Ultimately, I sprained my ankle and ruptured my Achilles tendon. The sprain was what hurt, but the brutal snap was the tendon. The ruptured Achilles tendon required surgery, four weeks in a cast, four weeks in a boot, and three months of physical therapy. And I noticed another change.

I was afraid.

I started having dreams about the cab hitting me, the hard unyielding bumper hitting my legs, my head bouncing off the hood and then off the asphalt, rolling, scratching my hands up, the pop in my ankle. The way the engine sounded when it revved.

I became very hesitant to cross streets. At all. My boyfriend, Adrian, realized what was going on, and I tried to talk to him about it. It felt like I had been urbanized in some fundamental way. I told him about the time I saw a man crash through a plate glass window two doors in front of where I was walking. Another guy came out and started beating him up, and I darted away from the situation, keeping one eye on the whole thing while I dialed 911 and hailed a cab — all of it without breaking a stride. I refused to be afraid back then. But this — this had changed me.

Later, over margaritas at our favorite restaurant, Adrian gave me a little pep talk: Was I going to let one little Crown Vic ruin my life? Fill me with fear? What, was I going to just stay on my block for the rest of my life? NO! I was not. I would not be held captive by the fear that a cab would come out of nowhere and squash me.

We ordered another pitcher of margaritas, and Adrian let me get a little toasted, which was exactly what I needed. After we left the restaurant, we started to jaywalk diagonally across the street toward Adrian’s car. He held my hand as he led the way. But even with all that liquid courage, he still had to pull me along a bit. I checked the traffic coming both ways in a fidgety, nervous way. And then I’d check again. And Adrian just kept tugging me along.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a white Crown Vic taxi came bearing down on us from the right. I panicked. In that moment, I could feel the cab hitting me again. Every detail of the event played out in my mind: the hard bumper, the cold metal hood under my hands as I rolled off of it, hitting the ground and the awful, awful snap in my leg.

And so, without thinking, I yanked Adrian in front of the cab, and ran to safety.

Of course, as it turned out, the car was not as close as I thought. And it wasn’t a white Crown Vic, but a blue Honda Civic. And it stopped politely, several yards away, so Adrian could straighten up from where he had almost fallen in the middle of the street and walk back to me. But none of that changed the ugly reality of what I had done: I had just thrown my boyfriend in front of a car to save myself.

I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. I cried and apologized and told Adrian I was an asshole (he agreed). But, because he’s a good guy, he took my hand again and walked me to the car; he opened the passenger door and helped me in. We rode home in silence. He dropped me at my front door, made sure I was inside, and drove away.

I had always thought of myself as tough, loyal, fair and brave. The usual things people like to think about themselves. But if adversity reveals character, I had just revealed mine: I would sacrifice someone I cared about to survive.

A few days later, I finally had the surgery on my Achilles tendon. And Adrian was a good sport through all of it. He visited me while I was housebound because the snow was too heavy to navigate on crutches. He picked up my prescriptions at the drug store. When I became more mobile, he would walk slowly next to me as I limped along in my walking cast.

But something had changed between us. We both knew that for whatever reason — PTSD, cowardice or a heightened fight or flight instinct — I had sacrificed him to save myself.

We broke up shortly after my cast came off. When I looked in his eyes, I could see that expression of horror on his face as I yanked him past me into the path of the car. I saw it over and over again, my own relationship PTSD. In the end, he might have been able to get over my weakness, but I couldn’t. I needed a fresh start with someone who hadn’t seen the worst in me. Another selfish act of self-preservation? You bet.

“Do you want to know the sex?” the technician asks, pausing over something that my husband and I cannot identify.

We’ve already agreed that we do want to know, even though I am already confident this baby is a girl. I don’t know why I have such certainty about my pregnancies, but I knew that my first baby was a boy and that this one is a girl.

I am not surprised when the technician announces, “You’ve got a daughter!”

I am not surprised, but I am elated. It is the perfect family: a boy, then a girl. A big brother for a little sister. They are three years apart, my Sam and Grace, both names chosen during my first pregnancy. After a bumpy start to this marriage, to my move from Manhattan to Providence, R.I., things are settling. It is as if my life has taken a big, happy sigh.

My hands cradle my stomach.

Hello, Grace, I say silently, certain she can hear me.

II

When a person dies the body will begin to decay immediately. The bacteria in the intestines will still live and begin eating away at the tissues and emitting noxious gases

On April 16, 2002, my son Sam’s ninth birthday, I took Grace to her ballet class. It was a beautiful spring day, warm and full of blossoms: dogwood, magnolia and azaleas. That afternoon, I sat in my backyard, feeling lazy, watching our new puppy fall over her paws. I sat too long, and had to rush to pick Grace up from kindergarten. Tuesday afternoons were my most hectic days. Pick up Grace with ballet bag in tow; drive to Sam’s school; get to ballet class, change her clothes, occupy Sam for an hour; race home to make dinner. Today had the added errand of picking up Sam’s birthday cake at Ben and Jerry’s, and getting hamburgers and hot dogs for the half-dozen relatives joining us for a birthday cookout. Earlier, I’d made the artichoke dip they all liked, and put Red Stripe beer on ice.

Grabbing Grace’s ballet bag, I saw that she didn’t have any tights in it. I was late already. Surely she could do one class in just her leotard and slippers, I decided. I broke the news to her as soon as she got in the car and dropped her purple leopard backpack onto the seat beside her. That backpack was almost as big as she was, and a collection of trinkets she’d collected on our trip to Japan hung from it — a starfish, a little Picachu, a pink flower.

“Well,” Grace said in her characteristic husky tone, “ballet is better with tights.”

In the rearview mirror, I met her blue eyes shining behind her little wire-rimmed glasses.

“OK,” I relented. “I’ll stop at home and try to find some before we get Sam.”

On our way, she told me that Tamara, who also took ballet, was sick.

“Strep throat,” Grace said, handing me the bright red paper the school always sent home when someone had strep. Our 17-year-old German exchange student was just getting over strep herself. Today had been her first day back at school.

The clock on the dashboard seemed to mock me, showing me the minutes passing, reminding me how late we were running. I pulled into the driveway and told Grace she could not eat the blueberries I’d given her for a snack when she got in the car until I returned. I was a mother who worked ridiculously hard to keep catastrophe at bay. I didn’t allow my kids to eat hamburgers for fear of E. coli. I didn’t allow them to play with rope, string, balloons — anything that might strangle them. They had to bite grapes in half, avoid lollipops, eat only when I could watch them.

Grace closed the lid on the blueberries.

“Remember Tennessee Williams,” she said with a sigh.

I had heard that Tennessee Williams had died choking on the cap of an aspirin bottle he’d opened with his mouth. See what can happen? I’d told Sam and Grace. Now I laughed at her comment as I ran inside and miraculously located a pair of pink tights for her.

As we raced to get Sam, Grace told me her future plans. She would be in first grade at Sam’s school in the fall, and she wanted to take acting classes like he did.

“And art with Don,” she said. “And …” she paused, watching my face for a reaction, “no more ballet.”

“Got it,” I said. “Acting and art. No more ballet.”

Grace knew how much I loved ballet, how I had wanted to take it as a little girl but was forced into tap instead. As an adult, I took ballet classes three times a week, and I believed it gave me better posture, a stronger body, and made me more graceful. But Grace wasn’t very good at it. Why should she take it? My eyes drifted to that damn clock on the dashboard. I should let her skip it today, I thought. She could come with me to get Sam’s cake, help me set up the party.

As we pulled into the pickup line at Sam’s school, my husband called. “Can I take Sam with me this afternoon? Have a little boy time for his birthday?”

That decided, it seemed more prudent to have Grace go to ballet so that I could run the party errands alone and faster. Which is what I did. Sam went off with Lorne. Grace went into ballet class. And I dashed to Ben and Jerry’s and the grocery store, returning with only 15 minutes to spare.

