My body is rebelling. The right side particularly. It’s as if, at some point in my early twenties, someone drew a vertical line down my middle and labelled the right side ‘trash.’

While I’ve hardly treated my body as any sort of temple, it’s not as if I’ve neglected it either. Sure, I’ve eaten a pig’s tail off the floor of the pub and I’ll admit that not all of the hair attached to it was my own. But, on the contrary, I eat a lot of broccoli and the dentist says I have pretty teeth. In any case, it feels deeply unjustified each time something else goes wrong.

I got through thirteen years of school and only took two sick days. This meant I’d had little to do with medical professionals and so naively believed they were competent and reliable. Sure, if I walked into a Post Office, my arm hanging by a single tendon and said, “Can you help?” I wouldn’t dare complain when I was stuck back together with a few licked stamps and a piece of twine.

“Thanks,” I’d say, “and how much to post me to a hospital?”

But – when employing an actual doctor, whose sole purpose is to keep us alive, I expect a slightly higher level of competence.

I had just eaten a Big Mac when I found out my appendix was about to burst.

“So… you haven’t been fasting?” the emergency surgeon asked me as I lay on the operating table.

This was long before the days of the 5:2 or any other numbered diet that requires you to starve yourself simply because one day you might want to wear your old wedding dress to a Halloween party.

“Do many of your unsuspecting patients answer Yes to that question?” I wanted to ask, “who goes around fasting just in case they need an operation later that day?”

After my appendix was removed, I asked if they had kept it for me, as requested.

The surgeon replied that he hadn’t been able to, he was sorry.

“It was full of rice,” he said, “rotten rice. Or rather, fermented.”

I have no idea what an appendix was ever supposed to do, but I’m almost certain it’s not intended to act as an inner-body sieve, catching grains of rice to stop them slipping down into our drains.

As for what the body’s drain would be? It remains a mystery.

A few hours into my post-op recovery, the man in the bed next to me tried to pull the catheter out of his penis for the seventh time. He screamed in pain, as he had done on each previous occasion, and I wondered why they couldn’t put him to sleep, or murder him, for the sake of the rest of us.

For a while after that, I returned to a state of physical well-being, only throwing up here and there from alcohol poisoning and once after I stood up too quickly from the bath. It was a beautiful claw-foot tub, but the tap was centuries old and rusted, with jagged edges lining the spout like teeth in the mouth of an eel. As I lifted myself from the bath, the tap dragged along my spine, gouging in a deep ditch. When it became infected, which seemed to happen instantly, I threw up on the floor.

Weirdly, at some point in my later-twenties, my appendix pain returned. This time it was slightly lower, but it was there, on the right side of the abdomen where it belonged. There were sharp pains and dull ones. Moments where it kept me awake and moments where suddenly it felt as if something had burst inside my body. Like a dropped water balloon. Full of fermented rice. The pain was moving toward my groin and, after convincing a few doctors that I hadn’t just needed to do a poo for the last four months, I was booked in for two different ultrasounds.

The first was external and I was instructed to drink a bathtub’s worth of water beforehand. The woman was rough and wielding a lubricated stick around like she was in a swordfight with my torso. At one point, when I was deciding if it would be better to piss all over her office or run into the hallway and piss there, she asked me, “Can you keep still?”

She took a few identical photos on her machine and then snapped, “I can’t see properly. Your bladder is amazingly full.”

I must have communicated something to her with my eyes, something that said, “I hate you endlessly,” because she gasped and asked, “Oh god, did you drink a lot of water before this?”

She wasn’t aware, she told me, that I’d been instructed to fill my bladder to maximum capacity. This struck me as odd. Perhaps, I wanted to suggest, when you asked me twenty times for my name, address and date of birth, you could have also added a quick, “On a scale of one to ten, how close are you to wetting your pants?”

Had she asked, I would have found it within myself to hold up eleven fingers.

Regardless, they found nothing. But the exam had not been in vain. I took it as evidence that I had the most powerful pelvic floor in all of Australia and waited patiently for my phone call from the Queen.

Next came the internal ultrasound. The woman, who was coating herself from glove to elbow in KY jelly, asked if I was pregnant. I said I was not. She asked me was there any way I could possibly be pregnant? I said that no, to my knowledge, there was not.

“So… have you had sex?” she asked me.

I’d expected her to ask me this in medical terms, but her tone made me feel like I was at a sleepover with a Mean Girl.

I explained that yes, I have sex. With my partner. Who is a woman.

“Right,” she took her gloves off and threw them angrily into the bin, “so you’re a virgin.”

She rolled her eyes and left the room. No ultrasound for me.

I felt like I should apologise for wasting her gloves.

I ignored the pain for some time after that. Rice could have been collecting in another disused organ for all I knew, but I wasn’t emotionally ready to go anywhere near a doctor’s surgery.

Eventually, a physio worked out the problem. It was not, in fact, anything that could have been detected via a bursting bladder or by losing one’s perceived virginity to a speculum. It was a labral tear – which is nothing to do with a labia and everything to do with the cartilage inside one’s hip joint.

At this stage, bending my leg to put socks on was a struggle, so it was decided I should have the surgery sooner rather than later.

I lay on the operating table, freezing cold and shivering, wearing just a pair of paper underpants and a shower-cap. The surgeon used a tiny paint-roller to wipe an amber-coloured liquid all over my left thigh, into my groin and halfway across my stomach. Finally, he drew an X on my left hip using a permanent texta.

