* * *
As the gynecologist, seated on a swivel chair mere inches past my goose-bumped legs and thoughtfully shaved mound, leaned obligatorily towards the glossy pink sanctum of my cervix shining through the small yawn of my speculum-wrenched vagina, I closed my eyes the way people in pews do and waded into the rose-colored darkness for a brief breath.
When she picked up the thin plastic wand recognizable to every woman who's ever had a pap smear, I fastened my eyes to the ironic flower decal on the ceiling and tried not to imagine the rigid stick shooting through the short dark tunnel, like a snake lunging in the night. It bit into me with a familiar twinge, its sharp pinch the kind my sister used to give me when we were kids.
* * *
Between the legs of all the women who have opened to me are Georgia O'Keefe flowers, their petals and pistils colored in delicate or violent shades of pink, purple, and peach.
When I bend, I breathe deep.
* * *
The first time I bled, I was fourteen years old and calm. Finally, I thought, peeling the plastic mini-rocket from its thin wrapping, which was pearlescent and faintly textured like the wrapping of the after-dinner mints at Sizzler, the ones that yielded easily between my teeth, turning to a sweet cream on my tongue as I sucked.
Every month that year, my period arrived on time and pain-free. I marveled at its regularity; I could set my cheap K-mart watch to its arrival. But after those first fairytale months, I began experiencing the kind of cramps that doubled my mother over in supermarket aisles and kept my sister on a diet of anti-inflammatories when her monthly visitor came. My period was a sharp point of breath caught in my chest.
When I was eighteen and newly in college, my period morphed into less punctual forms of punctuation. At first, I was alarmed. I began bleeding for long stretches of time, for two weeks straight. Every time I pulled down my pants, I breathed an exclamation either white with relief or red with surprise.
Years passed. Many underwear lost their lives. I should have purchased stock in Playtex, but I kept believing my body would remember that first year of its bleeding, would return to a more normal state of normalcy. Once I knew to expect irregularity, I stopped questioning. I stretched into the stuttering ellipses of that wet siren's flashing light. On. Off. On again. Two weeks red followed by two weeks white followed again by a dazzling streak of crimson. My breaths were colorful contractions.
* * *
I was no older than seven or eight when I first took a hand mirror and sat on the bathroom rug to let my eyes run over the small, secret stretch between my legs. A muted fascination seized me as I stared at the tiny triangle of flesh cresting the small folds I'd read like braille beneath thin squares of toilet paper and the nakedness of my own fingers. And there, just below the puckered plot, was the place I knew babies came from. It gleamed like a light in the dark, and I felt a kind of biblical fear rise up in me at the thought of that pocket being always open, with no zipper or drawstring to keep what was in, in, and what was out, out. I dared not enter that place.
* * *
The first time I went to a gynecologist for a pap smear in college, she gave me a hard sideways stare when I, in response to her questions about intercourse, informed her I was gay. Even the clipboard in her hand seemed to tighten, and I didn't wish I hadn't told her, but I did wish she'd already done what I'd come to ask her to do. It would have been easier for her perhaps, if I was straight, and I imagined she might be kinder.
But I was a lesbian, and she pushed her cold, gloved fingers inside me like she was searching her pocket for loose change and told me rather flippantly that I had a "small periurethral cyst."
"Will it go away?" I asked.
"Most go away on their own," she said, snapping the glove off her hand.
* * *
I have just turned twenty-nine and am blessed to have quality health insurance. I decide this is the year of resolution, and I resolve to get regular physicals and to fix all my health problems: the recurring tinea versicolor mottling my chest, the sleep apnea causing me to guzzle coffee and yawn throughout the day despite a full night's sleep, and the menorrhagia messing up my mojo. I schedule an appointment with a primary care physician who prescribes me cream and oral antifungal medication for my chronic skin condition, sets me up to meet a sleep doctor for my apnea, and refers me for gynecological services.
