Maybe the Mountains In Denver Are All In My Head

by Karishma Jobanputra

Where are you? 

I’m in an ambulance. I’m unable to see out the window. The earth rumbles beneath me as I’m taken to a hospital in Denver. The paramedics ask me if they can stick an IV in my arm and I shake my head. I pass out, I say. From needles. They talk to me for a few minutes, then ask again about the IV, say that I won’t pass out this time. That they will distract me, that I can look away, that I am probably dehydrated. I acquiesce.

Then they ask the sort of questions they have been trained to ask. What do you do, where were you going, what were you going for? I have no idea, I want to say. Instead, I tell them things that I think are true, things that fall out of my mouth like muscle memory. Writer, Portland, a conference. 

I have never been to Denver before but imagine that the roads are the color of dust and pyramids. The air is a shade of grainy yellow that belongs in a hot, dry place. I try to inhale but it’s like swallowing sawdust. I thought it would be different. I thought there would be mountains everywhere and that the air would taste like cold water after a long run.

The trip to the hospital is quick, and the needle is in my arm. The thickness of it is sickening. The sliver of metal in my vein, I can feel it, a tense pain that plants the taste of rust in my mouth.

I say a lot of words in response to a lot of questions. This is just a layover, I’m going to Portland, do you think I’ll have to pay for another flight, how much does an ambulance ride cost? I keep going because if I stop, if I look at the needle disappearing into my skin, I will pass out. 

The flight to Denver was the wrong one. It was the right one, but I should’ve been on a different one. Instead of getting on a plane a day earlier, I stayed in bed. 

An old friend texted me. We’re on the same flight, I heard them call your name just now. Let’s meet in Portland after the conference!

I responded. Missed the flight but yeah, I’ll text you when I get there tomorrow!

I was too tired to make it to LaGuardia at 6 a.m. because I had been at Mount Sinai Hospital on New York City’s Upper West Side late the night before. 

It started a few months ago at Klong, a restaurant on St. Mark’s Place, with two friends. A crisp evening, the smell of rain in the air. A Thai curry and too many drinks in a dimly lit space frenetic with music and chatter.

On the subway home, I felt nauseous. I’m just drunk, I thought, keeping my eyes fixed on a spot on the window until I made it to my stop and could stumble into my apartment and clutch my stomach on the couch. 

But my roommate was having a small party. Her close friends sat around our table, candles lit, board games out, and crackers in hands. I sat with them for a while because it felt rude not to. My brain was dislodged from my head, and I was glad. Nothing felt real and I could box up the discomfort, put it to one side, feel it but only from a distance as if it were something separate from me. I sipped a glass of red wine and watched a cracker crumble in my hand like food for a bird.

I woke up that night with a blinding pain in my stomach and ran to the bathroom to throw up. I passed out on the cold floor, exactly on the spot I’d killed my first cockroach a few weeks earlier. My roommate was repeating my name as I woke up.

Are you okay? she kept asking.

They didn’t see me quickly at Mount Sinai, the day before I was supposed to go to Denver. I waited, grinding my teeth. I itched to use my phone, to get lost in a crevice of the internet, but needed to conserve my battery; I didn’t know how long I would be there. I texted my boyfriend who said he’d come as soon as he could. I focused on the cracked back of the chair in front of me and took deep breaths, counting eight beats in, eight beats out, eyes watering with tiredness and pain, counting, counting, counting.

After a few hours, there was a blonde doctor who looked like Rachael Harris, then a dark-haired doctor who looked like my mother, then a male nurse who looked like no one I knew and took some blood. I told them that my stomach hurt often and the pain came in waves, leaving my body hunched over on the subway if I couldn’t get a seat, the whole of me pinched and terrified I would keel over, fall to the floor, and hit my head on a seat on the way down. I told them there was a tightness in my head, the sensation of floating, of a strange, surreal lightness. They made notes, then left me alone for a while. 

Several infinities later, someone wheeled me upstairs in a chair and that is when I blacked out.

Anxiety is very bodily, said my friend in a clothes shop that also served coffee and also sold The Paris Review. The place was obnoxious and could belong only there, between Tribeca and Soho. 

I’d told him about the stomach cramps and nausea that had been dogging me for weeks. Not this bodily, I said. I go to therapy, I know what anxiety feels like. 

He shrugged knowingly and I felt a flash of surprise at his confidence that my pain might be so easily known, labeled, and dismissed. Was this what it felt like to be a Cassandra—the Greek mythological figure who could accurately prophetize the future but was never believed? Never trusted, destined to be disregarded. My body and its pain, by virtue of my being a woman, lived in the territory of being disbelieved, and the long history of women being unheard or labeled hysterical made me wary. 

