By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell went on birth control when she was in her late 20s. She had to be on some kind of birth control because of her polycystic ovary syndrome. As soon as she went on Norplant she broke out in bad acne. It was horrible.

   “Get that stuff out of your system,” her mother Alma kept telling her. Her mother had been a nurse and knew her stuff.

   After that, she put on 85 pounds and it would not go away. She went on every diet known to man and beast. She would lose some weight, get down to a certain number, and then stop the starving, and get it all back. It frustrated her, and pissed her off, too.

   “I’m going to do gastric bypass,” she told Steve, her husband.

   “Oh, no, don’t, I love you the way you are,” he said. He was under no circumstances going to say she was fat.

   “I’m going to do it,” she told him.

   Maggie went to St. Vincent’s Hospital near Cleveland State University when she was forty-two years old, signing on the dotted line.

   “I highly recommend the full gastric,” her doctor said.

   “I’ll do whatever you recommend,” she said, although she asked him about the band.

   “If you do the band I go in and put the band in your stomach, but you don’t start losing weight right away. First you have to wait six months for it to heal, and then I’ve got to tighten it.”

   “Screw that,” she said. “Let’s do the one where I start losing right away. I don’t want to wait.”

   She dropped 85 pounds, which was exactly what she had put on. One day she went to her chiropractor for an adjustment. His jaw dropped. “Where did the rest of you go?”

   “I know, I know, it’s great,” she said. “It’s just gone, where I don’t know.” She had no intention of ever finding it again.

   “There’s nothing left of you.”

   She had been a small person in a big body before the implant. Most of the women in her Bible study group had eating disorders and weight issues. She knew what it was like.

   “I was anorexic in high school,” she said. “My brother Brad’s wife is 38 years old. She’s a double zero and she’s lost all her teeth because she’d made herself throw up so many times. All her teeth corroded, just eroded out, and she’s lost her esophagus. So, that’s gone. Then she had to get a double mastectomy because she found out she has the x marker. She’s teeny-weeny, but her mother is heavy, and her sister is almost five hundred pounds. Her sister’s husband used to be normal, but he has put on a lot of weight since they’ve been together. She’s one of the sweetest people I’ve ever met, but she stinks, like in stinky. She stinks to high heaven. How do you bathe when you’re 500 pounds? She’s the sweetest person, but she knows.”

   Maggie wanted to have a hysterectomy because her ovaries were so bad. “My female parts are diseased and horrible, but they won’t do it.”

   “You should keep all your parts, like you keep your teeth,” her doctor said.

   “Why would you want me to keep them?” she asked her. “You pull out rotten teeth, don’t you?”

   But her doctor said she wouldn’t do it. She gave Maggie three options.

   “You can go back on the pill.”

   “I’m 49 years old,” she said. “No.”

   “We could try an ablation.”

   “I’m not doing that. I probably have cystic ovarian disease. And I have anemic cyanosis. It’s only the inside of the uterus. I’m not doing that.”

   “All right, we can do an implant again.”

   “Fuck that,” she told her. “I’m never doing that again, gaining all that weight, so forget it.”

   The diet she followed was the blood type diet. It’s the eat right for your blood type diet. Anybody can get any disease, any ailment, any affliction. But there are some blood types that get some more than others. More of the O’s, like her, are going to get more blood clotting, rheumatoid arthritis, and have more sinus issues. A’s have heart issues, high cholesterol, heart disease, and all the things that go with that.

   Her chiropractor told her about the blood type diet. “If you’re willing to do the gastric, are you willing to go a step farther?” he asked.

   “I can try anything for a month,” she said.

   After a few weeks Maggie started to feel good. After two months she noticed she hadn’t had a sinus infection for two months, so she kept going. Steve went on the diet, too. He followed his specific blood type diet, which was awful because he had to be a vegetarian. He hated it, but on weekends he splurged, and ate whatever he wanted.

   Ever since Maggie started following her diet, she hardly ever got sinus headaches anymore. She used to get them all the time. In the last seven years, since she had been on the blood type diet, she got a sinus infection exactly three times. There’s something to it, although her husband’s aunt, who is their doctor, didn’t believe in it.

   “It’s funny,” Maggie told her, “how I used to see you all the time, but now I hardly ever see you.” The doctor just shrugged.

   “Steve has to be a vegetarian, but I love my meat. I’m a Christian and I believe animals are here for me to eat. I’m not about vegetarianism. At the same time, I think there’s so much in our food we don’t know about, like preservatives and chemicals. Why do they have to torture animals before killing them? They inject them with drugs and rip their feathers out while they’re still alive.” Treat them humanely before they go in my stomach, she believed.

   Last Christmas they were out for a party with friends, driving around in a limo, all lit up like Christmas trees. They were hammered. When they got to their restaurant her hair salon boss’s husband went right to the bathroom and threw up.

   Steve ordered veal, since it was the weekend, and since she had never had veal, she wanted to try it, so she did. She stuck a piece in her mouth, but she had a thing with texture. It was just not steak texture. She liked steaks better than anything. She would kill the cow herself if she had to. She didn’t like the veal. Steve must have seen the look on her face, because when she spit it out, he picked it up and popped it into his mouth.

   Everybody at the table laughed, but that’s love.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street  http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Down East http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus

It is Cleveland, Ohio in 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two  police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal. Revenge is always personal.

Available on Amazon and Apple Books

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication