The Fighter

CW: Mentions of suicidal ideation, mental health struggles, anorexia nervosa

**

First of all, I very much know how much it hurts. Quite literally, it does.

You sit in your wheelchair as they push you bumpily and help you up the maroon leather-backed banquette at the very front of a coffee chain’s branch in the hospital’s lobby. You’re fully aware that the mobile chair is but standard operating procedure for leaving the medical centre, yet the mere idea of your willpower being excised along with that gangrene bit of your small intestine the surgeons took out just six days before makes you wince and sigh. No worries, though, when you look at the amethyst-backed menu as intensely as you would a Snellen Chart, beam, and watch your almond-shaped cocoa eyes sparkle.

You’ve walked up to similar marble counters across the city, asked for the same three-cheese and mushroom fusilli bowl and Moroccan Mint tea latté from some aubergine-aproned barista, almost as if the routine were doctor’s orders. However, you knew that today, your usual gooey pasta dish and the slight hint of aromatic cinnamon and chocolate in your beverage would be extra delectable. After all, one week of subsisting on intravenous fluids and then, flavourless jellies made even the simplest fare seem like Beluga Caviar.

You fork a mouthful into the cavernous expanse on your face, practically shovelling every morsel despite the undeniable acrid disinfectant smell permeating the air. Soon, your belly expands and then, you feel it. The staples holding your core together, the very same ones that will sting once Doctor Cinco dislodges them from your skin three weeks later, start pressing into the rubberised abdominal binder that keeps making you perspire. That burning sensation makes you wish they still pumped the sweet release of morphine into your circulatory system You will your mind to press on, though, keep your lips stiff as a limb in a cast, and jolt energy to your spine so you could sit up straight. Well, didn’t they call you the same thing your entire stay, anyway: The Fighter?

Of course, this wasn’t the first time you have been dubbed that. No, there have been moments, way too many instances where you’ve clawed your way out of a medical team pronouncing you dead.

As soon as you were born, you’ve had to take your first punch. You were scurried away to the neonatal intensive care unit where the healthcare team poked and prodded you, tsked, and declared “Yep, it’s a liver ailment.” Your barely open eyes scanned the room to gaze at your mum and dad’s stony expressions belying the petrification, the tempest inside making their pulses race.

Somehow, though, your minutes-old brain had taken all of this in scrupulously, almost like an intern observing the most critical quadruple bypass, and decided to pump determination into you, almost as if you were on a drip. You balled up those miniscule fists and gritted your way to leaving the NICU two weeks later. When your parents were finally able to take you home, you vowed to hang on, to make sure those lines keep going zigzag on a monitor. Of course, you still do.

When you were 16, you were thrust into Round 2, so to speak. Your beloved English teacher would find you doubled over on the classroom floor during a lunch break. The very next day, an A&E physician would examine you and frown as she pressed her hand onto your abdomen. She’d immediately ask for a sonogram, one that reveals a dark-coloured, malignant-looking tumour strangling your left ovary.

Suddenly, you dashed from chatting with your mates about books to seeing an oncologist, from worrying whether or not you’re done editing the features articles in the school newspaper to fretting about whether or not the possible round of chemotherapy would annihilate your strength. Nevertheless, you command your soul, that integral bit of you that no MRI machine can detect, to bear down, to kick and jab. As you lay on a table and scalpels slice you open, you rivet steel onto your consciousness to go on, to heal. When you hobbled out of the gynaecology ward, you smiled at the second chance at life handed to you with the discharge papers. Of course, you still do.

All those hospital stays, though, were nothing compared to the guerilla campaign you had to wage in the arid fields of your psyche. If going under the knife was a boxing match, in your head was all out war.

You always knew that you marched to the beat of your own drum, did not follow the yells of the invisible drill sergeant of “normal”. The girl who constantly dove into the trenches of her world of stories, who sloppily devoured every new language rule of the tongues she was interested in learning, would obviously find herself repeatedly stepping over social landmines. In the battle arena of secondary school, you were the unlucky target of verbal AK-47s, of unknown bodily fluids secretly smeared onto your uniform. All of those bullets were too much for your adolescent mind to bear, and so, you started fantasising about waving a white flag on existing, about surrendering to the cloaked assassins holding your heart hostage.

The only thing that went on a rescue mission to save you from the dark jungles of your emotions was your love of writing. Every word scrawled in flowing cursive in your old exercise notebooks was a helicopter ride out of the wilderness; every plot conjured up was a shoulder carry from an officer out of the bomb out of the frontlines. Your passion for creating tapestries from words gave you a mission, a reason to continue. To this very day, whenever you churn out a story, you breathe a sigh of relief that you did not let the mental enemies capture you. Of course, you still do.

It's battles like this that led you to a stapled-up tummy in a café.

Growing up, the sentence “You’d be so pretty if only you lost weight” pierced your ears consistently, almost as if it were a bugle call. You’ve learnt to put up a shield, to subsume yourself in doing your own thing. However, repetition left kinks in the armour until it was completely deformed. Once again, you reached for your sword, stood firm, and decided to fight…only you had decided to slay yourself.

It started innocently enough; you cut down your portions and stopped cramming down those sweets you adored. Eventually, you whittled down to your ideal weight and the praises for your new body became the shiny golden medals you proudly adorned yourself in. By that time, though, you became addicted to the adulation. Like an expert marksman, your eyes were trained on every roll on your belly and the roundness of your face. Despite dropping down to a staggering six and a half stones, your scrutinising gaze landed on the minutest of skin folds and desired to obliterate them. Soon, you’d spend three hours on punishing work outs, a solitary bunch of grapes the only thing that fuelled your strained muscles.

Then, one day at work, you found yourself vomiting all over your office’s floor, the sensation like a million steel-toed combat boots kicking you in the abdomen. A CT scan would reveal that a bit of your small intestine’s walls adhered to each other due to the lack of sustenance and that you needed emergency surgery or else the gangrene might infect your whole body. As they wheeled you into that operating theatre, you sobbed at your self-mutilation. You promised yourself to cherish this borrowed life you were handed. Of course, you still do.

The car arrives, and your mum helps you into the back seat. You do not know it yet, but you’re driving off into learning to wrangle your demons, to let the affirmations you speak into the mirror cover your heart like a breastplate. You do not know it yet, but you would find comrades --- friends and, eventually, a loving partner --- along the path who’d stay beside you in every skirmish. What you do know, though, is that you’re going home. What you do know is that you have a new lease on life and that you're grateful you can continue to fight again. Of course, you still do…as always.