One morning that same year, I woke up with an ileostomy, a 10-inch plastic bag -- the kind you would use to store vegetables in the freezer -- hanging from the right side of my belly. But this one was for collecting waste. I had been in the hospital for more than a month with ulcerative colitis, an inflammation of the inner lining of the colon. My large intestine had grown like rising bread, until it became mega-toxic, on the brink of explosion. The night my stomach became so hard that to rap on its surface would yield an echo of knocked wood, the surgeon came in and marked a spot where the bag would attach. He used a plain old Bic pen to make an "X," and I got wheeled quickly into the operating room.

He and his harem of students took out my large intestine, pulling an inch of the small intestine -- the ileum -- out of my abdomen, so much thread through dense fabric. They created a stoma, an opening in my abdomen wall. With a plastic clip on the end that I could clamp and unclamp for draining, the bag would stay there for nearly a year.

I woke up from the surgery woozy from the morphine and the pain that seemed to cut me in half. I looked at what had become of my body and felt a wash of grief. And then I thought of that cow. It was as if I had become her, pried open by doctors while students gaped at the spot where my hide was cut away.

There were a million things I had to remember so as not to become a public freak show. These tasks were manifold and cutaneous-like in their layers. Beneath the surface of my coverings, it began with making absolutely sure the bag was secure, a surprisingly long and complicated process. For one, I needed to find a flange -- a card-like square that stuck to my stomach, attaching to the bag -- with an opening the exact size of my stoma, an impossible task. Apparently, small intestines are as different from one another as shoes, and I had the most narrow and Italian of ileums. So I had to cut out a circle in the flange both large enough and small enough to slide the ileum -- that slippery, wiggly worm -- through it. Before sticking the flange to my skin, I needed to sprinkle on a special powder to prevent irritation and infection. Too much, and the bag would not stay stuck; too little, and a galaxy of red dots -- a reaction to the unbreathing material -- would splash across my stomach. Then there was the putty, essential for securing the flange in place so that no seepage occurred (though a leak could spring up as well from the bag's bottom, where a plastic clasp folded and clamped it shut like a toothless jaw).

To make extra sure, humiliation always at the forefront of my mind, I took long strips of flesh-colored tape, more the color of a bright Barbie-pink, and strapped them along the flange in the shape of a square. In addition to being expensive and not covered by insurance, this get-up was especially uncomfortable in the sticky humidity of New York in late August, and it hindered any kind of physical intimacy with another human being. I was already on the outs with my boyfriend when I went to the hospital. When I got out, I couldn't bear to be with someone who had seen my body before it had been sliced open. But it wasn't entirely the fault of the ileostomy, that wicked stepmother I would have liked to blame for everything. Truthfully, sex had become a sadness that was easier to avoid than endure.

As part of their campaign to convince me that my life would change very little -- hardly at all! -- from having an ileostomy, nurses told me brightly, "You can wear whatever you want, honey." But I found I could not. Jeans or trousers with waists that had once hung on my hips now rubbed against the stoma, irritating it. Pants that clung to me, flush with my stomach, rose as the bag (horrors of all horrors) filled, also increasing the chance of its balloon-like breaking. There was no way to wear skirts in the summer -- without stockings or tights, the bag would slap against my leg, which sounded to me like a screen door slamming shut as I walked. Or worse, it would hang between my legs when I sat down: a bizarre, dangling sensation.

Those nurses said, "Of course you can swim!" But how? A bathing suit? Forget it. One day, a group of us went to the reservoir -- another big Ithaca, N.Y., attraction -- and I sat happily on the beach in shorts and a T-shirt while a foray of graduate students jumped and splashed into the water. It was muggy, and I soon began to feel sorry for myself. Mournfully, I waded into the water, my toes pointed with longing.