I Hate Birthdays

“Hi, what are we in for today?” The lady behind the desk didn’t address me. I was okay with that. Honestly, I wished more than anything that I was invisible. Invisible people didn’t feel things. They didn’t stand awkwardly beside their mom as she checked them into their appointment, and they didn’t stand there feeling like their insides were constantly being attacked by a hammer.

The office space was cold and clean, completely sterile of any germs. You could probably be in and out of that waiting room without touching a thing. Even the doors my mom and I had entered through were automatic sliding doors. Every pamphlet, every piece of furniture was uninviting as if the sheer energy in the room was helping to keep the germs from nesting. The chairs looked uncomfortable too. The straight wooden back looked a little too straight for the natural curve of a normal human spine. The faded purple cushions were plastic and shone under the fluorescent lights. The kind of plastic that squeaked when you moved, and if you wore shorts like I was sporting, you stuck to the chair and have to peel yourself away leaving a layer of skin behind in the process. It was as if the nurses that sat behind the desk, with their watchful eyes, were daring someone to touch something. On the slight chance anyone decided to risk their life and touch something, a nurse would be there in seconds to decontaminate the surface.

My mom took her own sweet time, being the sweet Christian lady she was, talking with the nurse who looked like she was stuck in the 80s. It was early in the morning but an intricate brown bees' nest sat on top of the nurse’s head. It had probably taken a whole can of hairspray to make it stay that way. With perfectly painted pink lips she smiled back at my mother.

The door, just off to the left of the waiting room, opened and another nurse entered. This one was tall and had bleach white tennis shoes that squeaked just enough to be obnoxious, and in turn, distracted my mom. All I wanted to do was to leave, to run out those automatic doors so fast that they didn’t have time to fully open on their own. I had no desire to be there. But that wasn’t an option. I had to be there.

It was the day after my birthday. I hate a lot of things, but I hate birthdays most of all. My mom and I had come up with an elaborate theme for my birthday this year. I was a teenager, so my party needed to be amazing. I thought it was perfect until everything happened.

The theme was Murder Mystery. My mom had sent out the invitations and along with the invitations were biographies. Everyone came to my party as someone else and one person was a murderer. It made sense. I had met all of my friends while in a theater company, and we all loved being someone we weren’t. Maybe that is why I had a lot of trouble calling those people my friends.

It was kind of vulgar for the good Christian family that we were, but she had added a note in pen at the bottom of the invitations that there would be no use of blood, fake or real. Everyone would participate the whole time, even if they were killed off, to make sure everyone would feel included. She had thought of everything.

The setting was a beach house somewhere on the Italian coast. We were all wealthy friends getting together after years of making money and being famous. Because that party had to be perfect I wanted everything to feel as real as possible. Which is why I took my mom to the party store and we bought anything and everything with a beachy and ritzy feeling.

On the night before the party, I was getting everything perfect. The party would happen in our living room, where my father had built custom bookshelves that encased the rock fireplace. He had made it for my mom on their anniversary a few years before, and it didn’t look beachy. I asked if we could take it all down for my party, dad said no. He didn’t understand the whole aesthetic thing. So, I had to make do with hanging, in my opinion, fake, tacky, plastic wall murals to hide everything. Mom said they looked nice. They were brown wooden walls with tiki torches on them. To top it off the tikis had little faces on them that looked as though they had come out of a bad dream to haunt you. That’s what I had to work with.

I was on my own, moving the couches so everyone would have a place to sit, and decorating. I got my grandmother’s old stool with a fat yellow cat painted on it from the kitchen table so I could hang up the artificial walls. Scotch tape in hand, I climbed up. Everything was great. Everything was fine.

Tape, cut, reach. Tape, cut, reach.

I had gotten to the end of my wingspan, but I thought could get one more piece of tape before I had to move the stool. That’s what I thought. I was wrong. As I reached just a little bit further my weight shifted to one side of the stool. That’s all it took for the stool to give way and flip. I went crashing towards the ground, but I didn’t make it all the way to the ground. As I fell the stool fell perfectly below me with its legs spearing up at me. One pressed into my lower abdomen. I was caught.

My body folded and I remember not being able to move. It was more shock than it was having the wind knocked out of me, but the seconds that followed my failed attempt at flying breathing was almost impossible. I would say that my life had flashed before my eyes, but I don’t think that there was even enough time for that to happen. If it had, there wouldn’t be much to see. My life hadn’t been full of much. Some musical productions that I started as Dancer #7 in and a few soccer games of which I probably got a full 17 minutes of field time. Heck, I thought as I dangled there, if I had had more time in life I should do more. Being impaled by a rickety old stool, what a way to go.

