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I was having one of the best times of the year yesterday.

It was a warm winter day in Maine. The sky was high and there was no wind. The moderately high waves were chiseling the masculine rock surface endlessly as they have done for millions of years.

Mark and I discovered a new path that leads to the rocky Maine shore, which faces the open sea. The grassy field was wet and slightly muddy from the snow that fell a few days ago.

Listening to the sound of waves while admiring the huge rocky steps created by the waves made me forget all that happened during the past six months. Inhaling the salty air, surveying the endless stretch of the ocean, and feeling the wetness of the black soil invigorated me. It made me feel normal and embraced by nature.

We walked over 1.5 miles before realizing how much we walked. Even though I was having a ball during the walk, another part of me was keenly aware that the size S pants I bought at The Gap were quite loose, which fit just right before going to the surgery. I felt an urge that I often have to replenish the calories that I consumed by walking immediately.

The dilation that the surgeon conducted on Thursday made a big difference in my swallowing function. On the way back in the car I ate one of the Christmas cookies that I baked without any problem. Then another, and another…

10 minutes or so after getting home I started having an indescribable pain in my intestine. It felt like somebody twisted my intestine and left it without untwisting. I tried to sit up, slumped down, curled up…nothing worked. It was so painful that I could not even lie down. While trying all different postures, I was muttering every curse I could find in my vocabulary, both in English and in Japanese, endlessly, like the characters in a Robert Altman movie; “ Oh, God, why this! Help me! Ah, this is worse than contractions. I am such a mess…”etc. etc.

Even though I knew that throwing up would not accomplish anything, I tried. (Humans can throw up because we have a valve at the top of the stomach, but I do not have one anymore with the esophagectomy.) My poor stomach that is reduced to a little pouch under the throat gave out a little bit of acid and water.

“Oh, my god, I threw up blood. I should have stayed in Holden. It has been only two days after the dilation. There was a special instruction about bleeding in the release note.’ I was in such a hysteria that describing this now makes it comical. “ Mayumi, it is not from your esophagus. It is from your left nostril,” Mark said, trying to calm me down.

Poor Mark made a phone call to my oncologist in Massachusetts, then to a near-by hospital in Maine calmly. Because this was a weekend, the instruction came from an on-call doctor (Didn’t I say that every emergency happens during the weekend?) He wanted me to go to the nearby ER and have an MRI done, because so many things can go wrong with the stomach pain.

In spite of the excruciating pain and the hysteria, I knew that this was a dumping syndrome attacking me big time. I should not have eaten those cookies. They were too sugary. I told him that I would try to wait for at least 10 minutes to see whether the pain subsided.

With Mark’s rubbing at the back and the attempt to throw up, the pain finally went down to a controllable level, and I eventually fell asleep.

I woke up after about three hours, and found Mark deep asleep on the couch. It must have been so hard and exhausting to deal with a spouse in such a desperate state. Sorry Mark.

After waking up, I warmed up the fish soup, and I ate a small cup of it. I was not hungry at all, but I needed to eat to sustain my energy. It is my duty.

While eating the soup alone in the kitchen, I was thinking about a Japanese novelist’s allegorical accounts about hell and heaven:

Hell and heaven look alike at first glance. In front of people there are dishes after dishes of mouthwatering food. In heaven and hell alike, people are given enormously long chopsticks. The people in hell are agonized and exasperated, because the chopsticks are longer than arm’s length and they cannot put the food in front of their mouth. The people in heaven feed each other using the chopsticks. Actually the chopsticks are just the right length to feed the person sitting in front of you.

Where am I?

Thanks to the dilation, I now do not have a problem swallowing my food, but I have to be careful not to eat too quickly. Before the procedure, I was spared from the bad dumping syndrome, even though I could not eat much.

It seems that I have to surrender to the reality that there is no easy way to gain my weight back. I have to eat a healthy diet little by little, and accept the current weight for the time being. Accepting the limitation seems to open the door to heaven.