With kid’s camps starting the next day, one of the assigned prep tasks was to collect rocks that wouldn’t explode if put in an open fire. Apparently that’s a piece of information they don’t teach in school these days, that your common round river rock can explode when placed in fire, and since we didn’t want pieces of shrapnel hitting any children in the eye we needed to find an alternative. Michael and I immediately volunteered for this job as it gave us an excuse to leave camp — there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for alone time when every private structure was made of grass or canvas. So we took my truck up a nearby mountainside, parked near a rocky hillside, and began filling five gallon buckets with just-bigger-than-fist-sized rocks. Once we had three buckets filled we decided we had earned the right to take a little hike so we ventured onto an old cattle trail and headed up the grassy, hilly terrain.
Halfway up foothill I stopped and said, “Whoa, hold on,” as a wave of dizziness came over me. Michael rushed over to me as I slowly lowered myself onto the ground to sit.
“What’s going on?” He said, worry etched onto his face.
“It’s nothing, I just got another dizzy spell.”
“What do you mean, another one?” He asked. I took a couple deep breaths, keeping my eyes closed and my head completely still as the world settled back into place and the nausea passed.
As I opened my eyes I felt him gently place his hand on my back, waiting for me to respond.
“Well, right before I left the farm I woke up one morning with absolutely terrible vertigo. Ugh, I don’t even want to think about it,” I said, the feeling of sickness creeping back up. “If I moved my head even the tiniest bit the room would be so off kilter that the floor would tip completely sideways and then upside down and then I’d be throwing up from the motion. It was so intense. I spent five days like that in bed, barely eating, and barely moving for fear of the spins.. I’ve never been sick like that before. I went to the doctor and they didn’t have a solution for me, so I just rode it out.” I closed my eyes again and tried to brush off this current spell, not wanting to make it into a bigger deal than it was and not wanting the attention. I didn't know what caused it the first time at the farm, but it was absolutely terrifying and I wasn’t thrilled that it was back. I’d never been sick like that before, and it was the first time in my life that I felt like something was inherently not okay with my body.
“Damn, that’s really intense,” Michael said, still looking at me with concern in those sweet brown eyes. “And nothing helps?”
“No, not really,” I said, “I just have to try not to move,” I laughed halfheartedly, annoyed at myself that this was happening now.
A few moments of silence passed while I sat there with my eyes closed. “Didn’t you say the other day that, uhh, your ex was also sick on the farm?” Michael clearly remembered this detail but I could tell he wasn’t thrilled about talking about the ex-boyfriend subject. “What did you mean by that?”
I exhaled slowly and opened my eyes to see if the world had stopped spinning. It had.
“Well… It’s a long story… Are you sure you want to hear it?”
“If you’re up for telling it,” Michael said, resettling himself in the grass and leaning back on his elbow, getting ready to stay a while.
I readied myself to tell the story I’d told countless times to anyone who ever asked about my ex-boyfriend’s health — it was a pretty routine script at this point, as I shared just enough to not start crying and to also give the impression that things were optimistic and going okay rather than the honest truth which was that they really weren’t. Real or imagined, I found that if you talk too much about a young person being terribly ill, most people start feeling uneasy and welcome a change of subject. That, plus needing a way to survive the conversation myself, had led to me crafting a story in my head that was easy enough to repeat and keep my audience comfortable at the same time.
I began: “So, we went on a trip to India years ago and he got really sick when we were there, and then when we got back he was put on really intense antibiotics for what the doctors thought was a parasite. This actually made everything worse and he saw a bunch of specialists and they couldn’t figure out what was causing it but he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis,” I glanced at Michael, and since he clearly didn’t know what this was, I went on, “which is when you get ulcers in your intestines and they cramp and bleed.”
“Geez,” he said.
“Yeah. He was so, so sick. I’m mean like, losing toilet bowls full of blood, he lost a ton of weight, and sometimes he would just lie in anguish because the pain and the cramping was so intense.” I cleared my throat to keep my voice from cracking. “He saw a lot of specialists over the years and the doctors were little help other than prescribing steroids and other drugs and wanting to prepare him for surgery to get most of his intestines removed and wear a colostomy bag for the rest of his life.” I paused and shuddered at the memories, a chill passing over me as the breeze off the mountain picked up for a moment.