After many weeks of topical applications, my patchy skin clears up. I also have a sleep study done and am prescribed a customized mouth piece for my mild apnea. But the female stuff doesn't go as smoothly. During the standard pap smear, the doctor informs me that I have a cyst. I tell her I've had it for at least a decade. Her fingers twist and she estimates it's a centimeter long. She'd like to refer me to a urologist. I am apathetic but agree because I want to make the most of my expensive insurance while I have it. Then we move onto the topic of my irregular bleeding, and she seems less like an advocate and more like a nemesis.
"Have you tried birth control?" she asks. "Maybe we should test your thyroid." I assure her I've tried birth control and it's worthless, and I just had a full panel done a year ago and my hormones are normal. She presses me and I tell her to look it up. She does. I watch her lips curl like leaves do in hot weather. Then she turns away from the computer and my still-spread legs to feign working on something at the counter. She speaks without looking at me.
"Well, if the bleeding isn't really affecting your life--"
I am a sharp point of exclamation. I am fourteen years of backflipping, jack-knifing periods and large boxes of cotton pantiliners that still manage to leave thin reddish-brown trails along the elastic of my underwear leg holes. I practically spit: "It IS affecting my life. Aside from all the destroyed underwear, dollars spent in liners, and emotional expense from laundering my pants in public bathrooms, it's affecting my SEX life." I pause to try to stop myself, but then I throw in the whole bloody towel. "Sometimes when I orgasm, it's like a murder scene."
As the already cold, sluggish air freezes between us, her shoulders and lips prick like nipples in winter.
The word murder is not an exaggeration if the death is small, a field mouse or a guinea pig.
"I could do an endometrial biopsy if you'd like," she begrudges, twisting the top half of her body towards me, and I wonder if the image of red seeping through moon-white sheets was the passkey or if the word murder was what did it or if it was something physically cleaner and easier, like an inconspicuous glance at her wristwatch and a quick mental calculation of how much a ten minute biopsy could pad her coffers.
"Yeah, let's do that," I say, ignorant but hopeful.
* * *
"So, what seems to be the problem?" the urologist asks during our scheduled phone appointment, and I'm annoyed because the information should have been sent to his office. He should know more than I do.
"I have a periurethral cyst, and I want it out."
He asks how big it is (shouldn't he know?) and what my symptoms are. I tell him I feel like my stream has become weaker and less directed over the past decade and that my main concern really is that this thing will keep growing and one day I'll wake up unable to pee, my body as puffy as a Hostess Sno-ball and as unrecognizable and toxic as the list of ingredients.
"Well," he says, pausing. I worry he might tell me I don't qualify for the operation. "Unfortunately I can't fix this over the phone..." Is he joking, or does he take me for a fool? I wait for him to finish. "My hands won't reach."
Nevermind his creepiness. "So, can we schedule an appointment?" I hear myself say.
* * *
She promises the pressure and pain will only last the duration of the scraping, about thirty seconds. Which is nothing. Or would be if we were talking about waiting for water to boil for tea or idling at a light on a leisurely Saturday afternoon.
She tells me she'll move past my cervix into my uterus to obtain a sample of endometrial tissue for testing. No one has ever been inside my uterus, that deep well within me, yet I foolishly agree to let her go there with her sharp tools and rough manners, not knowing that womb is another word for heart, that if trespassed, it will jolt and thrust and steel itself as fiercely and painfully as that other pouch.
She guides the wand in like a cotton swab into an ear, so at first there is just the feeling of presence, and it's not quite unpleasant, but then she pushes further, and there is that uh-oh feeling of breaching the threshold, that inkling of danger that comes when the tip edges too close to the drum.
Imagine brushing that most sensitive mechanism. Imagine not a cotton swab, but a hard, sharp edge. Not a bump, but a bite. Not an accident, but an intention. Not once, but over and over again. Not one second, but thirty.
The stirrups are there to keep your knees from cracking the skull between them.
* * *
He pushes his gloved finger (or fingers? What's the protocol on the number? Is it up to the doctor's desires? How much of himself did he inject?) inside me, and I jump back from the chill of him.
"Sorry," he says. "This will be cold." The standard warning about the shock of the lubricating jelly comes late enough for me to wonder when he'd last worked with something other than a penis. Did he have a girlfriend, a wife?