Except when I walked into the hallway of waiting parents, they all looked at me oddly. Almost immediately, the door flew open and the ballet teacher came out.

“Oh good,” she said when she saw me, and she motioned me inside.

III

Rigor mortis (Latin meaning “stiffness of death”) is one of the recognizable signs of death that is caused by a chemical change in the muscles after death, causing the limbs of the corpse to become stiff and difficult to move or manipulate

The class of girls was silent as they watched me. The cavernous room was lit with beautiful afternoon sunlight, the wooden floors, scuffed from months of leaps and jetes. There, way across the room, lying perfectly still beneath a large window, was Grace.

“She fell skipping,” the teacher said. “Really, she kind of seemed off today.” She lowered her voice. “I think her arm is broken.”

Who would have believed me if I had said then what I felt? As I ran to my beautiful daughter, something was telling me that this was very, very bad, even as the logical part of my brain knew that a broken arm was a badge of childhood, that she would get a cast and have her friends sign it, and gain some cachet because of it.

Yet as I moved through that afternoon, lifting my daughter in my arms and carrying her the four blocks to the car; frantically checking on her as we drove to the emergency room, her eyes cloudy even then; pacing during the X-rays; holding her as we waited for the doctor to pronounce her arm broken; rocking her on my lap while the nurse explained what to watch for: There’s something called small compartment syndrome that’s serious, she said, and when she saw the look on my face, she quickly added, No, no, it won’t happen to her; through all of that I could not shake the idea that I had started down a road that led to heartache. And that no matter what, I could not turn back.

IV

The muscle in the eye that controls constriction or dilatation in the pupil, is no more … The pupils will dilate and no longer react to light or dark … Some of us in the profession have a saying when one dies that they have found everlasting light … This is because light is generally what causes the pupil to dilate … When we deal with death, the pupils will always be fixed and dilated, which indicates that there is no longer brain activity or response

I held Grace that night, as she moaned in pain.

By morning, her fever was 105.

By noon, we were back in the E.R., Grace semi-unresponsive. Something is very wrong, I kept thinking. Every nurse and technician and doctor who came in the room, I told that she’d been exposed to strep. “Mmmm-hmmm,” they said, and walked back out.

I held her hand. I hugged her close. I stroked her beautiful hair and her beautiful face.

By late afternoon, she’d had a grand mal seizure. She’d had a spinal tap, a chest X-ray, an EKG, an echocardiogram, an EEG. Everything was normal.

By dinner time, she was admitted to a room, given a grape Popsicle, and a video was popped in a TV for her. “She’ll be home tomorrow,” a doctor said. “The seizure was probably febrile.”

Something is very wrong.

By 7 p.m., a doctor was intubating my daughter, pushing me out of the way, looking me in the eye and saying, “Your daughter is not going to make it.”

I tried to hit the doctor. I tried to pull Grace off the gurney that was on its way to the ICU, surrounded by a team of doctors and nurses.

“The mother is hysterical,” the doctor said. “Make a note of that.”

All that night they forced me out of the room and into a waiting room outside the ICU. The waiting room had mauve furniture that looked like it belonged in a Holiday Inn. I would sit on the slippery mauve couch for five or 10 minutes, then run back into ICU, into Grace’s room, and find her hand to hold between the tubes and machines and working medical team’s hands. Then they would throw me out again.

Until finally they gave up and let me stay.

Sometime in the middle of the night they did surgery on her arm, right there in the ICU room. I had to leave her. They warned me she was so fragile that she probably wouldn’t make it. She did. I went back into the room and there was blood everywhere: in her hair, on the floor, drying on her neck. I got wet paper towels and wiped it up, carefully rubbing it from her body. A nurse said, “If she makes it, you can wash her hair tomorrow.”

I slept with my head on the gurney, breathing in Grace. I kept waking up, drinking water, and making sure she was alive. I kept saying her name over and over. I kept telling her I was there.

At some point, there was talk of her losing the arm.

At some point, doctors changed.

“Is it small compartment syndrome?” I asked the new doctor, who looked at me like I was crazy.

“It’s strep,” she said.

