean as he was terminal. He snapped and nearly bit off Missy’s left tit.

Got a call from the bosses that I was gonna have an upright walk in round closing time. He was one them big ol corn fed boys, well over six foot and tippin the scales at I’d say at least two-fifty. He wore himself a real defensive tough guy face and had a tattoo of the grim reaper waving a confederate flag. It had been like twenty minutes and I hadn’t even so much got a name. He sat there as quiet as a damn mime while I took his vitals. He hadn’t said a word to me but I pretty much had his complaint ball parked when he walked in. The way he walked, the way he acted. I knew it before he said it really. It’s always the big, tough, masculine bad asses that always seem to end up stickin things in the wrong places. Of course he finally broke the silence by mumbling under his breath that he had something stuck up inside him. I asked him how large the object was. He told me about medium size.

“Medium what?”

“Cucumber.”

He said before quickly trailing off into his reasoning for said cucumber to be in the oddest of places. He told me he slipped and fell while making a salad. Seemed like a perfectly plausible explanation. I told him ok, and then he relaxed a bit. He said his name was Tyler. It could’ve been fake. Usually is, except this time he kinda looked like a Tyler.

What followed next was an all too familiar scene for the many brave young men whose short fingers just can’t seem to peg a prostate like a dildo or an ink pen or a beer bottle or, well a cucumber. The men who, in the midst of their anal ecstasy found themselves flying too close to the sun. Next thing you know, Tyler’s lying on my big breed table on his back, his legs spread, his knees up towards his ears while holding onto his hamstrings and me, yeah I’m between his legs telling him to push like I’m a fucking OBGYN. Nam assists me. Nam was a helicopter pilot who fought for South Vietnam and was also a medic. The guys done it all and I let him do it all.

“I can feel it, Tyler,..keep pushin.” I tell him.

” I am pushin!!!!..I am fuckin pushin!!!! ” he screams at me while spewing saliva ribbons, his eyes red from the broken blood vessels.

“You must breathe.” Nam says.

“Fuck you! Fuck you and your, your kung fu breathin!”

I had to use my forceps and I knew this had to be painful because his previous self extraction attempt had caused quite a bit of damage along his rectum. I normally don’t like to sedate because it often prevents the patient from creating the push I need.

“I think I got it!!! I think I got it!!!” I yell out. I didn’t mean to yell it out load but I really was excited.

“What? You got it!” Tyler said but when he sat up he wiggled and I lost it again.

“God dammit, Tyler!!!! Your fuckin squirming,..you made me lose it!”
“Hey fuck you man!!! Fuck you…this is the worst day of my life!”
Missy walks in.
Tyler immediately turns to the side and falls off the table and makes my sterile instruments all fall to the floor as well. I just rub my face. He peeks over the table.
“Get her…get her the fuck outta here! Get her the fuck outta here!!!”
“Tyler, she’s a nurse….”
“I don’t give a fuck! I want her outta here!! I wanna her outta here!!!”
I look at Missy and roll my eyes.
“It’s the momma…she’s leaving….” she tells me.
I just look at Missy for a moment. I guess she can tell when I have a favorite client.
“She wants to say goodbye.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Figured you’d like to say goodbye, too.”
I rub my face with my forearm.
“I can tell her you’re busy.”
“No..no..” I tell her as I she’d my gloves off.
I walk up to the lobby and she’s petting that favorite tabby of hers through the cage.
“Should take her.”
She turns and looks at me while letting the kitten lick her finger. She shakes her head.
“Changing kitty litter’s gross..don’t you think?”
I look at her and flash her a smile, one that reminds her who she’s talking to.
She smiles back.
She walks up and gives me a hug, a real tight hug. I give her one back. She pulls away and looks at me.
“Thanks.”
“No problem.”
” There never is a problem for you, is there… Dr. Roc?”
I look at her and shake my head cocky-like before reaching out and knocking on the wooden door frame.
She reaches over and gently grabs my hand and caresses it with her thumb. She looks at me hard and then sighs a bit before turning around and leaving.
“See ya round, momma” I tell her cause I still don’t know her real name.
She turns and flashes one last smile at me with that little twinkle in her eyes that reads something along the lines of ‘No you won’t.’
I walk back in and Nam springs out of nowhere, startling the shit out of me.
“I got it, Roc! I got it when you cannot” he says with his busted English, grinning from ear to ear while holding up, with a pair of forceps, the medium size cucumber.
“That’s good, Nam..good for you.”
“Here you are .” he says handing over the forceps to me carefully keeping the cucumber pinched.
“Why you handing me the??. . …I don’t want this!” I tell him losing my grip and almost making the cucumber fall.
“Fuckin..fuckin chink…you let that fuckin chink touch me… I’ll stomp em” Tyler says all woozy and intoxicated back on the table. I see the pic line hooked up to a bag. Nam apparently went against my advice and sedated him, pushed something groovy in him to calm his ass down, but I suppose you can’t argue with success. Despite his drugged state Tyler is still just as unpleasant.
I walk over to him and kneel down at his level.
“You hear me, Doc? Hmm… I’ll stomp that swamp rat..stomp em flat?” he says.
I smile at him before raising my hand and showing him the large cucumber that he just recently gave birth to. He looks at it and gulps.
“You know something, Tyler? You should really chew your food better.”

END