My mom always told me that if you don’t like what you’re doing in life, change it. If you can’t change it, accept it. And if you can’t accept it, go get a drink. Some choices you can’t change once you’ve made them. Sometimes the results are hard to accept. I realized this just a few weeks ago.
Gout. Say it out loud wherever you are reading this. Whisper it if you’re embarrassed.
There. I feel like when you say it, you can get over it. You cringe less.
Say it for me again. Gout.
See, now, it’s almost like you have it.
Almost.
I am a gout survivor. I know that sounds ridiculous. I haven’t been tortured at gunpoint in Lebanon. I haven’t suffered through horrible persecution due to my religious beliefs. I’m not Lance Armstrong. I know that gout doesn’t compare to anything like that but, when I got it, I realized a few things about the choices I’ve made in my life; things I wasn’t quite ready to accept.
To clarify, gout is one of the ugliest words in the English language. It sounds like a communicable disease you get when you go on a safari in Mozambique or something that was brought back from a jaunt through the red light district in Bangkok. Right now, if I asked five girls out for a cup of coffee, then followed it with, Oh, and by the way, I have this minor medical condition, its nothing serious, I won’t die from it, and it sounds worse than it is, but I feel like I should be up front with it, ya know, in an effort to not have any secrets and full disclosure and all that good stuff…I have gout, that four out of five of those girls would politely lie to me about a boyfriend and the other one would turn around and walk out the door.
After all, gout is something your uncle gets. Something your mechanic might bitch about as he tells you your brakes are shot. Something retired basketball coaches hawk on television. Gout is something no one knows about but, at the same time, doesn’t want.
So, that begs the question: what is gout?
Gout is a disease that is caused by an abundance of uric acid in the blood stream. Those levels of uric acid are regulated by the kidneys. If you have too much uric acid, uric crystals are formed in your joints. When they manifest themselves, the sufferer of gout is then thrust into severe and uncomfortable pain in the joints. Typically it starts in the big toe, where pain can be inordinately bad, but for the most part moves out of the system pretty rapidly.
My particular case of gout happened in my left ankle.
On Sunday it was fine. On Monday I woke with stiffness in my ankle. Tuesday came and went with the same symptoms as Monday. By the time I got home from work and school on Wednesday, it was so painful that just walking up the steps to my second floor apartment was akin to walking with a torn Achilles tendon. Wednesday night passed with no sleep. The pain was so severe that I couldn’t rest. If I put it up, it hurt. Down, it hurt. Sideways, it hurt. It felt like bone was grinding on bone. Like little cartoon blood cells were taking pick-axes to my ankle. Like they were sawing my Achilles, back and forth, back and forth, like a lumberjack on a red wood. It was the greatest pain in my life.
I looked at my phone in the darkness of my room at 3:30 am, the pain not receding, the panic beginning to grow, the realization becoming more apparent.
I texted my mom:
I hate to do this but when you wake up you have to help me out and give me a ride to the ER. Something’s wrong.
Ten long minutes went by with no response.
I texted my best friend Andrew:
Yo – Dude. Need a ride to the ER. Pain in ankle so bad I might cry. PLEASE CALL ME BACK.
Ten long minutes went by with no response.
I looked at my foot. It throbbed. Felt like someone lit fireworks inside and each hot ember landed directly on my ankle.
I looked back at my phone. Nothing. No response. Four in the morning. I started thinking.
What were my options for a ride to the ER at this point in my life? It was my mom, my best friend, or the ultimate bachelor slap in the face: a taxi.
It wasn’t the pain in my foot that made me close my eyes and slam my head back on my pillow but the stark realization that I was alone. I had no one. Here I was, lying in bed, in terrific agony, and I had NO ONE to help me. (In full disclosure, I didn’t want to be that guy who gets in a cab alone, showing up at the Emergency Room, tipping the cabbie for his affection. Had it come to this: Did I need to resort to a friendship hooker who only cared as long as he got a decent fare?)