For the first time in hours, I felt relief. “Strep? Then you can give her antibiotics. You can cure her.”

The doctor was already busy performing some procedure. “The strep isn’t the problem. We’ve probably already cured that. But it’s a virulent form and it’s shutting down all of her organs.”

“Well, stop it!” I said.

At some point, there was hope. Her gray skin turned pink. They eased her from the ventilator. I saw those blue blue eyes.

V

“No wonder that the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart” — “Forgetfulness,” Billy Collins

By that night, April 18, in an instant, she died.

They tried to resuscitate her. They injected her and pounded her small chest. But they failed.

Lorne and I were allowed back in the room. Grace lay on that gurney. I looked at her, my daughter. I knew I should hold her. I knew I should take her into my arms. But I couldn’t. In the nine years since Grace died, with all the pages and pages I have written about losing her, I have never written these words.

My beautiful girl with her long legs and pale hair was now rigid, mottled, her tongue pushed forward, her hair pink with blood. This was death. It was ugly. Something acrid filled the air, a smell like a chemistry lab. This too was death. I tasted it for days, that smell. Her blue eyes were no longer blue. The dilated pupils took all of the blue away.

Nurses kept asking us questions. Did we want this? Did we want that? But all I wanted was to leave that room, that hospital. All I wanted was to run as fast as I could. So I did. I left that room where my daughter lay dead, and I screamed so loud that my voice remained hoarse for a long time.

What kind of mother leaves their child like that? I have wondered this. But now I know: Seeing death like that, seeing what it looked like and smelled like, how it robbed Grace, how it robbed me, I knew that this was final. Grace was really dead. I never had that feeling some people describe of waking up and forgetting the person has died. I walked out of that hospital into a warm spring night, my arms empty, and I knew: Grace was dead. I fell to my knees from the weight of what I knew. Even now, I am barely able to stand.

It had only recently struck me that email scams were getting craftier. After years of laugh-out-loud Nigerian hoaxes, chockablock with mangled grammar and outrageous pleas for the secret prince’s survival — hoaxes that only poor, good-hearted old people would ever fall for, at least according to the John Stossel report I watched — it seemed that scams were becoming harder to suss out. After all, we were moving faster, with less concentration, through more mediums than ever before. The mea culpas from vague acquaintances — “Sorry, everyone, please ignore that email” — were becoming a regular fixture of my in box. When two whip-smart co-workers fell for a Facebook scam that promised to show you how you ranked among your friends, well, I knew that could have been me.

In fact, I was still unsettled by an email hoax that ensnared me months earlier. The message arrived one morning from a friend who claimed to be traveling in London. “I’m writing this with tears in my eyes,” it began, and went on to describe every traveler’s worst nightmare: being mugged in a park, unable to pay the hotel bills. It sounded phony, but it had an almost touching attention to post-traumatic dialogue. “I’m freaked out at the moment!!” the email ended. Well, who wouldn’t be?

Surely it was fake. It had to be fake. But sitting there in my office, thousands of miles away, I felt torn between wanting to be a savvy Net user and wanting to be a decent human being. Was there a chance it was true? And if so, how would I feel later, knowing I had just clicked delete? I decided to call her, but despite having worked extensively with this woman, having met her for drinks once in my neighborhood, I didn’t have her phone number. This silly little email address was my one and only road to her. Eventually I hit reply: “Hey, I don’t think this is you — but if it’s you, what on earth is going on?”

(What a hopeless philosophical conundrum: “I don’t think this is you. But if it is you, is what you’re telling me true?”)

“Glad you replied back,” came the fast response. “All I need now is just $2,350 you can have it wired to my name via Western Union i’ll have to show my passport as ID to pick it up here and i promise to pay you back as soon as I get back home … Let me know if you are heading to the WU outlet now???”

OK: This was an obvious scam.

