Fat Face.

Here is an excerpt from my memoir:

“What is that? What is wrong with you?” They all just stared. The first time it happened, we were at the lake and I remember lying on the sofa with my right cheek on the pillow. My whole family circled around me, all faces hovering above with eyes wide opened and amazed.

They poked. They prodded. They whispered. I just cried.

I think they always thought that I couldn’t hear them, but I knew they all didn’t know what to do with me. Where do we take her? What is happening? We were practically in the middle of nowhere. Lake Gaston, North Carolina. The closest grocery store at that time was in Roanoke Rapids, nearly 30 minutes away. It was the closest thing to civilization, so we always called it “going to town.” They had a Wal-Mart and a buffet restaurant called Ryan’s with real southern hospitality, so “town” seemed rather fitting.

My parents took me into town to the closest hospital. “Name please,” the woman at the front desk didn’t even look up from her computer screen.

I couldn’t even open my mouth because the left side of my face was so swollen that it looked like I had a tennis ball shoved in my face. I tried to make noise come out of my mouth, but every time I did I could literally feel the mass growing. My face would expand and throb with shooting pain. My skin was trying to stretch around this new mass that was tender to even a soft touch and felt like it was growing by the second.

“Name pl…” she grew irritated, but quickly stopped mid-sentence when she looked up to see the growth on one side of my face and tears just rolling down. “Um…you can just go right on back. We’ll worry about the rest later.” Her thick southern accent made me feel like they would take great care of me, but turns out they aren’t very sophisticated medically in those parts of town. “How y’all doin’?” worked well for greeting people, but it didn’t speak volumes about their level of care.

The doctors asked me questions about my history, what I had eaten, how I was feeling. All the common questions. I didn’t have answers. I woke up and my face was huge, and the pain was unbearable. They didn’t have answers either. They thought it might be the mumps, but they just had to give me a label and that seemed fair enough. They really had never seen anything like me before.

They gave me a series of antibiotic shots in my butt with hopes of clearing up the “infection.” It seemed reasonable: Your face swells up huge and you have a fever of 103°, something must be infected. The series of shots meant that I had to return multiple days for multiple shots. My parents thought about taking me home, but I begged to just stay at the lake. Sure it’s desolate and was quite a drive to the hospital, but the lake is a peaceful oasis for all of my extended family. All year we count down to our time together at the lake. It’s what gets us all through the cold winters. It’s the only place in the world that doesn’t change year after year, so why would I want to be anywhere else?

So we stayed despite the level of medical expertise. The green couch is really what I remember of those days. Lying on the old, green couch that had been there forever. But it was the perfect couch, so why change a thing about it? Right cheek down on the velvety, plush couch. Left fat face up. Staring straight ahead at the pier and the water and all of my cousins jumping off the diving board. The neighbors brought me magazines, but all I really remember is them staring.

Everyone stared. Even my family would just stare. I thought that they might get used to my new fat face after a few days, but they couldn’t quite disguise their amazed eyes. Not just amazed, but curious and even fearful eyes. I cried because of the incredible pain, but I also cried when people stared. I rarely looked in a mirror, so I only knew it was bad from their reactions. It’s a whole different view from the inside looking out, and people forget that sometimes.

Exactly 12 days later, after multiple shots and tons of antibiotics, I was feeling better. They had fixed me, so what else needed to be done? I was better in time to start tenth grade, so life was fine. As long as I could go to cheerleading practice and look at the cute boy in history class, my life was complete.

The endless years of blood tests began that day at the lake. There were a lot more questions that needed to be answered when the fat face returned every year.

Nighttime.

I’ve always been afraid of the dark. Still today, at the age of 21, I run up the stairs if I am the last one downstairs who has to turn out the lights. My heart races as I try to escape the darkness that always manages to follow me.

What is it that scares me about the dark? Well, you can’t see a thing. Sure, that’s the obvious answer. But there really could be anything there. Especially in the phase where your eyes aren’t adjusted and it is literally pitch black.

Darkness has so much power. Fear of the unknown.

Sometimes I hear noises as I’m falling asleep or I see a weird shadow, so I reach for the lamp in full panic mode.

Nothing there. I feel so defeated when I turn the light on and there’s nothing there.

There’s also another element of darkness.

You manage to drift off to sleep and enter the world of dreams. You wake up in the middle of the night and it’s so dark that you could be anywhere in the world. You’re in a groggy state, so you try to look around to get your bearings. But sometimes it’s just too dark to decipher anything.

There’s this one moment when you can’t figure it out and you actually forget who you are. Where am I? Who am I? Did that really happen?

Just like turning on the light when you hear a noise, only to find that there’s nothing there, you feel so defeated when you snap out of the daze and realize that it wasn’t all a dream. The moonlight shines through the window just enough to illuminate your alarm clock—a quick snap back to reality. Your problems didn’t erase, and you can’t go back in time to a different body.

Darkness erases a lot. It erases our vision and our comprehension and our grasp of reality for just a second. But eventually you wake up and have to face the light where there’s no question about what’s in front of you.