Eventually, when the anaesthetist walked in, grinning maniacally, I conjured the courage to speak.

“I’m sure you do this to both legs, for like hygiene or whatever,” I said, “but – you know it’s my right hip that’s broken, right?”

No, it turned out, no they didn’t.

After the hip surgery, I quickly got back to teaching. I was on crutches, but decided to make them a part of my behaviour management strategy. If a student spoke, I could reach over and hit them with a crutch or make them hold one above their head while they worked. In hindsight, this was a risky move and really more of a reward to the students than a punishment. Had they decided to leave the room, or throw the crutches out the window, I would have been stranded in B18 for the rest of time, unable to hop through the maze of desks and schoolbags in order to call for help.

Eunice, who was then in Year 8, made the mistake of speaking out of turn.

“Shoosh,” I barked, “or I’ll make you touch the slimy part of my crutch.”

It’s unfortunate that in Australia there is no discernible difference between the pronunciation of ‘crutch’ and ‘crotch’.

“Please don’t repeat that,” I asked, which on my day in court will no doubt be paraphrased to, “this is our little secret.”

The hip slowly recovered, though I sometimes pretended it hadn’t, mostly in my own brain as an excuse not to go for a run. It was strange, then, when suddenly I started experiencing that same pain again, in that same area. The right side lower abdomen. Seemingly broken now for the third time.

Is it possible, I kept Googling, for one part of your body to be cursed?

This latest ailment happened during Covid, so by the time I could get an appointment with a GP, I was in pretty torturous pain. The Dr poked unenthusiastically on my stomach.

“Period pain,” he declared.

“I don’t have my period,” I said.

“Ovulation pain?” he offered.

Two weeks later, I returned with the same problem.

“So… not period pain?” he looked bemused, “get an ultrasound if you really want.”

Ok, I agreed, but only if I really want.

I lay on the bed at the radiology clinic with paper towel tucked into my underpants like a make-shift bib and at an all-you-can-eat rib joint.

“So it’s a dull pain?” the imagist asked, rolling that familiar wand over the surgery scar from my appendectomy, “right here is it?”

“Yeah,” I said, trying not to fart.

“Well,” she concluded, “I’d say you have appendicitis!”

“I don’t have an appendix,” I said, to which she cackled hysterically – presumably at her own ineptitude.

Eventually, she diagnosed a hernia and I was referred to a specialist to discuss the options “moving forward.” Without another word, she exited the room and left me with my undies around my thighs and a lap full of lube.

A strange situation for anyone, let alone for a virgin like me.

The hernia specialist’s office was in an inconspicuous building on the side of a highway.

There were six double doors along the front and two signs stuck to the bricks outside. One read ‘Aboriginal Health Service’ and the other simply stated ‘No Printing.’

I called reception to ask for directions.

“Open the door,” she barked.

The office was at the end of a long corridor of stained carpet and lined with stacks of files in warped cardboard boxes. They were labelled with sections of the alphabet, A-K, L-R, S-Z, and there was a piece of A4 paper sticky-taped to the wall with the word ‘flood’ written in black texta.

At least they’d adhered to the no-printing rule.

I sat in the waiting room, surrounded by filing cabinets and old women wearing masks. There was a small cassette player on the table which was tuned to a commercial radio station. This, however, was not enough to drown out the consultation that was currently in session, of which I could hear every word about the patient’s upcoming endoscopy.

While I’m not ashamed of my hernia as such I decided to conduct my appointment in hushed tones.

The doctor and I discussed the options “moving forward,” of which there was only one: another surgery.

He lay a pamphlet in front of me that was titled, Inguinal Hernia Surgery and began to read aloud from it. The only word I recognised was ‘testes.’

He explained that a hernia operation is simple enough, though there is one factor that can cause complications.

“There is a tube,” he said, “that carries sperm through the body. And it is right where we cut you open.”

There was a sizeable pause.

“This won’t matter for you because–” he looked me up and down, “because you are a woman.”

He’d had his hands in my pants three minutes earlier, asking me to cough, yet somehow he still needed to reassure himself verbally.

I wanted to scream. “And I’m not a virgin!”

I was somewhat unnerved by our exchange and so I asked if this surgery was something he’d done many times before. Perhaps he was an eye doctor or a lollipop man and I’d stumbled through the wrong door.

“Oh yes,” he said confidently, “example? Tomorrow I do two. One worked first time and the other I coming back to fix.”

In my silence, he referred to the pamphlet again, this time drawing a circle around the testes and crossing them out with his pen.

“Not for you,” he said.

The appointment cost $150 and I booked the surgery just to get it over with. He handed me the hospital admission papers and then tore the corner off a scrap piece of paper, on which he wrote my item number: 30609. On the back of the paper was another patient’s details: Luke Zanvaco, 1/3/93. By this point, my expectations were so low that I merely shrugged and headed back out toward the highway.

On the way home, I wondered how my body would betray me next. A gall-bladder full of pasta, perhaps?

I thought about Luke Zanvaco, who’d put his faith in our surgeon, no questions asked. Luke probably didn’t mind at all that his personal information was being passed around freely, to whomever might need to make a memo at a moment’s notice. Maybe it was me who’d set the bar too high. After all, they’d never actually replaced the wrong hip, or snipped the tube to my testes.

Days later, I read through my hospital papers. Under ‘Procedure’ was written: ‘hernia fix – left side.’

And under that, he’d crossed out ‘left’ and added ‘right.’