He fumbles his way around the first few inches, pushing like he's looking for an open door in a dark hallway. I wonder if it's that fumbling that heightens the feeling of invasion, that makes even my insides feel foreign.
There is pressure.
Does that hurt?, he wants to know.
* * *
Before she'd pushed inside me, she'd instructed me to breathe and to remind myself repeatedly throughout the process that it would be over soon. But breathing and affirmations didn't stop me from rearing back on the table twenty seconds into the furious scraping, my right foot lifting to kick the woman whose wand was igniting the very center of my being.
I saw myself as if from outside. The dimples on my butt congregating in mutinous crowds inches above the sheets. The muscles in my legs pushing out towards the skin. My jaws open in a silent scream, heart pounding to keep me together.
* * *
He says since there is no pain or significant obstruction, and since the cyst doesn't seem to be the kind that expresses itself or fills up with bacteria from the urethra, the surgery is not necessary but I can still elect to have it done.
I picture the yellowish marble of fat or pus or whatever it is tucked somewhere in the pink walls of my beginning. How long has it been there? How much more space will it take for itself? What will it come to if left alone?
* * *
"I hope," she says, tapping the side of the plastic container where my pink insides swirl in a clear liquid like thoughts in a brain, "I got enough."
Clutching a disposable hot pack to my cramping belly, I assure her she did.
***
He draws an open-ended ellipses containing two stacked circles at its center, the smaller circle above the larger one. The image looks like an avocado split in half with its woody pit lodged firmly inside, like an eyeball. "This is the vaginal opening," he says, drawing horizontal lines across the pit. "And this is the urethra." He points to the smaller circle. I stare at the collection of blue lines, this clit-less, lip-less representation of the flower between my legs. I'm no Georgia O'Keefe.
He draws another image to the right. It looks like a cannon with a kidney bean stuck to the lower rim of the opening. Or a slurpee cup, the kind with a clear bubble for a lid and a fat straw, tipped over and just beginning to spill its sweet drink. It's aimed at the avocado vulva. If the drawing wasn't so cartoonish, it might be vaguely threatening.
He points to the cannon straw. "Here's your urethra." And then to the kidney bean slurpee drip. "And here's the cyst." I try to make sense of how a cyst can be sandwiched in the seemingly non-existent space between the parallel tunnels of import and export. I understand that the doctor will cut it out, but what exactly will he have to cut to get to it? I don't think I'd understand even if he drew it for me, even if he took his fingers and pushed into me again and said, "There."
"If you decide to have this surgery," he says, "know that you will not be able to engage in sexual intercourse for four to six weeks afterwards."
"Doctor," I say, forcing my eyes on his for the first time. They are brown like mine. He doesn't look away. "Unfortunately, that won't be a problem." He drops his eyes to the side, and I remind myself that this will take less than the usual requisite pound of flesh; he will cut me, and I will be free.
* * *
She orders a uterine ultrasound for me and refers me to an MD, which is when I discover that she's a nurse practitioner and can't perform surgery should I need it. I'm slightly annoyed that I'll have to travel to an office outside of the city to meet yet another person who will put her hands inside me, but I'm also relieved I won't have to work with this woman any longer.
The ultrasound experience is physically intimate. A young blonde in a white lab coat lubes up a large white wand attached to a monitor and says some of the same things women wearing strap-ons have said to me just before slipping inside. But of course there's nothing sexual about it. We talk about work, the weather, human nature, all while she gently twists the wand, pausing here and there to take screen shots. We may as well have been friends catching up over coffee. I was grateful she couldn't read the images on the screen, grateful she didn't touch me, wouldn't know anything about me beyond our conversation.
* * *
My new lady doctor was genuinely nice, and I liked her immediately, especially when she grabbed a pen to sketch my uterus--a thick, broad loop like the pattern stamped on my finger pads or the soft yarn wrapped around my grandmother's knitting needle. She drew a thin straw angled horizontally off the top right of the loop, and it was my fallopian tube, but for some reason she left a gap between it and the circle of my ovary so that it looked like my uterus was firing my egg basket into space. I laughed as she squiggled the pen along the inner rim of my uterus. "This is the endometrial lining," she explained. Then she drew a dark stalk dangling from the top of the bulb of my uterus, like the wires in an incandescent bulb or better yet the uvula in my mouth. "That's your polyp."
