Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [129]
The energy created by the furor over the hearing continued at a high pitch for months. Though I was aware of it, it was mostly as though it was happening in some other world. During the demonstrations, I was teaching my classes. During the rallies, I was responding to the backlog of telephone calls. During the seminars, I was answering questions for the investigation of the leak of my statement. It did not occur to me that all of the activity was about me, because it was not. The activity was about every woman who hurt because of the hearing. The hearing exposed a vacuum of understanding so massive and powerful that it would have sucked all of me into it had I not tried so hard to hang on to what was left of my life. Thus while others were organizing, rallying, and protesting against the hearing, I was trying to keep the experience at bay and to regain my health.
Despite the fact that I had papers to grade and an upcoming surgery, I was thrilled to finish my last class for 1991. I limped into December on what little reserve energy remained after the hearing and subsequent coverage. By December 18, 1991, surgery provided a strange kind of relief. Forced bedrest was the only thing that would have stopped what had become endless and tiresome activity. That morning I was apprehensive—trying to prepare myself in case the worst occurred. The doctor had all but ruled out the possibility of a cancerous growth, but some possibility remained. JoAnn, Mama, and I joked nervously in the moments before the anesthesiologist administered the sedative. Shortly afterward, in the surgery room everything went white as I counted backward from one hundred. I was out at eighty-eight.
As is normal following surgery, I woke up to ice-cold hands and feet. “Would you get my socks out of the suitcase?” I asked JoAnn. Her face and my mother’s were the first thing I saw when I woke. Someone flashed a Polaroid photograph in front of me. “Look what they found,” someone said. Dr. Melanie Gibbs, my surgeon and gynecologist, had photographed the tumors and cysts they removed from my body. To my doctor’s surprise, there were about eighteen in total. The largest pale pinkish glob was no less than six inches in diameter. Two others were roughly the same size. The smallest was a bluish gray glob about half an inch in diameter. Thankfully, none of them were malignant. She had performed a myomectomy, removing only the growths and leaving intact the uterus.
Gradually, other faces appeared as my family and friends crowded into the small hospital room. “She looks so little,” said Eric, looking away. He was unaccustomed to a helpless “Auntie Faye.” My mother asked how I felt. My mind suggested that I was happy to see them, but all my body wanted was sleep. Somewhere in the recesses of what thoughts I could muster through the haze of the anesthetic, I wanted to lapse into a state of physical semiconsciousness and wake up days later, fully rested and refreshed. But of course, I woke the next day feeling sore, stiff, and hollow inside. Ray appeared that day at my hospital bedside to serve as my chief nurse. Despite the pain and mild depression I felt between naps, his face was a welcomed sight.
“Mary Brown” was the name that appeared on my chart. It was the unimaginative choice I had chosen to register under in an effort to avoid pity for me, intrusion, or speculation about my condition. So, on the morning of December 20, when the press descended on the hospital, after some initial concern,