The Antelope in the Living Room: The Real Story of Two People Sharing One Life (9 page)

Finally, Perry threatened to let Shorty (who works for Perry’s landscaping company and is always looking for odd jobs where he can get paid by the hour and turn a two-hour job into a fifteen-hour job) finish the painting. But there was no way I was going to let Shorty steal my painting glory after I’d already done most of the hard work, so with fresh determination, I spent a good part of the weekend finishing the whole thing.

I learned a lot about myself along the way, and I can guarantee I’ll never be the same.

Neither will my permanently green hands. Or our landscaping. Or the kitchen step stool. Or the knockoff Ugg boots I wore for most of the process.

And finally, our dog, Scout, might forever have a green stripe down his back since he stayed under my feet the entire time because
he is my loyal companion. Everyone else abandoned me, which maybe didn’t have as much to do with avoiding helping me as it did the fact that I was wearing maternity sweatpants, a seventeen-year-old Christmas-formal sweatshirt, and house shoes, but Scout stayed by my side the whole time.

Unfortunately, he never got the concept of wet paint and kept falling asleep right up against the house. He and I now know the wisdom contained in the immortal words of Kermit the Frog.

It’s not easy being green
.

And it’s not easy doing home repairs while your husband supervises because he doesn’t believe you’ll ever finish the project.

In a lot of ways home improvement is like marriage. It’s not glamorous. It can take a lot of hard work and effort. There are days it feels like it might be easier to burn the whole thing to the ground and start all over again. Then you remember how much you love the house or your husband and you recommit yourself to what it takes to see the whole thing through.

Even when it might involve paintbrushes and compromise and sanding and scraping all the rough edges.

And when you look back on a tough patch a few months after the worst has passed, you don’t remember all the hard work and the tears. You just have the satisfaction of knowing you’ve made something beautiful.

CHAPTER 9

W
HEN
I
WAS NINETEEN YEARS OLD,
I made an odd discovery. I had a mole in my belly button. (Yes, my belly button. What do you call it? Your navel? Then you are much more mature than I am.) When I first noticed it, I thought maybe it was just dirt or something. And I don’t mean to imply that I don’t practice proper belly-button hygiene, but there was just something there that I had no recollection of ever seeing before. It was all so sudden.

But after pulling out a Q-tip and some alcohol, I determined that it was some type of growth. And so I told my mother about it, and she scheduled an appointment at the dermatologist for me because I guess that seemed like the logical choice for belly-button issues. The dermatologist checked it out and determined that it needed to be removed; however, it wasn’t something he felt
comfortable doing since it was in such a precarious position in my belly button. So he referred us to a plastic surgeon.

Yes. I have had plastic surgery on my belly button. I know! It’s very glamorous! Quit asking me questions about it.

Truthfully, I am not alone in this. Apparently belly-button plastic surgery is a very big thing in China. But so is Hello Kitty and eating chicken feet, which means they might have questionable taste.

Anyway, it was an outpatient procedure. I went into the plastic surgeon’s office, he gave me three local injections to numb the area (sweet mercy, the pain) and then cut out the mole. After he bandaged it up, I was cleared to go home and wasn’t even offered any painkillers, which I took to be a sign that it wouldn’t be a painful recovery. I mean, it’s a belly button. That ranks lower than a gallbladder but slightly higher than a root canal.

I spent that night at my grandmother’s house, and this is where I need to tell you that her house was one of those split floor plans, with the master bedroom all the way across the house from the other bedrooms. And when I woke up in excruciating pain around 2 a.m. when all the local anesthetic wore off, I couldn’t even manage to stand up straight due to all the belly button agony. I had to get on my hands and knees and crawl across the house to beg my grandmother to call the emergency doctor’s line to get me some sort of pain medication. I couldn’t stand up straight for the next three days. It was terrible.

I know. I am the bravest person you know.

I first relayed this cautionary tale to Perry before he went to see the dermatologist for a few suspicious spots on his skin. He looked at me in stunned silence. I just knew he was admiring my bravery in the face of such tremendous belly-button agony. He said, “Are
you telling me that your belly button hurt so bad you had to drag yourself across the house?”

“Yes.”

“I am so embarrassed for you right now.”

Whatever. He doesn’t know my life.

I’d made an appointment for Perry to go to the dermatologist because he’d been complaining about two itchy spots on the back of his neck, and I was a little concerned about the amount of hydrocortisone he was going through every month. It’s not like that stuff grows on little hydrocortisone trees in our backyard.

There was no doubt in my mind that he probably had some sun damage. All you have to do is look at the color of his feet to know that God intended him to be a fair-skinned person. They are practically translucent! But he is an outdoorsman who lives in South Texas with an occupation that requires him to be outside about 98 percent of the time. Plus, we are from a generation that believed Hawaiian Tropic SPF 2 was legitimate sunscreen along with some white zinc oxide across our noses, but that was more about looking cool than being sensible.

The night before the appointment, I told him he needed to make sure the doctor did a full check of all his moles, especially one on his neck that looked a little suspicious to my untrained but highly paranoid eye. Something about it just didn’t look right, and it certainly didn’t help that it might have growled at me one time when I got a little too close.

The doctor looked him over and explained that the itchy patches were just spots that are sensitive to the sun. They see the sun and start to cry and complain that the sun is hurting their feelings, and then they get all dramatic and itchy. The bottom line is that they are similar to a needy friend
 
—harmless yet mildly annoying.

However, the doctor looked at the mole on his neck and decided to send it off for a biopsy because it was giving her the evil eye. Perry came home with a little Band-Aid and a few comments about how I always send him off to get all sliced up. Which yes, yes I do.

What else was I supposed to do for entertainment? It wasn’t like summer television had that much to offer. I just told him that I was trying to ensure he stays around as long as possible, because if something happened to him, I’d be stuck with a surplus of Columbia fishing shirts.

After his appointment, he just sat around the rest of the afternoon since they’d told him he should take it easy. He said he wasn’t sore, but I kept telling him he needed to take some Advil in preparation for when the local anesthetic wore off. Did he need to hear the story about my belly button again? Because I am always willing to tell it.

But the truth is, I was worried about him. When you’re young and brand-new and say those vows in front of your friends and family, you just throw out the “in sickness and in health” line because it’s part of the ritual. Like when you tell Aunt Nancy you love the sweaters she buys you every Christmas. It’s just something you say without thinking about what it might really mean or all the horrendous sweaters you’re committing to for the future.

Essentially, you’re taking over this person’s health care. It’s like you’re the government but hopefully more efficient and not looking for ways to cut corners. If your spouse becomes ill, people look to you to be in charge of the whole thing. Doctor visits, medications, and lots of wine. Or maybe lots of whine. It depends on the day.

And sometimes it’s just fetching Kleenex and cold medicine
while your husband suffers from a man cold. Which we all know is the very worst of all the colds. It’s far superior and more serious than any type of flu a wife might contract. It requires chicken noodle soup in bed, lots of “poor baby,” and Xanax. Granted, the Xanax is for the caretaker, but you get my point.

Perry’s iffy mole turned out to be nothing to worry about, but during the course of our marriage we’ve also had more serious health scares. Although I realize it’s hard to imagine anything worse than the belly-button story.

Perry has chronic back problems. It started when he was a counselor at a sports camp when we were dating but seemed to get worse after we got married. And so we finally went to see a doctor to explore surgical options. An MRI revealed that he had a bulging disc, and the doctor recommended that he get surgery to help with the pain. That sounded reasonable, and it certainly helped that at the time I was a pharmaceutical sales rep and had some sweet health insurance, which meant it would only cost us pennies. “What? No deductible? Sure, cut away!” I can’t resist a bargain.

Perry’s first surgery was about a year after we were married. We woke up at the crack of dawn to get him to the hospital in time. I held his hand until it was time for him to go back, and I cried as I sat in the waiting room because I was so worried about him. It’s never an easy thing to watch someone you love with all your heart be wheeled back to have any sort of medical procedure. Have you not seen all those
20/20
episodes where someone dies because a doctor forgot to take out a sponge or something? Good night. It’s enough to make you want to slap a Band-Aid on your appendix, pop an Advil, and call it a day.

