It’s by Patricia Lockwood in the London Review of Books and despite that august publisher it is both hilarious and horrifying: She describes her husband getting sick with a mystery gut illness in a London hospital, and wow does it capture a lot of what I felt last year during Doc’s own gut illness (“the body simply goes away when you are trying so intensely to project yourself into someone else, blinking in and out, in pain and on morphine, on the verge of being wheeled back”).
Also, I mentioned hilarity, and oh my god I couldn’t stop laughing at parts of this:
“‘Something is very wrong inside me,’ Jason said on his way back from the bathroom, bending over my row with his face white and his arm held rigid over his lower abdomen. Secretly I thought it might be the world’s hardest fart.”
“Emergency surgery was the only option. (‘Oh my God,’ I thought when I heard, ‘but he’s completely full of Lebanese food.’)”
“All of the people who had been told, in the direst terms, that my husband’s asshole was going to be directly connected to his mouth, and that we would live in England for ever, now had to be told something else.”