September, 2021

United World College, Montezuma, New Mexico

18 years old

I wake up at 5:30 in the morning with a terrible pressure in my bladder. I stumble out of bed, dragging the sheets to the floor around my ankles, and grope in the dark for a pair of shorts. In the seconds it takes me to extricate myself and slip my legs into the pants, the pressure mounts catastrophically. There’s no time to tiptoe or to gently pull the bedroom door closed behind me. Its slam reverberates like a gunshot as I barrel to the bathroom—the pressure in my bladder silencing any whisper of remorse.

The bathroom stall door swings shut. It ricochets back open. The latch won’t slot into place. Fumbling, legs contorted inward to dam the impending flood, I try the latch once, twice more. It locks; I sit. I see relief ahead, as brilliant and tantalizing as heaven’s gates. 

But the relief won’t come.

The pressure is like fire, like an anvil. What in the world… I wait for a trickle. I try to push, but I’ve never had to force myself to urinate before. I don’t know which muscles to summon for the task. It’s confounding, pleading with my body to yield to primal instinct. A tear leaks from my eye. The discomfort is like none I’ve ever known. Can I call it pain? I see no wound, no blood—but if this isn’t pain, I don’t know what is. I try again to push, and still, nothing. It’s worse to try to no avail than to endure. I lean forward, elbows on my knees, head in my hands. The pressure mounts. I was wrong—I don’t have the strength for endurance.

Back to my room. I scramble for my phone in the dark underbelly of my bed. My roommate huffs and tosses under the covers—unsubtle. Sorry my literal fucking crisis woke you. Hellfire isn’t raging in your vagina, asshole.

Back in the bathroom. I text my dorm’s resident advisor. Two minutes pass, no response. I check the time: 5:50 a.m. Health services won’t open for another three hours and 10 minutes. I calculate: 20 minutes since I’ve awoken, which means 190 more until I might meet the sweet grace of medicine, which means I’ll have to do the last 20 minutes nine and a half times over. I half laugh, half gasp. I check my phone again to see if by some miracle my RA has awoken and responded: 5:51 a.m. And underneath the time stamp…

Saturday. At this desolate, godforsaken New Mexico boarding school, it’s Saturday, and health services won’t open at all. If I were having a heart attack, I’d be dead right now. Or maybe I am dying. Maybe everyone’s been keeping it a big, hilarious secret that death starts in your bladder. The RA won’t respond, so all I can hope for is the on-call nurse, and I can’t find the on-call number anywhere. I close my eyes, dig my nails into my forehead, and picture my RA breaking open the bathroom door to find me in rigor mortis. 

Four hours, 20 unanswered texts, and 10 phone calls later, I’m connected to Hannah, the on-call nurse. She says she’ll be there soon. When, after another hour, she rumbles up outside my dorm and honks, I rise from my seat on the curb with gravel imprinted into my thighs and the red crescents of my nails cut into each palm. She rolls down the window, smiles, and waves.

“Hi, good morning!”

I open my mouth and fail to speak. 

“Ooh, rough one, is it?”

I realize in the car that what I had thought was the worst possible discomfort was nothing but a prelude to the main event. Every pothole and every judder of the engine brings pressure of diluvian proportion against the walls of my bladder. White spots swim across my vision. We roll to a stop at the Alta Vista Regional Hospital and the final jerk of the parking brake wrenches a choked shriek from behind my lips.

The only other person in the emergency waiting room is a middle-aged woman who eyes me suspiciously as, failing to stifle my torment, I cross and uncross my legs and twist and rock in the chair, intermittently rising to pace the room. Behind a windowed partition sits the lone receptionist who scrolls through videos on her cell phone, the audio trickling through the glass as indecipherable buzzing. Every now and then she chuckles at her screen or places her cell phone down to pick up a call from the landline on her desk. After watching the sun rise from half-mast to its full height in the sky through the waiting room window, I beg her, through a film of tears, to put me through to the doctor. She looks up at me with an expression of mild interest and shrugs. 

“Not sure where she is, hon,” she says.

At 1:00 p.m., the doctor leans her head around the doorframe; her eyes travel no farther up than my name printed at the top of the chart in her hands. I nearly run to her when she summons me. She hands me a cup, and as my hands clasp around it, a gaping fear expands in my gut. I don’t know if I can face the failure of my body again. I don’t know if I can stomach the absolute futility of my attempts to subdue the agony. But I have to try.

I emerge from the bathroom in a state akin to euphoria, if euphoria can be qualified by interminable, fiery pain and desperation of unprecedented intensity. In my hand is tangible proof that my body is corroding from the inside: a cup of watery red. Proof that for nearly eight hours, my bladder has been the host of something demonic, and nobody has done a thing to exorcize it. I proffer the container of liquid to the doctor, who looks from it to me appraisingly.