And yet, the exchange haunted me. I couldn’t shake the fear that something had happened to my friend. These grammar-challenged assholes had her email — did they have her, too? I know that’s not how email works, but I couldn’t stop imagining her strapped to a chair in a musty backroom, duct tape over her mouth. At other times, I would wonder if she had a drug problem — crack? heroin? — and was shacked up in some seedy motel on a bender, emailing everyone she’d ever met for money. The lingering anxiety stayed for days, weeks. I felt that if something happened to her, I would be responsible. Her email had implicated me in this drama. Not only was her safety in jeopardy; so was my karma.

OK, so now that I think about it, maybe I’m not all that skeptical about email scams. In fact, I’m actually a bit suggestible, which is a terrible, terrible quality to have when it comes to the Internet. I want to believe. I want to believe that you — person from high school I haven’t spoken to in 15 years — are dying for me to click on this link to see all your cool photos on facebook LOL. I want to believe the colleague I worked with 10 years ago really would send me a note about this amazing app he just discovered TRY IT YOU WILL LOVE IT. (Aww, for me? That’s sweet.) And apparently, when I get an email that says, “”So-and-so bought you a free movie ticket redeemable at 200 theaters!” I don’t stop to think, “Huh, that wording sure does sound promotional.” Or, “Why is it only good for $10? That’s less than the cost of a movie in New York.” Instead what I think is: It’s about time. So-and-so owed me a free movie ticket and, voilà, it arrived.

It took me months to redeem it. (To “redeem it.”) Such was my faith in this free movie ticket that I would think of it fondly on Saturdays as I ran errands, wondering if I should try to sneak in a film. I’ve got that free ticket. But life was stressful and time-crunched.

Then, this Saturday, I resolved to do just that. I pulled up the old email, went to the site, and clicked around with mounting frustration. I sighed when a pop-up asked me to type in my gmail address and password (“Why would they need that?” I wondered, but plowed ahead anyway).

Unable to find any information on my free movie, I gave up. Never mind, I thought. I’ll buy my own ticket.

By the time I closed the window, I had five new messages in my email, all of them out-of-office replies.

Subject line: OUT OF OFFICE, re: Sarah Hepola has bought you a free movie ticket redeemable at 200 theaters!

Dammit. I’d been scammed.

It’s a humbling thing to put a tiny little pill of poison into the in box of everyone with whom you regularly correspond. Afterward you feel … embarrassed? Ashamed? Exposed? I was worse than uncool. I had been gullible. But I would eventually discover that wasn’t the worst of it. This wasn’t even a phishing scam — it was just a coupon site’s aggressive Internet marketing gone wrong. One of the screens I impatiently clicked through asked if I wanted to send out a promotional notice to everyone on my contact list. I had inadvertently agreed to do just that — which made my story less “The Internet is evil” and more “I am an idiot.”

Eventually, I decided the only responsible thing to do was to email an explanation to everyone. Wading through my contact list was an intimidating task: 900 people. (Nine hundred people? How did I even know 900 people?) Just scrolling through the list made my hands clammy: writers I admired, professional contacts, friends I’d been meaning to get back in touch with for years. (Hey, sorry I forgot that baby shower gift, but look! A movie ticket redeemable at more than 200 theaters!) The public embarrassment was more excruciating for its away-from-view quality. I imagined my ex-boyfriend shaking his head when he saw the email: Well, I’m glad I broke up with her. What a dupe.

At this point, I know some of you must be thinking I was overreacting. Let me clarify: I was totally overreacting. But it’s just so humbling to cop to an email scam. It’s worse than thinking Joaquin Phoenix’s documentary was authentic, or buying that media story from earlier this year that the zodiac signs had all changed (guilty). There are a million disingenuous pieces of information zipping about at any time, and it’s forgivable to trip and believe a news story is real when it isn’t, to believe a writer when he is fudging the truth. But when you fall for some marketing ploy, you’re not just bringing embarrassment on yourself; you’re bringing everyone else down with you. All those 900 people who agreed to the unspoken social contract of being your Facebook friend, of writing you at your personal address — they’ve been dragged into this, too, because you did not look both ways before you clicked the link.

