As Told by Ginger, Appendicitis and the Nature of Memory

If you celebrated your prime pre-early teen awkward years back in the early noughties like yours truly, you might have run across a show called As Told By Ginger. The series focused on Ginger Foutley, the eldest child of a single mother, who tries to come of age in an American middle school. It was a pretty excellent series that explored hard themes of absent fathers, social acceptance and the obstacles of friendship, and was one I inhaled greedily as a thirteen year old growing up in sunny Brisbane.

Ginger for me was formative. She was ballsy and sweet and loyal; a sister, a friend and, maybe most importantly, a writer. I was so invested in this character because she wasn't a saddle clubber or a dance academy student or a worst witch, she was a normal girl from a low socio-economic background who found solace in writing - something I could identify with.

I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the power of character to provide hope and acceptance for people of all backgrounds and personalities, but that's probably a different story all together. The point of this post is to say that my appendix swelled twice it's size last Thursday, and in all my fevered haze, my sharp, toe curling pain, all I could think of was the episode where this happened to Ginger.

I haven't thought about As Told by Ginger in years - not even fleeting thoughts really, but that's the thing I guess about memory. It finds ways to sharpen and target moments all on its own, to latch onto something relative in the unusual. My body maybe couldn't recognise this stabbing pain in my side, but it could remember where it had seen something like it before and it hit the control-f of my brain to summon up the episode and tell me maybe this was more than period cramps or overwrought muscles from a workout.

In the episode, Ginger's long-time best friend, short-time boyfriend reveals he's been cheating on her since he got his braces off and became a stud, and Ginger recoils from family and friends, hurt, until her figurative pain turns into something literal. I have a sharp memory of her mother finding her in bed, curled in the fetal position and sweating out a sickness, and when I awoke to myself Thursday, it was a position I found mirrored in myself. So I did what Ginger did. I called my mother.

Eighteen hours later, I was appendixless and munching on plain cornflakes in a hospital bed. I'm recouping steadily at the moment. Stretching out against the constraints my stitches have made in me and feeling alternately elderly or too impossibly young to manage. That's the nature of these things, I guess, and this morning I found myself downloading the whole As Told by Ginger series on Itunes, either for nostalgia or to find some other half-formed bouts of wisdom, I'm not sure. Either way, I'm looking forward to it.