Ok so…I have a confession: I have a huge goiter. My husband and I went to the doctor and he said I have an iron deficiency and looked at me weird when I asked if iron was even something we could eat. I now take something called “Synthroid” but it doesn’t seem to be working—but now I’m thinking I should share what I wrote about it: I reversed the names because I don’t want him to find out, but this is about me entirely. Oh and my name is not “Erin”, and it’s me who has the goiter, not my husband.
Last Easter, or a few weeks earlier on Palm Sunday, when the fever temperatures showed up again in Jacksonville, Erin sat impatiently in an overcooled church with Lewis and his mother. Erin’s socks were lacey like lingerie, and she wore a dress that was frilly enough to be something out of Anne Rice. She’d only been to a few Catholic churches in her life, and most of those had been with Lewis and his mother Randy, and the only reason it bothered her was because Lewis was the kind of a la carte, macaroni Christian that could go with anything on the menu.
The priest asked everyone to lift their hearts up to the Lord and Lewis and Randy stood. The wood carving of Jesus above the priest was beautiful but light enough to make one think that Jesus was Caucasian, and Erin couldn’t help but imagine Jesus walking in during the mass, shouting “Stop stop!” The entire congregation would turn, some would stand, and Jesus would point to his wiry black beard, and say “can’t you see? I look more like Osama Bin Laden than like you! Don’t you know where I’m from?” As she watched the statue, it seemed to move, to shake his head, and Erin looked around to confirm the miracle but saw no other gasping responses.
Lewis was handsome in a rented suit that was too big for him, and made him look swollen and uncomfortable. Randy, a real touchy mother, occasionally took Lewis’s hand in her hand, and attempted to align the two. Lewis’s hands were bigger by inches.
“Where did you get those hands? And those veins?” She ran her hand along his thick blue cable veins, and Erin wanted to whisper, “hands off,” but Lewis wasn’t looking good. He was swollen and his lips spotted and lost color. Erin leaned over to him, bored from the drone of the church air conditioning and the bad teenager choir,
“What’s wrong with you?”
“I feel terrible. All over my face and neck.” Erin stared at him for a moment, his chubby neck and pouted out in pain lips, and diagnosed his health. He was fine. He was just being a baby and was tired.
“You’ll be fine, just relax.”
The church was getting warmer, and the stained glass windows behind the priest made the light coming in Mars red.
On the way out, Erin declined a church newsletter and Anne looked at her funny.
“Wasn’t that a nice thing? What a presentation! I believe the choir had a twelve string up there!” Randy exclaimed. “And did you see those poinsettias on stage? I can smell them from here. Ugh! Maybe I can ask your pastor about them.” She was a strong stride of a woman, big physically in the butt and legs, built like a horse in that way, but had a softer, more feminine face. When she smiled, you could see years of uncomfortable braces work coming to life. Erin noticed a stitch in her stocking, a jagged scar rip.
“Yeah mom.” Lewis obsessively cleared his throat, until Erin had to slap his back hard and almost shouted, “Are you not feeling good?” He looked sick, but not that sick, and at his age, vying for attention from his shiny-faced mother made Erin angry.
“I did like the band. I thought they were great too.” Erin said to change the subject, a peace accord to show Randy she was in on what was going on. The wind kicked up dead brown leaves pooled in the parking lot, and gray clouds rolled in the sky.
By the time they got to the car, it had already started to mist and Lewis’s neck had a belt of swollen skin around the Adam’s apple. Randy patted Lewis on the back and asked what was wrong, but Lewis couldn’t answer. He finally mustered,
“I..I don’t think I can swallow.”
“Oh God, Erin. What should we do? Is he allergic to Eucharist do you think?” Erin shrugged her shoulders.
“He’s fine he probably just needs a glass of water.”
In the car, Lewis’s neck swelled up more and it began to shower outside. Lewis looked scared. Erin leaned forward in the backseat rubbing Lewis’s shoulder. She didn’t know what to say, and felt a knife of disgust.
“I really can’t breathe.” Lewis whispered dramatically and gripped Erin’s hand. Randy gunned the car around corners following hospital signs to the highways.
Erin tried to calm him down, but she was uncomfortable. His neck looked terrible and puffed to the left of his Adam’s apple, and she imagined a snaked coiled just underneath the skin his chin, folded up in a peaceful sleep.
After a long wait at the emergency room by a guy who coughed like he was swimming in acid, a Doctor Royce Wayne finally called them to a bed. Erin’s white shoes clicked dorithly on the pale green floor. She was painfully aware of her drink coaster socks in front of men with pustules and dark stained bruises beneath their eyes. Many of the them watched Erin walk. Anne was crying.
The doctor diagnosed Lewis as the bearer of a rather large goiter. He said Lewis didn’t have enough iodine in his diet, which Erin didn’t even know we already consumed, and prescribed a small diamond-shaped white pill with a cute little “S” on it for “Synthroid.” The Synthroid would give Lewis the right thyroid hormone he needed to reduce the swelling from a bunched up snake in his throat to a golf ball, and back to the neck Erin married.
It was a simple treatment, the doctor said, but a year later Lewis still had the goiter, and had made no attempt to fix it. His mood started to change. He drank more when they were out, and sometimes at home in a way that crossed the line from fun to the commercial where people deny problems, and occasionally grabbed her when she was working on the computer and wrenched her head back to kiss her upside down. Erin saw the goiter at all times, a blunt and blurry melon in the corner of her eye.
Recently at a New Years Eve party at a friend’s house, Lewis got drunk on champagne and danced in the middle of the floor to Auld Lang Syne. Erin was in the middle of doing jello shots off of an aluminum tray when Lewis pulled her into a dance and swung her around awkwardly.
The sudden exercise rocketed Erin into drunkenness and she pushed away from him.
“You look like a retard Lewis, you look like elephant man.”