The ultrasound results showed no ovarian cysts or endometriosis, as I'd suspected because of a family history, but did suggest an endometrial polyp. Among a few other medically recognized symptoms of such a growth are mine: irregular, unpredictable menstrual bleeding, with variability in length and heaviness, and bleeding between menstrual periods. I was so grateful they'd found something, so glad I wouldn't secretly be labeled "hysterical" or a hypochondriac. Here it was, proof that what was going on with my body was not normal. I was not wrong to demand a deeper investigation, to order the doctors to push beyond birth control and stress.
Using simple terms I could understand, she explained how she'd excise the polyp using a hysteroscope. It sounded to me like she was going to send a tube with a camera-eye on it, a light, and a tiny pair of scissors, up my vagina, past my cervix, and into my uterus, where she'd use the scope to locate the growth and then snip it out. Easy as pie. "Just knock me out first," I said, recalling the discomfort and pain of the last invasive procedure.
* * *
Everyone is concerned about the pain, but I have faith in modern medicine and anesthesia and the carefreeness with which doctors prescribe numbing agents. I know they can give me enough drugs to make pain feel like kisses on all the ripped open places.
No, I don't worry about pain; I worry about function. I want to tell the doctors I can come in thirty seconds all by myself and that if someone helps, my whole body goes electric and my eyes and smile give off enough light to warm everyone in my life for a whole week. That if anything happens to the button I've been pressing like a patient on a morphine drip since I was eight, I will be disfigured for life.
* * *
The urologist and gynecologist agree to perform the surgeries back-to-back in the same operation. At the pre-op appointments, they give me lots of instructions regarding dietary restrictions and times I can and cannot eat or drink and remind me that I'll need a driver. The urologist reiterates the rules about post-op sex, like he's giving me a chance to change my mind. When I ask him if I can use a menstrual cup or tampons when I have my first period after surgery, his cheeks turn pink and he tells me that's a question for the gynecologist, as if she's the one slated to slice me open and stitch me shut.
Lying in bed the night before the surgery, I watch a video of a periurethral cyst excision. No one needs to tell me this is a bad idea.
A stranger's vagina yawns like a mouth that's been slit open, too wide. They've cut her. Or have forced the walls back with forceps. Or they've forced her open and have cut her to gain even more room. There is the hole of her, gaping. There is her clitoris, tiny and hiding beneath a pink hood, overcome with the whole horrible process like a farmer watching helplessly from her kitchen window as hail rips through the delicate shoots.
A white gloved hand grips a gleaming scalpel plunging into an unidentifiable pink mass. The thin membrane splits and there is a bloody lump there, presumably the cyst, and then my screen fills with metal: forceps, scissors. There is much tugging, like children fighting over a basketball. The back of my throat grows warm and I have to stop watching. They will shoot up into me tomorrow. They will lay me open like a fish. I will not be allowed to climb, run, swim, or bike for several weeks, and there is a new woman in my life who has assured me that a month of celibacy will not be a problem, but every time I see her, I want to press flowers, and running is my anti-anxiety drug, and masturbating is my SSRI, and it's hard to sleep now wondering if this surgery, for how little it costs on paper, will be worth it.
* * *
Morning comes early, and I want coffee, but despite the fact that the papers I was given say I can drink black coffee up until two hours before the surgery, I don't allow myself anything, not even water. I don't want to risk more than I already am, and I'm half asleep in the passenger seat beside my aunt as she drives us towards the outskirts of town, and I'm thinking about my parts and wondering if I'll look like Frankenstein when they're done, if my pretty flower will be changed by their hands, its petals removed and stuck back on with tacky glue and a few sidelong glances and spent breaths.