“Wow. This isn’t good, honey.”

“I know!” I say. I have a crazed impulse to giggle. “I know!”

***

I am rewarded for my struggles with a drive-thru trip of my choosing: either McDonald’s, Sonic, or Dairy Queen. In circumstances as extenuating as mine, the school is graciously willing to allow a small breach of its policy strictly prohibiting students from venturing beyond the school grounds and into town—implemented to prevent the illicit purchase of heinous substances such as Smirnoff Ices and cigarettes. I have not yet actually received the antibiotics I need to rehabilitate my urinary tract; I was discharged too late in the day, and the pharmacy had closed, so I’ll return to Hannah’s passenger seat to pick the pills up tomorrow. For now, the pain is no less, but I’ve at least grown too tired to squirm.

I choose McDonald’s. I order fries, a McFlurry, and—though I’m normally a strict vegetarian—chicken nuggets. After Hannah pays, she waves the credit card in front of me. She grins with smug satisfaction.

“This is the school card, you know. Isn’t it nice that they cover things like this?”

Back on campus, I hobble into my dorm with my brown paper McDonald’s bag dangling at my side. I pass several girls in the common room; they regard me with hungry, jealous eyes—nearly resentful. 

“McDonald’s?” they say. “You’re so lucky.”

“I went to the ER. This was my compensation.”

“Oh, are you ok?”

I open my mouth to respond.

“Wait, sorry, I can’t believe you got McDonald’s. I’m so jealous.”

Later that evening, I open my door to receive my ambiguously categorizable long-term hookup (he has told me he loves me, though I haven’t yet told him I like him, and neither of us has ever mentioned the words “dating,” “relationship,” “girlfriend,” or “boyfriend”). He enters, ruffles my hair hello, and seats himself on my mattress. Presently, I find standing marginally more bearable than sitting, so I lean against my closet, attempting nonchalance through the torment.

“How was your day?” he asks.

My voice comes out slightly too high-pitched. “Oh, not great.” 

“Why?”

He spots the McDonald’s bag on my desk. 

“Wait,” he says. “Is that McDonald’s? How did you get it?”

“Well, I—”

He reaches over and snatches the bag from the desk. He pulls out the empty fries and chicken nuggets containers and turns them upside down—several crumbs drop onto the duvet. His face falls; he brushes the crumbs to the floor. 

“None for me?”

“No, sorry… I ate everything.”

I attempt to contort my stance subtly to stanch the phantom flow still pounding against my bladder. Preoccupied by the bag, he seems not to notice.

“Damn, I wish you’d saved me some. I haven’t had McDonald’s in ages.”

“I was really hungry… It was my first meal of the day.”

“Well, you didn’t have to be that hungry,”  he says.

I apologize and contort again. He cocks his head as I attempt to press my thighs together, pigeon-toed. This time, I achieve subtlety less successfully.

“You okay? Oh, wait, yeah, why did you get McDonald’s in the first place?”

“Oh, I’m fine. I just had an infection. I had to see the nurse, but it’s Saturday, so—”

“Yeah, on-call. That sucks, sorry.”

“It’s ok,” I say. “It’s not that bad. She paid for the McDonald’s, which was nice—although, on the school’s card, actually, so I guess she doesn’t really get credit.”

He gasps, affronted. “You got it for free? And the school paid? Lucky.”

I laugh haltingly as he stretches out over the covers. He pats the spot next to him, and I remember: “Oh, but I probably can’t, you know…”

He raises his eyebrows. 

“Well, it was a UTI.”

He frowns; a dark cloud of concern passes over his face. He sits up, leans forward. “But, a UTI…”

“Like, a urinary tract infection. It’s just a temporary infection.”

The crease between his eyebrows deepens. A sentence is clogged behind a stoppage in his throat.

“Not an STD,” I say.

He breathes a deep, shaky sigh of relief, laughs, and rolls backward onto the mattress to stare up at the ceiling. “Oh, thank god. Well, UTIs aren’t so bad, right? Definitely not as bad as not even getting a bite of your McDonald’s.”

I bite the inside of my cheek to distract from the storm seething in my bladder.

He sits up again to look at me seriously. “I actually can’t believe you got it for free…”

I reposition myself once more against the closet, nodding. The discomfort has just surged—a fresh lick of fire. Pins prick behind my eyes. I can no longer muster words of pacification, I can’t apologize for my inordinate fast food privilege. The pain has extended its flaming tentacles through the whole length of my body. 

I recount the events of the day to myself in an attempt at a mantra, at self-hypnosis: UTI, UTI, UTI, UTI, UTI…