At thirty-two years of age I’ve made a million choices, and frankly, I’m still learning how to make the right ones. I mess up more than the average guy. I’m not a bad person…I just don’t always make the right choices.
How did I get gout? Bad choices.
Being alone at thirty-two years old isn’t as drastic as gout. It’s not felt as immediately. Like gout, it doesn’t shock your system because you eat too much meat. It doesn’t cause harsh jabbing pain in your joints because you drink too much hoppy beer. It doesn’t feel like your foot will split in half because you have a defective genetic make-up. No. Being alone at thirty-two is much slower and much more subtle.
Being alone at thirty-two is more of a silent killer. It only rears its head in moments like these. Moments when you realize you need to call a cab to get to the emergency room. Or when you look up from your book on the train and see the couple kissing across from you. Or when your grandmother asks if you’re seeing some one. Or when you’re watching Four Weddings and A Funeral on WGN on a Sunday afternoon because the Cubs are on a rain delay and you look over to your couch and no one’s on it and you just ate three pounds of gummy bears because you’re in a depression hurricane and the only thing that fills the void is ordering another deep dish pizza and…
That last one never happened but I know it would be a living nightmare. Being alone was something, as I got older, I thought I could handle. Once I got gout, though, everything seemed magnified. And not in a good way.
There were girls. There always were. But I was a victim of a Seinfeldian world. I always found a reason to not move forward. There was the chronic crier. The one who said ‘I love you’ at dinner on the first date. There was the mom with tattooed eyebrows. There was the, I’m still in love with my ex. That one happened three times. There was the drunk. The overly Irish one. The not-Irish-enough one. The one with female patterned baldness. There was the one with tattoos on her chest. The one with the crazy brother. The ex of a friend. The wedding girl.
I know what you’re thinking, and, no, I’m not a male escort and I only just realized how bad that list sounded. Like I’m some sort of wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am-mister. Like, if you show me a little interest you can just take me straight to bed. But I’m not easy. I have standards. I’m particular.
Here are my bad choices. There was my first love Sara. The girl that I snuck around with, kissing when no one was looking, the one who ran her fingers through my hair when I was eighteen and had no idea who I was, but was still there for me anyways. She wanted to wait until she got married. I didn’t.
There was Val: the girl who laughed at all of my jokes even when they were bad. The girl who paid for the tuition to my first class at Second City because she believed in me. The girl who called me crying every other night because she had a dream I was cheating on her. Eventually we broke up because I was cheating on her.
I made those choices and now here I was, lying in bed, staring at my gout-y foot, the one that felt like it needed to be amputated, and I had no one that loved me to take me to the hospital
Around 5:30 am my old man came and got me and gave me a ride. I went to the ER at Illinois Masonic hospital and a really cute nurse asked me what was wrong. I told her it felt like someone had shot me with an invisible shotgun in the foot. She told a doctor. An X-ray tech took me in the back. The results were in. There was no structural damage. The only diagnosis: gout.
The cute nurse shot me a sympathetic eye. I smiled and hung my head in shame. She printed me out a few things about gout. I rolled my eyes and laughed.
Great.
Gout.
For Life.
I thought about asking for her phone number but decided against it. I didn’t think anyone would want to go out with someone with gout. No one wanted Mrs. Goutfire. Three strikes and you’re gout.
After a few weeks the pain went away. I changed my diet and stopped drinking a ton (two of the only things you can really do to control gout attacks).
I started making better choices.
It took me getting gout to figure out that, basically, I was a lonely prick. A jag who shouldn’t have been so god-damned particular. A man who was still making poor choices. But like my mom used to say, If you don’t like what you’re doing, change it. If you can’t change it, accept it and if you can’t accept it, go get a drink.
Now, if I can’t figure it out, does anyone want to buy me a drink?
Matt Martin is a MFA Candidate in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago, a graduate of Second City Chicago’s Conservatory Program, has been published in Trilling Magazine and Hair Trigger and is the host of Come Home Chicago.
Photo courtesy Marco Djermaghian