We arrive at the scheduled check-in time of 6:30 a.m., an hour and a half before my surgery, and I don't know why, but I assume I'll have that time to read. Instead, a few minutes after sitting down, a male nurse calls my name, and before I can register the pace of events, I've changed into a cotton gown, swallowed a pill or two, met several medical professionals in charge of my care, held still for the application of an anti-nausea patch just behind my ear, admitted to the friendly nurse my supreme fear of needles and proclivity for fainting, been injected with a numbing needle in the hand followed by another needle for the IV, and taken in enough fluids intravenously to feel cold from the inside out.
At some point during these surgery preparations, my urologist showed up in scrubs. He approached my bedside with a smile, then paused and thrust his pelvis forward, his hands on his hips, and said, "You ready?" And I wondered if anyone had ever told him he was creepy. Then my angel of a gynecologist arrived in a skirt and with a soothing smile on her face. The two doctors shook hands, and I remembered, gratefully, that after I'd divulged to this woman how I did not feel comfortable with the urologist, she promised to stay after she'd finished the hysteroscopy; she promised to be in the room while he did his part. I smiled at her, and my aunt sitting in the chair beside my fancy hospital bed smiled too, knowingly.
A little after 8 a.m., my friendly nurse, "Taco" he'd told me to call him, lowered the back half of my bed, slid the guardrails up, and began wheeling me away from the curtained room down the hall towards the operating room.
The OR was a shock. First of all, it was filled with people. I don't know why I thought it would just be my two doctors working on me. There was a whole team in scrubs, and everyone was wearing those gauzy white masks over their mouths. Their eyes twinkled at me though as I laughed at the bleak white walls. "It looks like a warehouse in here!" I exclaimed. "These walls could really use some swatches of purple." I couldn't tell if I was just being my usual self or if I'd already been drugged. Somebody laughed with me and then, as a couple of them shifted my body onto the operating table, I heard the music. "Are you guys seriously listening to trashy pop music right now?" I was incredulous.
My gyno laughed. "What would you have us listen to?"
"I just figured you'd be listening to classical, you know. Some Bach or Beethoven."
Her eyes, twinkling, smiling, a clear mask coming down over my nose. "Breathe."
* * *
The sensation of a presence to my left. Tiny clickings of a computer keyboard. My eyes struggling to open. Blurry possibilities. A curtain. A room beyond. A woman's voice. "Are you in pain?" My voice, crackly, difficult, like pushing up through the frozen surface of a lake. "My back." Tears tickling my cheeks. Why was I crying? I was captivated by my tears. The pain in my back was no greater than the pain I felt there every month. And then the woman on the keyboard made it go away. But I was still crying. I tried to gain a sense of my body. I felt like a newly hatched bird, wet and folded into myself, cold and weak and ridiculous.
I could see now. "Why am I crying?" I asked the nurse, and she said something about the possibility of medicinal goop in my eyes, and that didn't make sense because the operation was nowhere near my eyes, and I wasn't having an allergic reaction, and I wasn't in pain, which left me wondering if I was sad or relieved or happy. Was I feeling something? I paused to feel as the nurse wiped the corners of my eyes with a tissue. I felt...fine. Content.
"I need to remove the catheter," she said. Catheter? How had I not known they were going to shove a tube up my urethra? Wasn't that standard procedure for most surgeries? I thought it probably was, but somehow I hadn't thought I'd get one. I didn't have much time to think about everything I'd heard about catheters before the nurse was closing the curtains and pushing up the sheets from the bottom of the bed. She told me to breathe in and then out. And then there was a tug. A long tug, like drawing a bucket of water up a well. There was pressure but not necessarily pain. When it was all out, the lower half of my body felt better in a way that let me know it had not felt good, but there was a strange sensation where the catheter had resided.
"And now I'll remove the batting," the nurse said.
"What?" I managed.
"They padded your vagina with batting. It'll look bloody when I pull it out, but don't worry, that's just betadine."
And then she was pulling a never-ending rust brown scarf from my cunt like she was some kind of magician. I was as rapt as a kid whose grandfather finds a quarter behind his ear. How the fuck did that get there? I wondered.
"Would you like some juice?" the nurse asked after rolling the blankets back down. It was not really a question. "Apple or cranberry?"