Dad was there first. He must have heard the crash of the stool flipping as it scratched his self-installed hardwood floors. He lifted me off the stool and set me on the couch. I wasn’t dead. Carefully, he checked my head. That’s what he did when my brothers got hurt. No matter what they were doing, someone would always end up with a head injury and mom would pile the rest of us kids into the suburban, and a field trip would be made to the emergency room.

“She looks okay,” he said to mom, who had just come into the room. “Are you okay sweetie?”

Was I? Honestly, I still was trying to figure out how I had managed to perfectly flip the stool. I had set it up right beside the arm of the couch that was next to the bookcase. It was a tight space to begin with, but somehow I had managed to flip the whole thing over. Mom put her hand on my leg reminding me that she was still waiting for me to respond. I had fallen on my stomach and it hurt. Like when you stub your little toe or slam your finger into a door, maybe when you have a papercut then put hand sanitizer on your hand. The pain was like all of those things combined times 20. It hurt.

I grabbed my stomach. Slowly, I lifted my shirt. There was nothing there but a slight red tint, but it hurt. On my left side from just under my belly button down below the waistline of my shorts, there was a pulsing pain like someone was stretching my insides to the point of explosion. With no visible stamp of my battle minutes before I was deemed as ‘fine’ and sent off to bed. I didn’t sleep much that night, and the next day was even worse. When I got dressed I couldn’t help but look down at the splotches of purple and yellow that began to form on my stomach.

My birthday was going to be a good day, I told myself. It wasn’t. I was distracted throughout the whole party. The smile I wore was painted, a fraud. I knew it, my parents knew it, but my friends, who were almost as fake as my smile, had no idea. The characters were played perfectly and the dramatic deaths sent everyone into laughing fits. I could do little more than breathe before the pain in my belly was inflamed. The throbbing pounded against me the entire three hours of my painstakingly long party.

Finally, the last character was killed off and the murderer voted on, it was Carrie. Her pale white skin and blood-red lips should have been a dead giveaway, but somehow she played us all until the very end.

Once everyone had left I went to the bathroom and lifted my shirt. It was like someone had attempted to recreate a Van Gough on my stomach using dark blues, yellows, and every shade of purple they could think of. Each color was visible on its own but mixed and melted into the next. The colors of paint went down my side below my waistband towards my crotch.

Mom made a doctor’s appointment for the next morning.

I hated the doctor’s office, but I hated it even more when the nurse came in and had me lie on the table. As I shifted my body, the paper that covered the table ripped. The nurse was sweet with a kind smile, but her hands were cold. I shivered as she lifted my shirt. The instant she looked at the bruise I saw a flash of concern. Even quicker than her expression had changed it changed again. “I am going to go get the doctor,” she told me, then was gone.

He needed only a second more than the nurse. The doctor looked at me, felt around the entirety of the bruise, and calculated my reactions. I was no longer needed and he turned to mom. They spoke for a moment, then I was sent away.

‘Thank the Lord,’ I thought as I grabbed a sucker. But as mom and I got into the elevator, mom pressed the third floor instead of the parking garage.

“You get to have an ultrasound, hun,” she smiled. It was one of those I-am-smiling-because-I-have-to-keep-it-together-but-I-might-be-falling-apart-on-the-inside types of smiles. That wasn’t good.

“Mom, am I okay?” Never thought I would have to be asking my mom if I was okay or not. Never thought I would have to ask anyone that question. It was my body, which meant I should have known if something was wrong… so, how did I not know? I mean I knew something was wrong, I just didn’t know what exactly was wrong.

Without answering my question she checked her fake smile in the reflection of the elevator doors, “They just want to make sure.” The elevator ride was longer than it should have been. We went down three floors, but it felt like I was riding it up and down a skyscraper. Anticipation does that to you. It elongates the seconds so you have time to build your fear. With time comes greater fear. Even the hallway that we walked down felt impossibly long. I was Alice falling down the rabbit hole. No end in sight and no way of knowing what was ahead of me. The sliding doors parted and invited me to my destination.

Squeak, squish, squeak, squish. The nurse’s shoes.

She called my name. My mom stayed behind.

I followed the nurse down the hall. We passed three doors before she opened the one on the right. The blue scrubs that she wore really made her look official, but she looked really young and was way too happy. Behind the soft, enthusiastic smile there was a bit of remorse. For me, I thought. I was dying. This is what they were going to tell me.

Behind the door was a small locker room with mint green wallpaper and white plastic cabinets. The sweet nurse with the squeaky shoes opened one and gave me a hospital gown. It was blue. “Here ya go sweetie, just put your things in here,” she left the cabinet open, then pointed to a curtain near the back of the room. “You can change in there and put this gown on with the slit in the front okay? Just be sure to take off any jewelry,” with a sugary smile she left.

The plastic curtain got stuck when I tried to move it aside. This place didn’t even want to let me change. I snuck around it and quickly stripped. She didn’t tell me if I should leave my underwear on. Should I take them off or leave them on? Oh no… if I wasn’t already nervous my anxiousness meter was now off the charts. The room was getting smaller and I couldn’t find the exit. Too much. It was all too much. The looks that everyone gave each other, I really was dying.

Breath.

The stream of air left my lips way too fast. I tried to inhale slowly. Eyes closed. Exhale. The changing stall stopped shaking. After a few breaths, I knew I was on solid ground again and could think. I kept them on.

I changed and pushed back the curtain, which now slid nicely along the rail without any trouble at all. I bundled my shorts, t-shirt, socks, and shoes and put them in the locker. There was no stool or bench for me to sit on, so I stood there, hands crossed, for no more than a minute. I needed to be doing something when she came to get me so I didn’t make her think I was standing there waiting for her. Even though that is exactly what I was doing at that very moment. I took my things off the shelf and folded them. It took a bit more time than I thought because I didn’t usually fold t-shirts. Normally, I would just throw them in my drawer. My sister hated that. We shared a room and she often would remind me that it was a shared space and I couldn’t just do whatever I wanted to with my things. She hated when the room was messy, and my side was messy just about all the time.

The door clicked and opened slowly with a slight knock. The nurse’s voice had lost its tranquility, it had been replaced with urgency. “Ready?” she asked.

I nodded.

The floor was ice under my bare toes. Part of me wanted to run the other direction, but my legs were half the size of her’s and she’d probably catch me in a second. I’d go kicking and screaming, but she looked like the type of woman that would get me to the exam room no matter what. It was the way she carried herself that made me believe no matter what I tried there was no avoiding the fact I would go through this test. Shoulders back, head up, and ready for battle.

Without a sound, the door opened and she led me inside. It was, for the most part, bare. Two posters hung on the wall depicting the inside of someone's stomach from different angles. I was really glad I had skipped breakfast that morning, otherwise, it might have landed on the step that the nurse helped me up onto the table with. I shifted so that my feet were towards the door and I faced the ceiling. Besides the table I was on there was a machine with a television screen. It had wires going in every direction that the tall nurse was playing with and I realized that I wasn’t sure exactly what they were going to do to me. Mom didn’t tell me. No one had told me.

I had been so focused on the screen next to me that I didn’t realize that the door had opened until I heard the click as it shut into place. A man had entered, his white coat matched his beard. Mom had been behind him and she took her place in the seat next to me. Her face was unreadable; only a pinched smile gave any sort of comfort. At least she wasn’t crying, maybe this was a good sign. Maybe I wasn’t dying.

“Hello there.” He was trying to act natural, I wasn’t confident that he was succeeding. “We are just going to do a quick check to make sure that everything inside is all functioning as it should be, okay?”

I nodded. I think it was the quietest I had ever been in my life.

The nurse came over and moved the hospital gown so that my bruise was exposed. I had my eyes on the doctor to see if he reacted when he looked at it. Nothing. He didn’t even blink.

She squirted some gel in her gloved hand. “This is going to be a little cold,” she said only a split second before she pressed her hand against the bruise.

I flinched. It wasn’t so much that the gel was cold, it was gross, like slimy and thick. So thick that she had to apply pressure to smooth it around, which started up the throbbing pain that, a moment before, had subsided. The test itself took only a few minutes. Beeping filled the room. The little machine the doctor used made a splotchy black and white picture appear on the screen. He moved the machine around and made faces at the picture as it shifted with the movement. He shut off the beeping of the machine and brought silence to the room.

My mom looked at the doctor and they moved to the corner of the room as the nurse brought over a wet cloth and cleaned up the gel that was an inch thick on my stomach.

In a hushed voice, mom addressed the doctor, “So?”

“No internal bleeding…” It sounded like he was looking for words. “The thing is, she fell right on the side of her uterus. I am worried that some of her reproductive organs might have gotten extremely damaged. She’s young and still developing but I think you should be aware, because of this, there might be some complications with having children in the future.”

I audibly heard the breath that my mom let out, she was relieved. I probably should be too, but I wasn’t sure I was. It wasn’t like I sat around thinking about being a mom or anything, I mean I was thirteen, but it was nice to think that I could. Or at least could have before that moment. I would never have a big family to match the one I had grown up with. I would always be on the outside of a dream I didn’t realize I had until then. I would never have kids of my own. I wouldn’t have any of that. I would never have a family picture of our own children.

I was sterile, just like that waiting room. Happy birthday to me.