Shannon Ulmer
When I was sixteen, I was diagnosed with a “compression of the left renal vein,” Nutcracker Syndrome. I remember doctors looking at the CT scan and saying that it may or may not have been the cause of the pain that controlled my life for the next nine years. I was passed back and forth from specialist to specialist like a ball in a medical tennis match. No one wanted to touch me; they just threw me to the other side saying gain some weight, wait until you’re older, you are just exaggerating the pain, the blood in your urine is just your period until I was ready to resign and accept that this was how my life was going to be.
When you have to fight something like this for so many years; when you have to learn to live with pain that makes the 10-point pain scale seem absurd, you have to find something to keep you going. You have to find that one small thing that makes you push through it or the pain consumes you and life won’t seem worth living. I found my small thing when a hummingbird passed out on the floor of my garage. She was dead by all appearances, yet I felt compelled to pick her up. Her viridian-hued feathers brushed against my palm like they held no mass at all. Looking down at her, I felt as if I were looking down at myself. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of times that I had become overheated and pained and passed out in the Georgia sun because my heart ran too fast and I couldn’t find a place to lie down quick enough. Isn’t that the same thing that happened to her? She flew into the garage and her heart that was already tachycardic at more than 1,200 beats per minute couldn’t handle the extra strain. She needed to consume half her weight in sugar daily and that meant eating multiple times an hour, somewhat like my stomach stricken with gastroparesis that couldn’t handle the standard three human meals and instead insisted on multiple small snacks throughout the day. I fed her drops of sugar water as I thought of the time I came out of anesthesia after my exploratory pelvic laparoscopy and couldn’t stop shaking. The nurse gave me water for a mouth that felt like it was coated in cotton and crackers to ease the nausea. She told me I was just coming out of the anesthesia and I would feel okay again in just a moment. She stayed by my side, brushing the hair out of my face and holding the cup of water up to my mouth until the shaking stopped. I felt the bird quiver in my hands as she licked up the sugar with her tiny tongue and remembered that moment. Wasn’t I her nurse then? Wasn’t I just helping her come out of her bad reaction? I held her and spoke to her, telling her it would be okay as she lapped up drop after drop until she could support her own head again and the strength began to flood back into her limbs. When she finally gained enough strength to fly away, she paused near my ear to make that unmistakable buzzing sound that hummingbirds make, a resounding hum that I took to mean thank you.
I never forgot that moment. When I graduated high school, my parents gave me a small hummingbird pendant, a symbol of the things I had overcome. It was all of the school days I skipped to lay on the couch with heating pads and hot tea, all of the outings and dates I missed out on because the pain was my closest friend. It was all of the doctors who told my parents I would outgrow this and the pain really wasn’t that bad. It was my triumph over all of those things wrapped up in a silver package. It was a small thing I could hold on to. I never took it off. When I graduated college and the pain became worse than it had ever been before and started to spread, I had that same hummingbird tattooed over my left shoulder. It was a small thing that no one could take away from me, a small bit of strength engraved on my skin, because I knew I was nearing the climax of my journey.
A year and a half after I started carrying my hummingbird on my skin, a stent that was supposed to fix everything migrated and destroyed my renal vein and parts of my inferior vena cava. I was halfway through my first semester of nursing school — halfway through my first step towards helping people like me — when my surgeon’s team came to me in the ER and told me ‘the big surgery’ couldn’t wait any longer. I carried my hummingbird with me into that surgery, I wore her on my back, but I carried her in my core. When I was in the ICU, my skin yellowed and my consciousness barely in my body, I carried my hummingbird while the nurses marveled at her beauty during my CHG baths. When I took my first wobbly steps with a walker intended for people three times my age around the vascular floor of the hospital, I carried my hummingbird while the physical therapist admired her through the gap in the oversized hospital gown. When I got home and looked at my incision for the first time, the steri-strips down the middle of my still distended abdomen, I carried my hummingbird while I clasped the delicate silver pendant around my neck once more. When the surgeon said that if we had waited any longer to do the surgery the consequences would have been fatal, I knew that I had carried my hummingbird’s strength through something that pushed my body to its limits and saved my life so that I can save others like me.