"Cranberry," I croaked. And instantly a can of juice with a white straw materialized on the table hovering over the right side of my bed. But I couldn't figure out how to get to it. I decided to play it cool and ignore it, but after a couple of minutes the nurse reminded me about my juice, as if I'd forgotten. I couldn't look at her. "Um. This is going to sound weird," I began, "but I don't know about my arms. I don't..." I couldn't figure out how to explain the sensation, like my arms didn't exist or were possibly not attached to my body.
The nurse, probably having heard it all before, gently peeled back the blankets that had been tucked up to my chin, and without an ounce of judgment explained, "Here they are. It's okay to use them. Go ahead." I knew then that she had children, that she could feel for anyone what she felt for her kids.
I stared at my arms, folded against my chest, my right hand covering my left, and slowly pushed them away from my body, watching as my hands moved into focus. The can, once I'd picked it up, felt heavy in my hand. But the juice was worth it. It was worth everything. And the graham crackers the nurse brought me a minute later were even better. "Oh my God," I gushed. "These are the best graham crackers I've ever eaten. And I eat s'mores all the time, so I would know."
The nurse laughed and explained that I wasn't the first person who had swooned over the crackers. I knew that there was a logical explanation for why I thought the crackers were so amazing--I hadn't eaten in a very long time, for one--but that didn't stop me from believing in their power. "But have you tried them?" I asked, knowing somehow that she hadn't. "You have got to try these," I said with more conviction than I'd felt about anything in a long time. "Seriously."
She laughed again, and my aunt appeared, taking the seat beside me. She asked me how I felt, and then the urologist swaggered in. He stood close, did a little bit of his standard pelvic thrust, and if I remember correctly, touched the sheet over my knee and said, "The surgery went well." I nodded. Then he smiled and walked away.
"You're going to need to pee," the nurse said. It was standard procedure. Everyone who had a catheter taken out needed to prove that they could pee before they would be released. "Here are some underwear," she said, ripping open a plastic package stamped with ONE SIZE FITS ALL.
I could hardly contain myself. The underwear were gauzy white fishnets cut like boy shorts. "WHOA!" I exclaimed. "These are racy! Do you have them in other colors? Like red or black?" That nurse loved me. I just laughed and laughed, picturing a nice 70-year-old woman fresh out of surgery slipping into this holy little garment in front of her open-mouthed husband.
The nurse handed me a pad and told me she'd help me, and I turned toward my aunt and nearly screamed, "Close your eyes!" like I was a little kid realizing for the first time that being naked in front of other people is weird and no longer desirable or acceptable. The nurse helped me into the underwear and stuck the thick pad into its center before helping me close my falling loose gown. She let me lean on her as she led me down the hall and then into the bathroom where she put my hand on the silver bar by the toilet and told me she'd be outside the door if I needed anything. I laughed. What could I need?
Then I tried to figure out how to pull up my gown while pulling down my new underwear with my enfeebled hands (the right one with the IV in it felt almost entirely useless). I wound up getting it and sitting down unnecessarily hard on the toilet. At some point while trying to get the stream started, I shifted and the pad fell into the toilet just as I began to pee. I couldn't stop. I watched in slow motion horror as the water below in the triangle of space between my thighs blossomed into a vivid red and the half of the pad that was in the bowl swelled with the weight of my insides come out. When I was finished peeing, I reached for the toilet paper and bled all over my right hand as I gingerly dabbed at myself. I felt like I was in some candid camera show or my own circus. When I went to stand, blood fell out of me, and I realized I was going to drip blood across the bathroom floor if I didn't come up with a solution.
I sat and planned. And then I thrust my left hand, which was clean and still good, beneath my wounds. I stood and let the gown fall around me. The pad fell back into the bowl and I fished it out with my right hand and deftly swung it into the receptacle across the room. Then I hobbled over to the sink, the fishnet undies still hugging my knees, and washed my hands as best I could. It felt like a year later when I reached the door, cracked it open, and explained in a whisper, "Listen. I, um, lost the pad." And instead of asking me what happened, the nurse, bless her soul, simply said that she'd be right back, that she was going to get me another one. And once I affixed that one, she walked me back to the bed where I began shaking from the cold that had lodged inside me. She got me a blanket that felt like it had just come from the drier and wrapped it around me before handing me a second can of cranberry juice. She was an angel, and I felt tears pricking the corners of my eyes. Maybe I had been crying from joy after all.
