“Woman Buys Bathing Suit; Then Opens Wrists”

Ruminant With A View

by Elizabeth Boleman-Herring

TEANECK, NJ—(Weekly Hubris)—7/12/10—I shouldn’t joke about suicide.

I’ve just come through Transforaminal Lumbar Interbody Fusion surgery, aka The Valley of The Shadow of Death, and I still can’t put on socks or underwear, or any shoes other than flip-flops without the loving, longsuffering assistance of my male nurse and spouse, known to some as The Devil Bat (see previous columns for more on the gestation of his moniker).

One thing I have been able to do since May 20, however (and obviously), is to sit on the sofa moaning like a donkey about to give birth (I may be one of the few of us who’s actually heard this sound: unforgettable), watching “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” and mainlining Edy’s Loaded Chocolate Peanut-Butter-Cup Ice Cream.

Really, when you’ve had even a stellar neurosurgeon (and Dr. Alfred T. Ogden is a stellar neurosurgeon), perform $180,000.-and-counting’s worth of maintenance on your broken-in-half spine, all you can really do for about two months is consume carbohydrates like a veal calf being fattened for slaughter.

You hurt like hell; you can’t move; you can’t drink; you can’t even make loud noises or cry too much because that hurts, too—but you can eat ice cream.

You don’t even have to go to the effort of chewing the stuff.

Before surgery, in mid-May, I was teaching five Yoga classes per week, and weighed just what I’ve weighed for a decade: 129 pounds at 5’7”.

After surgery—it’s July, My Dears—I look as though someone with a trowel has come along and just slapped Pla-Do, or Play Dough (do they still make that stuff?) onto my thighs and mid-section and upper arms. I’ve become . . . The Pillsbury Pla-Do Woman, and it’s not a pretty sight.

My friend Marian asked me to come float—just float: I thought I might be able to manage that—in her above-ground pool. The ladder might pose a challenge, I reasoned, but, I also thought, two months out from the knife (knives), I was up to getting into the pool.

Then I tried on my bathing suit. A pink, Victoria’s Secret bikini. Marian’s daughter, Natalie, would not have found it age-appropriate for me but, last summer, it fit like a pair of little pink gloves.

This summer, once I managed to get the damn thing as on as it was going to go, I burst into tears: as they phrase it in South Carolina, my mother’s home state, and a place given to colorful expressions, parts of me looked “like squirrels fightin’ in a sack.”

Now . . . given my weakened state, buying a bathing suit at the mall was not going to be in the cards. Even prior to The Late Unpleasantness (what some of my ancient Southern relatives still call The Civil War, but what I call my operation), I had realized that ordering by phone, from Victoria’s Secret or Lands’ End, would comprise a far less humiliating experience than entering a mirror-lined mall changing room to try on bathing suits.

(Oh, The Horror, The Horror!)

And, until inflated like a blowfish by Edy’s and Ben & Jerry’s, I’d been successful at getting the job done with a minimum of angst. Not so, not so, this time, Dear Readers.

On my map, The Valley of The Shadow of Death empties right into The World of Hurt and The Vale of Tears.

I got out my measuring tape. I did not step on the scales: I may be a Presbyterian, but I’m not yet a Buddhist. (Think about it a bit; get back to me.) Blessedly, the sizing chart for VS does not, also, ask your weight. The measurements were enough to gag a gazelle.

Swallowing my pride, I ordered something called a Tankini. I should have ordered something called a Humvee, obviously, because, when the damned thing arrived in the mail, on me it morphed into a thong-like contraption with all the properties of a push-up pair of itty-bitty rubber bands. In paisley. What was I thinking? Paisley?!

After back surgery, someone unable to put on her own socks and underwear should not order a Tankini; and no one, but no one, of any size, looks slimmer in paisley.

So, Lands’ End it was. A one-piece suit, in black, from Lands’ End. On sale, too. If I was going to have to look like a little old Greek granny for about six ice-cream-less months, I was going to dress like one, by golly.

Then, I called the 800-number, and got a man on the phone.

This would not do.

As sweetly as I could, I said, “Raymond, I’m quite certain you could help me buy a bathing suit over the phone, but I wouldn’t survive the process in my current state. If I have to talk about . . . well, certain things, with anyone right now, it had better be a nice, middle-aged, female Lands’ End Associate from the Middle West (which is just what I got after Raymond put me on hold for a moment).

So . . . due to the July 4^th holiday, my enormous black Humvee of a bathing suit has not yet arrived, the postman chugging up our hill with the monstrous package in his backpack. So, Marian’s pool (and water level) are safe for the nonce.

But, I tell you, if you can survive what I’ve survived this summer, you can lose 20 pounds, practice and teach Yoga again, and graduate—eventually—back down to an age-inappropriate bikini.

But not in paisley.