Peg's Lump

“All my life, I had a lump on the back of my neck.”

Editor’s Note: The following short story is part of The Peg Universe. You can find the first installment (“Peg’s Leg”) here, and the second (“Peg’s Midwife”) here. If you like what you read, please consider a free or paid subscription. Enjoy!

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Peg had a lump. It had been there for some time, not much of a bother. But kind of a bother. Thankfully, it was behind her neck, or rather, on the back of her neck, so it lived in solitary darkness under her hair.

After Peg had become a medical doctor, she became disillusioned and left the profession even though she had graduated medical school at the top of her class. She decided to become a farmer, then a chiropractor, then a functional medicine practitioner and voodoo witch doctor. (She converted to Catholicism on her death bed, but we’ll get to that later.)

Peg grew her own herbs on her farm and began manufacturing her own line of supplements with the help of her husband and his dehydrator.

Anyways, it came time for Peg to address her neck lump. The lump had begun as, hmm, something small. A feeling. A whisp of the hand against something not hard but not squishy either. A conversation with her husband in which they both had to feel around a good while with several fingers before they could find it (“Here it is, no here, here”).

Peg’s husband made a circle around the lump with red marker. Now, all they had to do was part Peg’s hair and search for the red bullseye. They left the lump there, much more peaceful knowing that they couldn’t lose it again.

The lump was filed away while Peg and her husband dealt with other matters. Their growing supplement business, their clients who came seeking Peg’s expertise. She helped people with thyroid goiters, leaky guts, skin lesions, flaky fingernails, obesity, corns, H. pylori, migraines, all manner of subluxations, puffiness, collagen, gelatin, you name it. She dealt with these problems and their carriers, namely, human beings.

Peg noticed a trend. Almost all of her patients had some kind of lump! And this got her thinking about her own lump again, the one in red permanent marker on the back of her head. Despite having a bookshelf filled with references from both eastern and western medicinal traditions, Peg posted on her practice’s Facebook page soliciting advice: “Anybody else have a lump on their neck? Idk I’m kind of worried,” she wrote. She went to bed but had trouble sleeping. Peg was beginning to feel anxious.

In the morning, Peg checked her email, as usual. She was struck by a particular email that showed up in her promotions tab (which she rarely checked). The subject line read, “Got a lump? Stop worrying. We can help.” Peg felt relief. She clicked. She scanned. She found a YouTube video linked at the bottom of the email.

Peg clicked this link but realized that the video was actually of her and her husband showing a film crew their supplement farm. Peg began to sweat. She closed YouTube and made another cup of hot coffee to stop her from sweating.

Peg decided to close her practice (against the advice of her husband) until she dealt properly with her health. Who was she to deal with other people’s lumps if she couldn’t deal with her own lump?

At the advice of someone she didn’t know that had responded to her Facebook post, she read a long and detailed account of one doctor’s success with a very simple lump protocol. Raw garlic cut into small pieces and swallowed as if it was a pill, shots of purest olive oil, milk of magnesia, no dairy, no fat, no carbs.

Peg decided to dig a little deeper. She clicked on the doctor’s profile. It had very few followers, even fewer likes, and the picture seemed a little too…what was it? Glossy? Fuzzy? Clear? Were his eyes too blue? Too ovalish? The profile was only created a few months ago. But the doc did seem to have many, many letters after his name. In fact, he, too, was first in western medicine, then a chiropractor, then a functional practitioner and voodoo doctor. At least, that is what his bio said.

Peg was almost 65 by now. She said to herself, “Look at yourself, Peg! You’ve been to every Buddhist monastery east of the Atlantic Ocean. You’ve met with Eskimo healers on all seven continents. You can do this. This lump can’t beat you. Nobody can!” So, Peg began the garlic protocol. She asked her husband to remove all fats and carbs from his diet as well, because she suspected he had H. pylori and also a lump somewhere, too.

After completing her eight-week garlic cleanse, Peg felt amazing. She was running again, she had purchased a purple cruiser bike, and she felt ready to reopen her practice. Her lump was not gone, but it was noticeably smaller, and it had moved a bit to the left so that now a small portion of the lump hung outside the red marker mark. Peg felt confident that with a few more weeks of diet and supplement work the lump would be behind her. Or rather, it would no longer be behind her.

On this particular morning, Peg had packed her bike basket full of deliveries from her artisan supplement shoppe. She kissed her husband goodbye and rode out into a misty, foggy, morning. She breathed very deeply and contentedly as she pedaled. She marveled that she saw no one else from her neighborhood out on such a morning as this. Where were those bums? Were they sitting in their homes watching YouTube on tiny, handheld screens? She thought that maybe they were, and she was sad for them.

Then Peg noticed a bump in the middle of the road. It was a black bump, maybe a tire someone had forgotten there. Peg swerved slightly to the side on her purple cruiser and made to go around the thing. Until she noticed that the tire was wearing a shoe. Two shoes, in fact. And it had a head and arms and was not a tire but a man. He looked dead, but Peg wanted to be sure. Maybe one of her supplements could help.

So, she reached for the man’s hand to check his pulse. She couldn’t feel anything there, but she had never been good at checking pulses, so she pulled back the man’s eyelids to see if there was life in his eyes.

Then, I am sorry to say, something terrible happened. The man in the road that had not been a tire had also not been dead. He had been playing dead. So, he took this moment to scream the loudest scream he had ever screamed and ever would scream again. He made his eyes as big as they could go, very, very big, and gnashed his teeth at Peg. He also grabbed Peg’s head while he did this.

Peg’s mind and body could not handle the shock of this. It had been too much, too quickly, on too beautiful of a misty morning. Peg’s heart could not keep up with the blood that shot in and out and to all the extremities of her body, even to the lump. Peg had a heart attack. She wobbled back and forth.

The man caught Peg. He was wearing a black robe. Peg saw rosary beads dangling from his habit.

“Would you like to be baptized?” the man asked Peg. Her eyes flickered and she breathed her labored breaths.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m dying.” The man pulled out a vial of holy water and poured it over Peg’s head. “In Nomine Patris. . . .”

The man closed Peg’s eyelids after she was baptized to let her rest in peace. But she opened them again and whispered, “It’s not too late.” And with a last effort of body and will, Peg pulled a bottle from her pocket. It tumbled to the ground in the middle of the road; it rolled off her fingers and made a plastic clanking sound.

The bottle was from the supplement shoppe. The man opened it and found a Chinese fortune cookie inside. The tiny scroll read, “You are a holy fool.” He looked up into the sky and saw Peg’s spirit hovering near the sun. She smiled at him and floated backwards into a cloud. The man smiled back and yelled aloud, “Goodbye!”