And then the IV was removed and a bright, young-faced woman appeared with a wheelchair. I was helped into it, and I got to say goodbye to Taco and the lovely juice nurse before joking with my "driver" that we should stop at Salt and Straw and get some fancy ice cream on the way to the car. She admitted that she had never been to the gourmet ice cream place, and I jokingly commanded her to make it a priority after she got off of work. We laughed all the way to the car.
* * *
Nothing hurt. Maybe because I was taking Vicodin. Or at least, nothing that I thought would hurt did.
Instead, the first time I sat down to pee after coming home from the hospital, I nearly screamed. Have you ever been stabbed? Or eaten glass? It felt like I was pissing glass and knives. I stopped my stream every other second to catch my breath and feed myself words of encouragement and consolation. "FUCK. It's okay. It's okay. You can do this." That was my mantra for three days, every time I peed because for some reason the pain killers couldn't touch the pain of my inflamed urethra (courtesy of the catheter). But that was truly the worst of it. Well, that and the bloating. I was grossly, morbidly bloated. I felt twenty pounds heavier with gas and water. But I couldn't fart, and I couldn't "go" until a friend handed me a bottle of MiraLax. That shit really is a miracle.
The doctors told me the stitches would dissolve. But a couple of weeks after the surgery, a short thin string appeared on a piece of toilet paper, and I had to contact my friends in the medical field to ask them if I was going to be okay. They told me I would be fine, and I knew it was true. There was no blood. Sometimes a body refuses to keep that which it does not recognize.
* * *
My gynecologist called me a few days after the surgery to ask me how I was feeling and to tell me that both the cyst and the polyp had been analyzed and neither was malignant.
"You've had the cyst since you were in utero," she said, and suddenly something like grief rose inside me like a stitch dissolved in the heart. I had given away this part of me that was older than any other part of me except my soul. I had not asked them to keep it. I had not thought to ask.
And then a piece of mail arrived. It was the pathology, the lab write-up. I read the medical jargon the way fundamentalists read the bible. I looked up every word. I pondered. I gasped with religious feeling when I discovered the size of the polyp. 5.0 x 3.0 x 1.0 cm. I picked up a measuring tape and a pen and drew the dimensions to discover a patch the size of a business card ripped in half, which is pretty significant considering the uterus is about the size of a pear. I read phrases like "hemorrhagic material" and "variably sized, thick walled blood vessels." I put words together: glands, proliferative, secretory. I thought of the nurse practitioner who assumed my constant bleeding wasn't interfering with my life. I closed my eyes and prayed my uterus would return to what it was when I was fourteen years old.
The cyst, whose findings the doctors deemed "consistent with a mullarian cyst," was the size of a pencil eraser and lined by a "layer of tall columnar mucous secreting epithelium." Sexy, I know. My favorite line: "There are also foci of squamous metaplasia." Maybe instead of talking to the urologist on the phone, I should have just called the Ghostbusters. Squamous metaplasia. Holy shit.
* * *
Less than two weeks in, I asked my girlfriend to look. I wanted to know if I was okay. I knew I was being ridiculous, but I imagined my clit might have moved, that the doctors might have rearranged the landscape down there like a kid playing with Mr. Potato Head, the kindly potato's moustache jammed into his ear hole, his eyes goggling from his chin.
"You're perfect," she said. Or maybe she didn't. Maybe she said I was fine or normal. She could have been lying, but I trusted her because she was from the east coast and raw like me. So I was perfect. Or I was normal. Perfectly normal. But I knew only time would tell if my current underwear would outlive all the others from the past decade. Time, a few serious orgasms, and some peeing in the woods. Maybe now, I thought, I wouldn't piss all over myself when I squatted amongst the trees. And even if I did, at least I'd always have the memory of that cranberry juice and those divine graham crackers, of the fishnet underwear and the pad slowly flipping back into the bowl, life gifting me with laughter despite all the times it had exposed my wounds.
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