I kept going. “But he was one of the smartest and most stubborn people I’ve ever met and he refused to accept that as an option. So he did a ton of research and changed his diet to eat super clean and then we.. Okay… It’s gonna get weird,” I paused, as this was part of the story I didn’t usually share, “We tried a fecal transplant at home,” I glanced up to see Michael’s reaction and blushed.
“I don’t know what that is,” he said.
“Well,” I said, chuckling, but being too far in to turn back now. “Umm, so the idea is that you put the stool of a healthy person into the sick person’s colon and let the beneficial bacteria recolonize itself, because he basically had no beneficial bacteria left from all the antibiotics,” I shrugged awkwardly again.
“Wait, did he have to eat poop?” Michael said, aghast.
“No! No, but… We decided that I was the best donor since I’d never really had antibiotics and was healthy.” The next part I rushed through: “Basically, I’d poop into a sterilized blender and then transfer it into an enema.. He would insert it and hold it in for as long as possible and then.. Well, that’s it. We just knew to never use that blender again,” I laughed awkwardly and felt my cheeks burning. Here I was sitting on the side of a mountain telling this guy I was hardcore crushing on that I voluntarily shat into a blender. I tried to make it better by adding, “It totally worked! The morning afterward was like night and day — he went from being super sick to having normal, blood-free poop. We used to joke that my poop saved his life.”
I glanced at Michael and he seemed nonplussed and almost impressed by this story. “Okay, that’s crazy but I believe that it worked,” he said.
“So anyway, that was all great until we were on the farm and the sickness came back. Then there were many more trips to the emergency room in the middle of the night — I remember there were times when I felt like it was completely on me to get him to the hospital or he might not make it through the night, and of course these flares always happened when it was snowing and icy and we were also running the farm by ourselves — we had forty cows, twenty sheep, fourteen goats, chickens, a big garden, the whole thing. We were super isolated out there, I was taking care of all the animals by myself and was a caregiver to my very ill boyfriend and the cows basically became my only friends, and… yeah,” I muttered, having gone off script and shared a little more than I intended to.
He looked at me patiently, giving me the space to go on.
“He did get better, more or less. And I didn’t leave when he was sick,” I added sharply, my face burning again. It was important for me to make that clear, even though it ultimately would have been fair to myself to have left then too. “Like I said before, we just kind of... unraveled. And we didn’t know how to put it back together.” I swallowed hard.
Michael looked at me for a moment before saying, “Kelsi, it’s okay. I’m just, really, really sorry,” he shrugged. “Maybe you got so dizzy because of the immense amount of stress and the heartbreak and from making the really difficult decision to leave,” he added. Then he reached out and took my hand in both of his.
We sat there quietly on the mountainside for ten minutes, tears gathering in my eyes as we watched the light turn golden and the grass sway in the wind and let the moment settle. That wasn’t the usual story I told, I thought to myself, but a sense of relief came over me as I had finally released some of the words I’d been clutching on to for so long.
We both started shifting in our seats as the wind picked up again and Michael said, “Come on, let’s go back down, it might be the elevation making you dizzy.” He helped me up from the ground and hovered right behind me as we made it back down to the truck — I could tell he wanted to be there to catch me if I lost my balance. I didn’t get another serious dizziness wave though, and by the time we got back to the truck the mood had shifted and we were laughing as usual and were ready to take advantage of being alone in the wilderness, away from prying eyes. The hood of the truck was still warm from the sun when we laid down on it.
When we got back to camp, we pulled up next to the group and they asked what took us so long.
“We had to drive way up there to find the rocks,” Michael said, grinning at me as he heaved the buckets out of the truck bed. Clearly he was reminiscing on our romantic time spent together, not on the fact that we had sat on the hillside and talked about serious illness and my ex-boyfriend for a solid thirty minutes. I smiled back, because while the romance was nice, it was the vulnerability, the safety, and being listened to that I was recounting. And in that shared smile I think we silently agreed to keep our budding romance just between us for a while. This felt like something special, and even though I told myself that this was just a casual spring fling, I had a feeling in my gut that it was going to be much more than that.