Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir by Padma Lakshmi Read Free Book Online

twenty years, this powerful tissue had amassed and twined inside me, growing outward from my uterus, spreading through my body and coiling around my insides. It felt like it had choked and mutilated every part of my being. I wasn’t crazy, or dramatic, and I didn’t have a low threshold for pain. In fact, I probably had a high threshold for pain, and that may have been part of the problem. Dr. Seckin didn’t understand why I wasn’t writhing in pain outside his office. “I believe you when you say you think you have answered my questions honestly and sincerely,” he pronounced very deliberately in his strong Turkish accent. “But what I see of your anatomy and the picture you are painting of your life seem very different.”
    So much was suddenly so clear. Just months before, in April, on our second wedding anniversary, I’d had to be rushed to the hospital late at night—the tissue had wrapped itself like a tourniquet around my small intestines, though I hadn’t known then what was really happening. I had been in pain all day but didn’t want to disappoint Salman, who had reserved a table at Bouley weeks before. To his credit, he suggested we stay home, but I wanted to celebrate with him. We both needed a good time together. I knew, too, that he expected to make love, something I wasn’t sure I was capable of. Until recently, we had always been hungry for each other and could never get enough. Lately though, we had been fighting more and more about our lack of intimacy. I figured that after the meal and a bottle of red, he might tire out or, better yet, I might feel better. My plan was not very well thought out. The chef insisted on our having the tasting menu. A third of the way through, I asked the maître d’ for a pillow. My lower back was throbbing and the pain was wrapping around tomy abdomen, which was cramping, too. I thought the pillow might give me some support, or that I could find a more comfortable position leaning against it. With each course the waiter brought, my pain increased. I barely made it through the meal.
    When we got home, I climbed up the stairs to the fourth floor. Halfway up, I began to have trouble breathing and stumbled. I made it to our bedroom, tore off my red jersey dress, and reached for the heating pad, which was always plugged in and waiting under my pillow. I turned on my side and doubled over. My husband came in and I told him that in addition to the back pain, I had begun cramping and that it really hurt. And I didn’t know why. “Of course,” he said. “How convenient for you. It’s not your period and it’s not ovulation. What is it this time?”
    This didn’t sound quite as cruel at the time as it seems now on the page. For years I had tried hard to hide my pain from others, even from him, and to dull my symptoms through denial and keeping busy. My mother told me from a very early age what her mother had told her: that this was just our lot in life. She said that the only thing to do was to try very hard not to let it affect any more of my life than it had to. So I compartmentalized the pain, tried to mostly sequester myself in bed until it subsided enough that I could get up. Now I understand that we were both feeling the effects of this vexing disease. To this day, my mother hasn’t been officially diagnosed, but she has suffered the same mysterious pain, the same stab-in-the-dark surgeries. One doctor, ignorant of the cause of her suffering, threw up his hands and removed her appendix.
    My husband never truly grasped the extent of my pain, in part because I took it for granted. Now Dr. Seckin was telling me that I probably had pain during sex. I wasn’t sure that this was true. For the first several years together, our intimacy was fully gratifying. I don’t ever remember having pain during sex. But I’d gotten so used to all the other pain that I didn’t even identify it as pain anymore.
    Recently I could remember my husband complaining that I rarely