Where I Am?

I live in a very mall town in Arkansas, population 2000. It is, in fact, so small that everyone knows everyone else. I can make a phone call, get the wrong number, and the person on the other line will know me by my voice, know who I was calling and probably know if she is home or not. That’s a good thing, most of the time, but not now.
You see, I had surgery on the 8th, had a hysterectomy, total abdominal hysterectomy, and it hurt like hell. Prior to the hyst, as the medical staff so casually calls it, I was attending the university working on an English degree so that I could get into the Master’s program up north and over the river. Anyway, I plan to go back to school, this is only a small thing, I will be back in school after Spring break. Everyone in town, though, knew about my surgery. I spent three nights in hospital. One night a friend stayed, the second night my sister stayed. I have to give you a feel for my older sister. She raised me when my mom died so she is very protective of me. In the middle of the night, I feel the covers gently getting pulled off of me, she pulls out a flash light and shines on my bandages, looks at the tube collecting my urine, the other one draining blood. I hear her moan as if she has seen the worst thing in her life and she covers me back up, wipes my face with a cool washcloth, and hits the button on my morphine pump. Before I go off to lala land, I hear her on the cell, “yep, she has one of them cathers, and a tube that’s draining a lot of blood, there’s a plastic thing there too, but I didn’t touch it. I don’t know. I’m worried as can be.”
Now I’m home and people have been in and out bringing casseroles, roasts, cakes and well you know the southern thing. But each of them can tell you exactly what I had inside and outside of me because after that phone call my sister made, it spread through this town like wildfire. When people come to visit they ask all kinds of questions about the tubes and the surgery. My husband, who is not from this area, asked me how in the hell they knew what kind of drainage tubes I had. I just laughed. Yesterday, our sewer lines got backed up and a plumber came and fixed them, while, I might add, I was at the doctor’s office getting a painful procedure, and anyway, this morning, my sister calls and says, “I hear you had to have your pipes cleaned. It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours and the entire town knows about my plugged pipes. Is there a moral to this rambling? NO, but it is a slice of my life. Good or bad, it is what I live, and the people have given me a wealth of characters to write about. Until I heal enough for heavier thinking this must do.