The episode also touched a nerve because I have been grappling with technological ignorance for some time. At 36, I was feeling left behind by interns whose brains ran like a Twitter feed, who used their smartphones like an extra limb. Despite working for an Internet company, despite being a capable single woman who could comfortably wield a power tool, I sometimes sat helplessly tapping at my iPhone like a chicken frantically trying to peck its way out, and it was not uncommon for my 27-year-old colleague and best work friend to look at me with exaggerated mock disdain: “What are you, my mother?”

But as I was cobbling together my red-faced response to 900 people that night, something kind of amazing happened. Something I didn’t expect. An email from my favorite high school English teacher popped up in my in box.

“Is this legit?” the subject line read.

I think my heart actually skipped a beat when I saw her name. I’d emailed her years ago — five, perhaps? — after another sleight of the Internet had helped our paths intersect. She was dubious of the offer that had arrived that afternoon, but she thought she’d ask anyway. It was wonderful to hear from her. It was always wonderful to hear from her, but the timing was perfect. I had just undergone some major shifts in my life that needed to be shared with a wise and favorite former English teacher. I know it was all just chance, I know it was random and weird and chaotic — but on this particular day, at this particular time, it felt a little bit like magic.

Eventually, I did send out that walk-of-shame email to my contact list. “Sadly, I did not buy you a free movie ticket,” it began. “I wish I had — but I didn’t.”

Emails started pouring in almost immediately. Laugh-out-loud jokes from clever friends, sympathetic “don’t-sweat-it” messages. I did not go to a movie that night. Instead, I caught up with dozens of people I hadn’t talked to in years, making arrangements to see some of them soon.

I spent that evening alone — but it sure didn’t feel that way.

Apparently it never occurred to my grandma that sending me into junior high school talking about Vivian’s scheming and the Carrie-Austin-Mike love triangle would be like sending a bleeding man into a shark tank. Luckily, my mom caught the problem before it was too late.

The night before my first day of school she told me, “Look, I’ll tape the show for you, but you can’t talk about it — ever — to anyone.”

I agreed. How could I not? Sami’s wedding was that week!

As time went on, however, I matured past the over-the-top plotlines and poor writing on “Days” … and moved over to the nuanced and subtle stories on “All My Children,” “One Life to Live” and — my all-time favorite — “General Hospital.”

As I got older, I would miss a few weeks of the other shows here and there, but never “GH” (as we die-hard fans call it). I let out a sigh of relief when I found out that “GH,” unlike “AMC” and “OLTL,” had been spared. I was expecting a clean sweep.

As someone who prides himself on his taste in pop culture, I never freely admit that my guilty pleasure is the guiltiest of them all in terms of sheer camp. It’s not so much that soap operas are cheesy; it’s that they seem to take themselves so seriously. And so did I for many years. I would find myself rationalizing my addiction by saying things like, “She’s really an excellent actress! That scene where she admitted to her biological mother that she only slept with her stepfather to … OK, never mind.”

Now it seems that time will keep my secret hidden. Eventually all the soaps will vanish. The Soapnet channel is already gone. One day future generations will talk about “General Hospital” and wonder how something so corny ever survived for so long.

But every once in a while I find a kindred spirit. I’ll be at a party and overhear someone mentioning Luke and Laura’s wedding and my ears will perk up. I’ll meet the person’s gaze across the room, and we’ll share a moment of understanding.

Ah yes, my friend, I say silently: I’m one of you.

High on sugar and fat, my friend Jordan, my husband, John, and I set out for a postprandial walk from the donut emporium. We made it several blocks when it became clear something had gone horribly awry in my intestinal track.

“Get the car!” I squeaked to my companions, feeling the pressure mount in my guts and heat course through my body. “Get the car NOW!”

One look at my sweating, bug-eyed face was all the encouragement they needed.

As they fled, I could feel my muscles give way and round one erupt in my pants. (Funny enough, my pants were brown.) Panicked, I scanned my environment and strategized my next plan of attack. I had about five minutes until they returned with the car, and with no cover in sight, I lumbered over to a parking strip, dropped trou, and began to yank on my underwear in an effort to physically rip them off of me. “C’mon, c’mon, c’monnnnnn” I shouted at my soiled briefs, tugging at the material as I struggled to maintain my squat. I rummaged through my purse and found my keys, using the serrated edge to try to cut the elastic.