My friend bought me a coffee and himself a copy of The Paris Review. There were very few clothes around us, all of them hanging stiffly from hangers or folded carefully and specifically, like origami, nestled between empty vases and books. They looked soft, sweaters in cream and pink, and I wanted to rub them against my face. 

I remember when I was in Texas, he said, and I ate a doughnut and I just thought, what if I die? What if there’s something in this doughnut? And I collapsed in the hotel bathroom later.

After a beat, he clarified. There was nothing in the doughnut. 

He began to flirt with the barista or maybe the sales assistant—it was hard to know what her job title was—while I thought about the doughnut. He couldn’t have known if there was something in it in the same way I couldn’t know if there was something wrong in me. Maybe there was something in the doughnut. Maybe there wasn’t, but that still didn’t mean that my anxiety manifested the same way as his. 

In Mount Sinai, my mind woke before my body, the feeling of someone trying to put something back together and failing, a brain trying to fuse itself back into place, to grab onto the inside of my head but short-circuiting. A nausea so intense I would give anything for it to be over, half conscious and half not, enough to think this is what hell is, this is what hell is and I want to die until suddenly my eyes were open and the hospital was there in front of me, my body goose-pimpled, shuddering, not my own, of course, not my own, where are you, I don’t know, the taste of pennies in my mouth, harsh against my tongue, a doctor saying words that floated like balloons, she fainted

back

put her                              

         fainted

put

   her 

The doctors in Denver come and see me much more quickly than they did in New York but still, I have time to wonder how many bills I will get. I tried to stop the airport from calling an ambulance because I don’t have health insurance. I have a part-time job and a part-time internship. I have parents who have health insurance but they live in England, so it doesn’t matter.

I called my parents as soon as I got off the plane. What do you think I should do? I drank the air like a gasping fish. The oxygen wouldn’t go to my brain and I was shaking and sweating and taking small steps so my stomach didn’t hurt too much, the smell of the airport like the sealed air that belongs in a can of whipped cream. 

I don’t know, my dad said, sounding calm. He’d been on the other end of this phone call before, most recently two days ago, when I called him on my way to Mount Sinai.

I wished he would panic so that I could know this was real. So that I could know that even if this was all in my head, my body was still breaking. 

I’ll get on the plane to Oregon, I said, falling into a seat. I thought of the money I’d spent on the first flight and then this second one. I’m already halfway there, I managed.

Okay, he said.

Ten minutes later, I felt worse and knew I wouldn’t be able to walk to the gate. I called my dad again.

I don’t think I can do it. I’m going to go to the hospital.

Should I come?

It was the middle of a workweek and he would be able to get here tomorrow, at the earliest. I didn’t even know if there were direct flights from London to Denver. By the time he got here, I would have lived through the next few hours by myself. I straightened, winced at the pain in my stomach, and gritted my teeth. 

No, it’s okay. 

I called my boyfriend in New York. 

He looked up flights and they were extortionate and he had an $800 limit on his card.

Don’t worry about it, I said. 

I shuffled up to one of the airline desks and asked if I could have some water. They peered at me. 

Are you okay? 

At Mount Sinai in New York, after a long stretch of time saturated with the fear that I would pass out again, they took me upstairs for an ultrasound. It’s like there’s a hand inside my stomach, I told the nurse, and it’s squeezing every muscle it can find. Treating my ovaries and diaphragm like stress balls.

Afterward, they didn’t take me back to my room but to a different floor. A holding station, said the nurse. Someone will collect you and take you back to your room. I had no watch or phone and wondered if my boyfriend was wandering through the hospital, looking for me. I imagined him as a character in a fairy tale, yelling my name into a dark forest to no reply.

I waited for what felt like hours, uneasy and silent, wishing I had my phone or a person to distract me. I started shaking and felt sweat on my brow. I called to the woman behind the reception desk that I was going to faint. She took me back down to the floor I’d been waiting to go to and handed me a carton of apple juice on the way, slamming the fridge door shut with her leg. My boyfriend was there, in the waiting area. He looked at me like he didn’t know who I was, my gown falling open, my lips dry, my hands shaking so much I couldn’t pierce the juice box. He stabbed it for me. I looked at him like I was thankful and he looked at me like he was scared. I didn’t know who I was either.

You seem quite anxious. A neurologist in Denver hits an instrument that looks like a hammer against my knees to see how my body reacts, then asks me some questions. He has a kind tone and round glasses that make me think of Harry Potter.

