5. Georgie
CHAPTER FIVE
GEORGIE
They bruise and scrape every possible piece of visible skin on my hips, thighs, and calves, but after two very long hours that felt like an eternity, I’m free.
I will never be using the elevator again and I might have bruises for the rest of my life from where my hips hit the framework of the elevator ceiling, but I’m free.
Also, I never imagined I’d be able to say I stood on top of an elevator car or be able to see just how close I was to death as I look up to see the elevator cables deteriorating in front of my eyes. But I guess this is my life now.
The second I am inside my home, I get naked.
I don’t care that I left the curtains wide open in the living room for the world to see, I peel out of the suit and throw it so far across the room they should hire me to pitch for a major league baseball game.
That’s the last time I ever wear that damned thing again.
I go to my room and look in my full-length mirror at myself, trying to figure out the root cause of the start of all my troubles.
It’s not hard to find the monster in question that soiled the suit, and chair, and inevitably set my luck on a course destined to crash and burn in the form of a stuck elevator.
Left thigh, right where I suspected it to be; the size of a dime on the surface of the skin but the size of a marble or bigger underneath.
What was once a red and angry lesion-looking sore is now red and open and weeping, and very angry for being unattended to for so long.
I sigh, just thinking about how many more of these spots will come because of the stressful day I’ve just dealt with. This is what I have to look forward to.
I’ll start out my next few days waking up to more and more flares, wondering how the hell one even managed to tunnel to a place I’ve never had a spot before.
They’ll start out small, painful, making their presence known.
They’ll grow and fester like the monsters they are before the inevitable break, the relief of the pressure on my skin, followed by the frustration of the drainage and smell that comes from some of them.
I’ll cover myself in bandages, wear the baggy clothes I know will be the most comfortable for flares, and I’ll hope that the least amount possible will rear its ugly head.
If a spot gets too majorly infected, a call to the doctor will be placed for antibiotics.
Then I’ll deal with the scars and the tunnels they leave. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
This is just a glimpse into everyday life with Hidradenitis Suppurativa.
Alternatively, acne inversa or HS for short, and something I’ve spent the majority of my life explaining to people who don’t really care and to doctors who should know about it by now.
Nothing is worse than going to a check-in with a doctor who has your file and having to witness said doctor and their residents googling your condition, trusting websites that are hardly legitimate over my own knowledge about something I’ve lived with for more than half my life.
Come to think of it, this was a mild day for my HS, all things considered.
Although, I’m sure with the stress of today, that will drastically change in the next 48 hours.
It’s all a waiting game with HS. Waiting on the next place for the tracking to tunnel inside your body, the next medication or diet that won’t work, the next really bad flare that sends you to the hospital.
The next time someone looks at you, sees the off-coloured scarring or open areas of HS that you can’t hide, and that face of disgust. The next “Are you contagious?” from someone who clearly doesn’t realize the comment can affect you so negatively—or even worse, they don’t care how badly the remark hurts you.
“Georgie?” Franny’s voice echoes through my apartment a few minutes after I’ve stepped into the scalding shower.
“In here,” I call back, tilting my head back to let the water soak into my dark hair better.
“How are you doing?”
Her voice rings out clear. I know she’s standing in the doorway of the bathroom, mentally deciding whether or not to put the toilet lid down to sit and talk to me.
She ends up doing it anyway, that internal battle always ending the same, and I can hear her sigh outside the curtain.
I pull the curtain back to flick water at her.
She scoffs and wipes her face while I resume this glorious shower.
“Oh, you know, I feel wonderful. My luck is perfect; I got the job, and now I’m gonna go get a lottery ticket so I can win tonight’s draw.”
“I know you’re mostly joking about all that, but did you actually get the job?”
I reach for the body wash. That smell of cocoa and shea, and all things soothing to the skin, wafts through the room. I turn to the curtain and respond to her question, “No. I felt like I was on one of those What Would You Do episodes, but it was real life.”
“I’m sorry, Georgie.”
“It’s fine. I’ll figure it out. You know me.”
I can hear Franny’s disgruntled shift on the toilet seat lid, her arms no doubt crossed. “You shouldn’t have to figure it out, G. It was really shitty of him to do what he did, and you know it.”
I do know it… By he, she means Brandon, and what he did was decide that he didn’t want to have to try anymore.
He didn’t want to do a life with me anymore, claiming it had become ‘too difficult’ for someone of his age to ‘make such an effort’.
If he thought what he was doing was too much effort, I pity the next person he tries to leech on to—use for a good time, a place to stay, and some decent food.
He took a year of my life that I can’t get back…
not to mention half of the rent with him.
My half has been covered for a while since I’ve been off on medical leave to recover from the latest HS surgery over a year ago, but when I told work that I was ready to come back, they told me they would not be needing me after all.
I’m pretty certain the only reason they didn’t want me back was because I had asked for accommodations they didn’t want to make an effort to provide.
Again, I am too much of an effort to deal with.
Franny only let me dwell on it for a day before making me tell myself ‘I am enough’ over and over until I believed in it again and got my ass out of bed.
Then she helped me spruce up my resume. But job hunting…
In a city where all the jobs are taken and most are not disability-accommodating?
Let’s just say it has not gone well. I’m still determined, still searching for jobs every day—everywhere I can—stepping out of my comfort zone hoping they will look past all the things that don’t fit and give me a chance to prove them wrong.
I take the longest shower I possibly can.
So long that my fingers start to prune and hair becomes too clean; so clean in fact, it becomes a tangly mess that I’ll end up not brushing anyway.
I tell Franny about everything before the elevator: the sleeping in and the bad suit, the flare I knew would be trouble the minute things started getting stressful, shitty Tracey and her shitty attitude, the inevitable flare breaking…
Then, finally, the elevator. That was a whole other thing entirely.
I don’t know if anything about that experience felt good.
Honestly, I really thought I would say ‘I’d wipe my memory of this entire day, given a chance!
’, but when I start talking about it, I don’t say that at all.
I say how I was petrified, which is true.
I talk about how it felt to be manhandled out of the elevator ceiling, and then I show Franny the bruising already blooming on my hips.
“It wasn’t so bad after N called you and asked to stay on the line with me.
He made me feel okay about the whole thing, tried to keep me calm through it all, talked to me and went above and beyond—I should send him a card.
Where the hell do I even find a ‘thanks for saving me from the elevator’ card? I could make one I guess–”
Franny sits up from where she lays on my bed, interrupting me. “Wait. What do you mean when he called me and asked?”
While standing in front of my full-length mirror, eyeing the bruises, I meet her eyes in the reflection.
“He– he said he had to call and get permission to stay on the line talking with me. I would assume for like… service charges or something? I don’t know.
He put me on hold, then came back a minute later and he never left until I got out. ”
“G, he never called me. Not a second time anyway. He called me to tell me you were stuck in there and then I called all the people I was supposed to call. I never heard from the monitoring station again until I let them know you were out. But I spoke to a different person then. Not him.”
Settling beside her on the bed, I lay back to stare at the ceiling. She copies me, then turns to look at my expression of pure confusion as I ask, “So he never called to get permission? He said it was against their protocol to stay on the line that long, especially talking like we did.”
“No, he never asked me. I’ll have to call and find out how long the call was and what it’ll cost Rivera on the next bill…” Franny fades into building manager mode while my brain is frozen in an infinite loop.
He didn’t call. He didn’t get permission. He said he’s technically not supposed to do what he did and he didn’t call to get permission… and yet he did it anyway? Though my mind races, two questions remain at the forefront: What does all this even mean, and what was it that made him want to stay?