Increasingly aware of the time flying by and the adolescent boys slowly walking toward me, I gave up on my undies, zipped off my high heeled boots, stumbled into some sharp thorns, then finally shimmied out of my pants and ruined underwear. Looking around wildly for something with which to wipe, I closed my eyes, swore, and settled on my hand. Frantically, I managed to pull up my pants just as the car came around the corner.

As John and Jordan pulled up, I ran to the parking strip and wiped my hands feverishly on the wet grass, completely prostrate as if in prayer. Luckily, I was surprisingly clean, but I smelled like a litter box. Sweating and panting, I hopped in the car and turned to my husband. “I need to go home,” I whispered, biting my tongue to stave off a flood of tears.

Later, I washed my hands like an obsessive compulsive scrub nurse. In the shower, I sobbed, clutching myself and rocking in my antique claw-foot tub. I couldn’t shake a feeling that I was dirty and contaminated, no matter how hard I scrubbed. Did I have a food allergy? Did I have cancer? Was I dying? I had never heard of adults outside assisted living facilities pooping their pants. I was only 26 years old. Robust, blond and pink cheeked, I could have moonlighted as a model for Soviet propaganda posters. What was wrong with me?

Completely unnerved and desperate, I turned to my nutrition-minded friends for advice. It was suggested I might have celiac disease, or lactose intolerance, so I dutifully ditched all wheat and dairy for six grueling weeks. Despite my new-found ability to make dairy-free mashed potatoes, my diet experiment did little to ease my symptoms. In a maddening dance of déjà vu, the details of that night were repeated, without warning, at the most inopportune times. Sales calls became roulette wheel nightmares, as I cut pitches short to run to the john. I even completely lost control in one meeting at a nursing home, in an act of ironic solidarity.

Even if I hadn’t been soiling myself in the line of duty, I was way out of my league in this job. The stress of trying to make commission while my body fell apart made my decision to quit and pursue a “lucrative” career as a freelance writer that much easier. Working from home provided a bathroom safety net, and working for myself meant a significant drop in pressure.

Unfortunately, the second my resignation letter hit the desk and my health insurance ran out, all hell really broke loose. Every event suddenly centered on its proximity to bathrooms, making my apartment the only safe haven most of the time.

Malnourished and dehydrated, exhaustion set in. My pink skin took on a grayish tinge. My joints began to ache from the systemic inflammation. And the bathtub began filling with hair each day — a few strands at first, and then large stringy clumps. I couldn’t even rejoice when I lost 10 pounds in one week. It was obvious my body was breaking down.

Even with my online searches, I had no idea what was going on, but going to the doctor seemed out of the question. With only catastrophic health insurance, my access to health care was limited at best. I wasn’t up for spending hundreds or thousands of dollars to be diagnosed with something that would keep me from qualifying for better health insurance. And I was just plain scared. Scared of knowing the truth, scared to hear what I could only assume was “you’re dying” from a qualified doctor. So I waited, and watched, hemmed and hawed, scanned WebMD and tried to piece together evidence for what was ailing me.

But the breaking point came at last. After lunch, in the car, IT happened. We were on the freeway, over 20 minutes from home, and there was nothing to do but sit in the filth, wailing “why meeeeeeee!” to my visibly shaken husband. When we got home, he confronted me. “You need help,” he said. “You need to see a doctor. I don’t really care how much it costs.” And then he went to the bar.

Two days later, I sat with my new doc as he ordered a colonoscopy, stool samples and an upper gastrointestinal tract X-ray, all in the name of figuring out what was wrong with me. As I entered the room I stifled a gasp. Dark and buzzing with machines, the place looked straight out of “Star Wars,” with a giant white vertical table providing a Death Star-like focal point. Led to this table, I was mounted and cuffed, torture victim style, as the table was lowered to various positions until I ended up completely horizontal. An X-ray made its way over my torso, making a stop action movie of my upper GI tract while the radiologist hid behind protective glass.