I almost tell him the specifics of my situation—that I don’t know anyone in Colorado and maybe I’m dying—so that he can recognize how stupid his observations are. That I have no interest in being disbelieved or dismissed again. That anyone would be anxious right now. Instead, I tell him that’s just my energy and think I’ll throw one of his little hammers at him if he tells me this is only anxiety.

He tells me my tests came back fine and that it’s probably anxiety and I almost cry. I want to quote many things about women being diagnosed with anxiety when actually they are suffering from illness or disease. I almost mention Cassandra but stop myself. I already know I have anxiety, I say. How can I trust you, is what I really want to say.

He tells me it can get more intense, more bodily. He looks at me kindly, as if he knows I want to argue with him. As if he knows what I am thinking and is on my side. I know, after hearing him say it, after hearing my friend say it, that they could be right. I could be making my own body break this way. But to accept this feels impossible—it feels like committing to something that I can’t know to be true.

He tells me someone will be by to discharge me. I ask him if I can go to the toilet and he says yes, but doesn’t tell me where it is or help me get up. When I manage to shuffle out of the room, I feel like I’m in a labyrinth. Everything seems so far away, even though it isn’t. When I get to the bathroom, a miracle, I lock the door and a cold sweat breaks out on my forehead. I hope I don’t faint in here. No one will be able to help me.

Nothing wrong with you, said the blonde doctor at Mount Sinai. Ultrasound and blood came back normal. It could be an ovarian cyst that burst but I can’t say for sure, she continued. I used to get them and they really hurt, I know.

I felt like I’d failed a test and this woman had a hand in that failure, had been the one grading it and decided to betray me. I wanted to look at her and see that she understood, knew what it was like to be dismissed and not believed because at some point, surely, it had happened to her too. She, too, must have been surrounded by an eerie lack of a panic and too kind condescension. Surely she knew; she was a woman.

But there was nothing to point to. I nodded at her, devastated. How could I say there must be something more and I needed her to find it? That I had been so convinced she would find it? I wanted her to see the answer, pull out a sharp surgical tool, and find this Schrodinger cyst, bring it out of my body and hold it in the air, triumphant and bloody, so I could look at it and say with a strange, dark triumph, See? I knew there was something, something physical to explain the physicality of this pain. Thank god it’s out now and it’s over. This is real. You have fixed me. You heard me...But that hadn’t happened.

My boyfriend and I went home and decided to brave the subway because a cab to Brooklyn would have been expensive. I knew then that I wouldn't bother trying to make my flight the next morning; I was too exhausted. I felt like I’d spent hours chasing after something blowing away in the wind and every time I caught it, all I had was a fistful of air.

After I am discharged in Denver, I give my contact information to the department that deals with payment. I go to the pharmacy and pay $30 for two Ativan, which I’ve never taken before. I worry that taking them will make me more anxious than I already am and remember my friend’s doughnut story. 

I go to a hotel by the airport, pay too much for the night, and the receptionist leads me to a room that is five steps from the entrance, the first room on the ground floor. If someone tries to rob the hotel, this would be the first room they’d go to, I think. They’d probably kill me. The hotel would go out of business after the press found out.

I peel off my clothes and shower, shivering until the scalding water hits and turns my body red. I catch myself in the mirror and wonder who it is. My teeth feel strange, like they are covered in fuzz, and it hurts when I press them together. 

My luggage is at the airport, will be on the plane I am taking tomorrow, back to New York. I get into bed wrapped in a towel—the idea of putting my plane clothes back on disgusts me and there are no bathrobes.

I call my friend, the one who told me anxiety was bodily and that the doughnut was safe but his mind told him it wasn’t. 

Want me to come?

He doesn’t have a limit on his card and is wildly cavalier.

I can’t tell if he’s serious, so I say no.

I call another friend who I know wants to sleep with me. He laughs when I tell him I am in bed in a towel rather than my clothes. He says that he can’t jump on a plane to Colorado right now and even if he could, he wouldn’t. He laughs and I do too. We both know he would and that makes the pain in my stomach less potent. 

I call my boyfriend and he says he is sorry he can’t be there, that he will pick me up from LaGuardia tomorrow.

When there is no one left to call, the room suddenly feels too big and cold. There is no one left to distract me from the disintegration of my brain. No deep, knowing voices telling me they are sorry, that they will fly to me, that they will hold me tomorrow, little breadcrumbs that make me think, whatever is wrong with me, it is real. Real enough to warrant a conversation intended to make me feel better. 