When they finally let me go into the recovery room, I was
stunned to see Perry looking so pale and helpless. As much as I joke and as much as I tease him that he totally started falling apart the day we got married, he really doesn’t do sickly. While I look at ill health as an opportunity to watch trashy television and stay in bed all day, he views it as something akin to a prison sentence.

So I fought back my tears as I stroked his hair and watched him fight nausea from the anesthesia. Ultimately, they decided he needed to stay the night, and he insisted that I go home to get some rest. So I headed home while I prayed he’d have a peaceful night’s sleep and be much improved in the morning.

I headed to the hospital early the next day to pick him up. By the time we signed all the papers and listened to his post-op instructions, it was late morning. They wheeled him out to the car, and I watched the nurse help him in and shut the door. Then I pulled out of the parking lot and began to carefully navigate our way home. But that’s when I saw a Chick-fil-A.

Suddenly all I could think about was a chicken biscuit. You know, the chicken breakfast biscuit you can only get before 10:30 a.m.? My desire was fueled by two factors. First, this was back before there were many Chick-fil-A restaurants located outside a mall food court. Second, I was rarely up and out early enough to make the breakfast-biscuit deadline.

So I gently asked Perry, “Do you mind if I pull through Chick-fil-A and get a chicken biscuit?”

To his credit, he didn’t file for divorce on the spot. And maybe it was the pain medication, because he just looked at me and mumbled, “Okay.”

I pulled through the Chick-fil-A line and ordered my biscuit, only to be informed that it was 10:37 and I’d missed the cutoff
by seven minutes. SEVEN MINUTES. Dang those nurses and their post-op instructions. And since I didn’t want anything else Chick-fil-A had to offer, I attempted to make a U-turn out of the drive-through line and, unfortunately, jumped a curb. With my husband who’d just had back surgery in the passenger’s seat.

I am a horrible person. A horrible person who finds a chicken biscuit completely irresistible.

Did you ever read Cherry Ames books when you were younger? She was a nurse with jet-black hair and rosy red cheeks who was always on a new adventure wherever she was working
 
—in the army or on a cruise ship or at a smallpox farm. (Not really on that last one, but it made me laugh.) I loved those books and aspired to be Cherry Ames when I grew up.

Sadly, jumping the curb in my quest for a chicken biscuit with my post-op husband in tow forever disqualified me from being Cherry Ames. There’s a good chance I’m not even allowed to read the books anymore.

I finally got him home and situated on the couch with a blanket. According to Perry, the Clemson Tigers band marched through our living room to dispense his pain medication at some point that afternoon. Which is weird, because we’re not even Clemson fans, not to mention that South Carolina is a pretty good haul from Texas. So I took this as an indication that maybe it was time to cut back on the meds just a tad.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the last of Perry’s surgeries. Fast-forward about eight years and an additional back surgery later, and we decided to try it one more time. The difference was that this time we had a child and bad health insurance now that we were both
self-employed. All of a sudden that Tylenol they wanted to charge $85 for seemed highly extravagant.

Perry had to be at the hospital by five thirty in the morning. I still haven’t really figured out why you have to be at the hospital so early for surgery. Especially since the doctors don’t seem to breeze through to draw those Sharpie cutting dots on your body until sometime around nine. Inconveniently, this surgery coincided with Mimi and Bops leaving on vacation and Gulley already being on vacation, so I was left without anyone to help me with Caroline until after eight in the morning. And that’s how Perry ended up taking a taxi to have back surgery during our ninth year of marriage. Old Love!

That’s what happens when you’re on your third back surgery in four years. It’s like having your fourth baby
 
—you’re lucky if anyone even shows up. And they sure aren’t bringing flowers or food.

In fact, Perry told me I could just stay home and he’d take a cab back home when the surgery was over. I told him there was no way I was going to let him do that. Cab rides aren’t cheap, and we have a perfectly good city bus system.