For step two, I collected my crap in a dish that nestled in the toilet, and then scooped it into little vials of preservative. The vials were then shoved in a paper bag, which my husband ran to the doctor within the hour. We had to do this three different times, and each time I fantasized about a cop pulling John over for some minor infraction. “What’s in the bag, buddy?” he would ask, stone-faced behind his aviators. “Poop, sir. Vials of poop.” “Very funny, now get out of the car.” Fortunately, or unfortunately, each crap run went off without a hitch.

Step three involved fasting for 12 hours, then drinking Gatorade and a couple of bottles of nasty salt laxative, which caused me to set up residency on the toilet for the following 12 hours. When that ordeal was over, and I’d reread several Harry Potter novels while praying for death, my husband drove my visibly lighter self to the office, where I was given a date rape drug and violated by a yard-long camera spelunking through my butt. When I came to, I deliriously told John the story of how a nurse had called me “a tiny thing” as she wheeled me into the exam room. “A tiny thing, John! Can you believe it?! Me! A tiny thing!” Then I passed out and rewoke to tell the story again and again.

Finally, after the prodding, poking and ingestion of puketastic beverages, we had an answer. “You have ulcerative colitis,” my doctor told me, as he flipped through my chart. “Left-sided ulcerative colitis.”

Ulcerative colitis, or “UC” as it’s known among the colostomy bag set, is an autoimmune disorder of unknown origins. Part of the inflammatory bowel disease family of fun™, a troupe that also includes Crohn’s disease, UC basically entails an inflamed intestinal track and rectum rife with ulcers. Get diagnosed with UC and you’ll have it for life, with only one “easy” way out: have your colon removed.

Worse, probably, than finding out I had the disease was trying to explain it, as I soon learned when sharing my news with friends and family. “Inflammatory bowel disease” has got to be the least sexy malady out there, trumped only by elephantiasis of the nuts or scabies. Most people have never heard of it, which necessitates at least a brief explanation involving the words “anus and rectum.” “But what does it do?” concerned friends ask, to which I usually reply, “It makes me poop my pants.” Talk about a conversation killer. No one has ever followed that one with “Please tell me more.”

Sometimes I find myself wishing UC was more easily explainable, like cancer; cancer is godawful but something everyone knows and understands. The word “cancer,” if not cancer itself, is clean and direct and to the point — the Danish Modern of disease. UC is just embarrassing.

No one really knows what causes ulcerative colitis, and the doctor delivered the assurance that nothing I had done had caused it. But naturally, I felt guilty. “I’m being punished,” I decided. “This is all my fault.” The stages set in. Denial: “Maybe this is no big deal. Let’s get drunk and play Rock Band with our upstairs neighbors!” Anger: ” Screw you, god! Why does everything happen to me?!” Bargaining: “Maybe if I start doing yoga and eating a macrobiotic diet I’ll be fine!” Depression: “I am defective. I should just die and stop inflicting myself on everyone around me.” And finally, Acceptance: “OK, I have UC. Now what?”

I’ve been in the “now what” stage for five years now. Five long years of drugs and supplements, diets, restrictions and experimentation. Some of it helped, some of it didn’t. But I just keep trying because the alternative is having part of my body removed or giving up altogether. There have been stretches when I was just fine, and could forget and pretend I was normal. There have been other stretches when I’m tired and angry, buying adult diapers and almost passing out on walks. Even as I begin to slip into remission, there are painful reminders: my rotten teeth, the ache of my joints, the way I nervously scan every establishment for its bathroom before I can relax. I will never be the same and I know it.

But because of this experience, and its ongoing effects, life looks totally different. Most days it’s easy to be grateful. Whenever I’m whining about our rusty 15-year-old car or our messy house, I have to take a step back and thank god I’m basically well and still functional. Every day without an accident is a cause for celebration. I may be broken, but I’m not just a brain in a jar. I’m alive. And I plan to stay that way.