In the silence and vastness of this little room by the airport, I am lost within an unknown breathing mass that has the ability to tear me apart from the inside but leave me with perfect blood tests and medical results. I am terrified, wondering if all the doctors are missing something or if I am turning something in my head into something bodily. Something that has the power to chew me up and spit me out into a large, cold bed in Denver, shaking in a towel under the covers.

If I die here, 
will they write “anxiety” under cause of death?
Who will find me tomorrow?
Will it be housekeeping, 
a woman unlocking the door with her keycard after no one answers her
knock, 
leaving her to find me wrapped in a towel, 
clean and 
cold and
silent 

I wake up wrapped in a dry towel and a warm bed. There is sunlight in Denver and the pain is a twinge instead of a crushing weight. I almost cry with relief. It feels like the first day of spring, and I consider the possibility that I won’t die here.

Breakfast is included, and I spread toast with peanut butter from a little disposable tub. My flight is in the afternoon so I put my essentials back in my carry-on bag, then sit in the lobby and read. I reluctantly Google anxiety and start promising things to myself: I won’t drink caffeine again, I will learn breathing exercises, I will eat better, sleep more, exercise. I message my old therapist, whom I can no longer afford. She agrees to see me every other week and lowers her charge slightly. Even if it isn’t anxiety, I tell myself, these are good choices. 

I look for lunch and find a sandwich and salad place five minutes from the hotel. I eat and a man introduces himself to me. He is broad-shouldered with kind, light eyes and tells me he is in town for the marijuana convention. He has a name like Chad. I smile at him kindly. He smiles back. What might it be like to be him? To be calm and happy and in town on purpose?

The airport in Denver is much bigger than I remembered. I wait in line and try not to crumple beneath large American flags. The last time I was in this airport, I left in an ambulance. 

I didn’t see any mountains, I realize, as I stride to the gate trying to feel purposeful even though my clothes smell like a plane and I worry my stomach will scrunch up on the flight as I sit next to a stranger. I wonder where the mountains are or if there are any at all. Maybe the mountains in Denver are all in my head. 

Right before I board, I take the Ativan. Looking at the pill, all I can see is a doughnut. 

I fall asleep as soon as the plane finds its place in the sky, my mind slumping into oblivion. I could be anywhere. I could be flying over mountains without a body that hurts. It could be beautiful. 

The bills from Colorado reach my Brooklyn apartment quickly and unapologetically. The cost of an ambulance is $800. I learn the cost of my whole trip, which was not a trip I wanted at all, is almost half a year’s worth of rent.

I write letters stating how much money I make, and include copies of my bank statements. They reduce the bill to nothing after months of calls and documents and evidence in the form of a letter signed by my roommate attesting to how much I pay in rent and utilities. 

When the pain starts up again, even though I’ve had a few sessions of therapy and stuck to decaf coffee, I think about the doctor with blonde hair. I wonder if there are cysts congregating in my stomach and learn, after a Google search, that cysts are more likely to form if you have an IUD. 

I rush to Planned Parenthood and tell a doctor in purple clogs to remove my IUD. I tell her about the blinding pain and she says it’s possible it’s the hormones the IUD releases that are making me feel this way. I want her to say it again. This is what I needed to hear from the blonde doctor at Mount Sinai. This is the Schrodinger cyst.

She pulls my IUD out of me, my legs wide open, and I see it, a little white thing smeared red, and I could cry with relief, with the feeling of this cramping pain that feels so different and delicious because it is new, because it has overwhelmed the old pain living in my stomach for so long. They charge me $60. I want to empty my bank account to this woman, give her everything I have. 

Thank you, I say to her too many times.

Afterward, my boyfriend and I go to Shake Shack and share fries. Perhaps I can live now, I think, hopeful. Perhaps this soft body that is still breathing will be mine again.

Do you think that’s what it was? my boyfriend asks. The IUD?

I shrug. I feel better, I say, sipping his lemonade. 

And this is real, the fact that I feel better. I don’t want to really answer his question. I don’t force myself to consider if the IUD was the thing, or if my anxiety needed the IUD to be the thing, or if, in actuality, the two were braided together, as real as each other, forming a specific, inextricable plait of pain. 

In this quiet moment, my breaths belong to me and the absence of hurt is real, more real than anything anyone with a deep, knowing voice could tell me. But I also know this might not last, that I am wobbling on a tightrope and a fall might come. And when it does, there will be nothing left to find because I have emptied my body of everything already. The context of female pain and the reality of my anxiety will split apart and coexist and I will have no choice but to meet the eyes of the unforgiving animal living in my body and see it for what it is. 

Published June 13th, 2021