My Review of Fairview Hospital

Cleveland Clinic’s Fairview Hospital Credit: Cleveland Clinic

After what felt like two hours on the operating table after an emergency C-section, the resident suturing me up looked pleased. He proudly reassured me that he took some extra time on the table to make sure the tattoo on my lower abdomen lined up properly.

When I was 18, my friend Denise called my early 2000s Razor flip phone in a tone that implied both urgency and inevitability: she was getting her nose pierced, right now. She insisted I come along, either as moral support or accomplice. We all knew she didn’t need the support, and we all knew she didn’t really have morals. My parents were out of town, and I suspected, with the exacting paranoia of a teenage girl, that they would both notice and detest a metal stud sticking out from my snout. I was adamant, this is not going to happen. As I got into the car, I rehearsed my grounds of refusal like a defense attorney heading into closing arguments.

Denise was a master in coercion. When I got there she started to really work me over about the nose ring. I finally caved under what felt like a suffocating weight of peer pressure, but to stay true to my values, affirmed that the piercing was out of the question. I couldn’t bear my parents’ disappointment in me. I’ll just get a tattoo instead. You know, a permanent alteration to my body. At the time, it seemed like a reasonable compromise. Sure, you can take a nose ring out, sometimes the piercing will even heal itself; but with a tattoo, I can put it somewhere they won’t see.

While Denise sat in the chair, I stood in the lobby, flipping through the tattoo parlor’s binder, and, since it only takes about 5 seconds to pierce a nose, I pointed, more or less at random, to a small, blue elephant with its trunk pointing up. I had no affinity for elephants. They are not my favorite animal. I am not a huge fan of the zoo. I’m not even a Republican. The elephant was completely arbitrary.

The artist, a middle aged man with the steady hands and dead eyes of someone who has inked 300 butterflies and at least one The Land tattoo in Old English font onto patrons, stamps this elephant onto my body, in a place my parents will not see. A few hours later, the permanence of this decision set in.

Time passes, and panic gave way to rationalization. I could not un-elephant myself, but I could bestow it meaning. That became the plan: retrofit depth. Months go by, with the elephant on my mind. I remembered those vintage circus illustrations – elephants with balls balanced improbably on their trunks, a grotesque hybrid of whimsy and labor. In many cultures, elephants with their trunks up symbolize luck, prosperity, and kindness. What if, instead of a ball, my elephant held up the Earth? Peace on earth. The planet will be the pièce de résistance of my tattoo.
So, back to a tattoo shop I went. A tiny globe atop its tiny trunk. It felt clever. Unique. Symbolic. This was now meaningful, it is my own.

More time passes, and I am sitting with some friends in college watching cable television because it’s the late aughts and Netflix doesn’t exist. We are flipping through and land on Animal Planet. I’ve never really watched this channel, it doesn’t mean anything to me in particular. Like I mentioned, I didn’t even really like going to the zoo very much. As a commercial comes on, up came their network logo, and suddenly one of our friends yells my name. “Look – look at their logo,” she gasped. The room fell silent. An elephant, holding a tiny globe atop its trunk. I had branded myself with this tattoo, that turns out, is their brand. Unbeknownst to myself, for years now I had been walking around with the network logo of Animal Planet plastered to my body.

In the years that followed, the absurdity of this faded from embarrassment and into comedic sentiment. And then, at 4 a.m. in a fluorescent-lit operating room, I was lying open on a table while someone tugged a tiny human out of me. My daughter, arriving fast and furious in a way that suggested future temperament, was saved by a team of people who had likely been awake longer than I had been alive. And still they took the time to line up the Animal Planet logo, because nothing says “Caring for Life, Researching for Health, and Educating Those Who Serve” like corporate branding for a global media syndicate done right.

In the moment, I was honestly mildly annoyed. This tattoo was a mistake, an artifact of poor judgement. I just wanted to hold my daughter and put some damn pants on. And yet again, as time passed, the moment reassembled itself into something meaningful. At 4 a.m., these sleep-deprived and overworked medical providers operating in the highest of high-stress environment saw an Animal Planet tramp stamp and responded not with mockery or indifference, but with precision, respect, and care. They stood there, feet aching, hands cramping, taking extra time to realign a teenage mistake on my lower hip. What else could motivate that kind of attention, except an abiding respect for the person it belonged to, and a commitment to meet people (whoever they are, however they got there) with dignity?

My daughter is almost four now. These days, we go to the zoo a lot; I’ve grown to enjoy it. She is strong and wild and bright, and she thinks rules are more of a suggestion. I hope one day, when a friend calls her with a questionable plan to pierce her nose, she says yes. Or no. Or instead, she tattoos a minimalist yellow picture frame to her ankle, that she came up with all on her own. I just hope she knows that whatever she chooses, even if it’s impulsive or ridiculous or stitched together years later in hindsight, it can still end up okay. Maybe even meaningful.

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