At the emergency room, they ask you to rate pain on a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being meh, 10 being unspeakable agony. As my sister sped down the local highway, I was convinced, for one solid minute, that I was dying.
This event happened in August 2020, at the height of the first wave of Covid-19, at least in Florida. I went in alone, filled out a sheet, sat on one of the six empty chairs in the waiting room, and waited ten minutes before being led, hunched over, to a room for assessment. After payment of the co-pay, I was allowed to provide a pain rating. It was a pulsating, radiating, nausea-inducing pain, the kind of pain that made every sense unbearably clear. I rated it an overall 5, with intermittent spikes of 7.
Even on morphine, then Toradol, the pain didn’t budge. It was stubborn, unresponsive. It emanated from an abstract place modern medicine had yet to discover, like the exact physical space of the soul. Well, my soul had manifested in my lower left torso and was being twisted by degrees by a spiked, gauntleted fist.
Later, after emergency surgery, the gynecologist informed me that my left ovary had twisted five times around itself, and both it and the fallopian tube were necrotic. She performed a unilateral…
