Ladyparts

by Deborah Copaken

  “So, please. Help me save my job,” I said to Rafe.

  “I’ll try,” he said. “But ultimately it’s Sharky’s call to make. You’re on his team. I can’t step on his toes.”

  A week later, Rafe pulled me aside and said, “I want you to know that, no matter what happens, this is not about you. You’ve done nothing but good work here, and we all know it.”

  “So if you’re a bestselling author, like, what are you doing working here?” McKenna once asked, and I made the mistake of answering honestly.

  “Because I have to,” I said. Isn’t that why we’re all here?

  The first rule in marketing is “Know your audience.” To whom are you speaking? Why are you speaking to them? What is it you’re trying to say? What do they want to hear? How will you make them hear it? In fact, more than any other factor, my not understanding my audience probably lost me my job or at the very least pushed it over the edge. It didn’t occur to me, when answering McKenna’s question honestly, that those four little words—“Because I have to”—would stand as a rebuke to her entire life story and her sense of self-worth.

  “What about severance?” I say to Sharky.

  “No severance,” he says. “We don’t have the budget.”

  “Please,” I say, snot running out of my nose. “I’ve been talking to a million people, but I haven’t nailed down an actual job yet. I’ve been too busy trying to save my job here. I just need a couple of months to land on my feet.”

  “Sorry,” he says. I lock eyes with the Buddha and remember his four noble truths: 1) Existence is suffering; 2) Suffering has a cause; 3) Suffering has an end; 4) A path exists that leads to the end of suffering.

  My sole job now is to find that fucking path.

  THIRTY

  Bloody Mother’s Day

  MAY 2017

  I am lying on an exam table in my doctor’s office, naked from the waist down. “Okay, so, here’s the problem,” says the physician’s assistant. “We don’t even have a pull-down menu option for whatever this is.”

  It’s the beginning of Mother’s Day weekend, 2017. My legs are in stirrups, toes curled inward, and the speculum that has just been yanked out of me is now covered in blood. As are my underwear, my jeans, and increasingly part of the floor of my primary care physician’s office, where I’m being seen by the PA because I showed up here, without an appointment, after waking up in a red puddle. I’ve also been bleeding quite copiously—Carrie-at-the-prom level, all over the sheets—and feeling intense pain during sex with a new partner, a fact I attributed to the freakish size of him until this morning’s deluge, which was unprompted by anything but a good night’s sleep, alone.

  “What do you mean there’s no pull-down menu option?”

  The PA is squinting at the various insurance codes on her computer screen, now with a nurse looking over her shoulder, too, plus someone else who has been summoned into the room, all of whom are squinting and searching and pointing at the screen, whispering words I don’t understand. “I mean,” she finally turns to me and says, “I can choose abnormal uterine bleeding—you know, miscarriages, pregnancy spotting, postpartum bleeding, stuff like that—but there’s no option for abnormal nonuterine bleeding.” She looks over her shoulder, back at me: “When did you say your last menstrual cycle was?”

  If I had a dime for every time a doctor or nurse, staring straight at the word hysterectomy on my chart, or having just heard me say outright, “I had a hysterectomy,” has asked me when was the date of my last menstrual cycle, I’d have enough dimes to buy a jumbo-sized box of tampons. Maybe two. For someone else. With a uterus. “I didn’t. I don’t have a uterus.”

  “Oh, right. Duh. Sorry.”

  “So what should I do?” I say to no one, feeling vulnerable with my diagnostic code–less cavity exposed, as the three medical professionals in the room focus all of their attention on the thorny issue of how to define my vaginal Vesuvius for reimbursement. Meanwhile, the PA’s attempt at a Pap smear has not only failed, it has further antagonized my already aggrieved cervix, meaning blood is now geysering out.

  “What you should do,” says the PA, snapping off her rubber gloves and looking concerned, “is to rush over to the hospital right now. I’ll call ahead, so you don’t have to wait in the emergency room. Go straight to gynecologic oncology.” She hands me a clown-sized sanitary pad.

  Go straight to gynecologic oncology? Not exactly the words I was hoping to hear after this fun-filled week, which included but was not limited to the following:

  Applying for unemployment, as I’ve done every Sunday now for two months;

  Liquidating my 401K to pay for a few months of extra COBRA coverage;

  Preparing the paperwork to represent myself at a custody hearing in family court, now that my ex is back in New York;

  Receiving the unfortunate news that, since my executive at NBC was either fired or resigned, the Shutterbabe pilot I co-wrote with Eddie will not be produced or shot.

  “Do you ever wonder why so many bad things keep happening to you?” friends with household incomes twice the GDP of Tonga ask during this period. The subtext being: What are you personally doing to cause this bad luck? Everyone else—particularly those of my friends recently downsized from the publishing world, all of whom, back in the pre-digital ’90s, had no reason not to assume that the lavish book parties and magazine budgets and publishing contracts wouldn’t go on forever, if you were disciplined and shrewd and put in the sweat equity—keeps their mouths shut. They know, because they know, and because watching my one step forward/two steps back health and employment tango has reminded them: There but for the grace of God go I.

  Let’s do some on-the-dole math, circa 2017: If unemployment brings in $403 a week, but your rent has risen from $2,300 a month to $2,701 a month (the precise amount of money at which a landlord can flip a rent-stabilized apartment into market rate, so now the landlord is really doing nothing to maintain the apartment, as he wants to force you out); family COBRA is $2,314.20 a month; you just paid $12,000 to cover your ex’s tax bill—money you were saving to pay a lawyer to divorce him; your daughter’s college tuition and housing fees are due imminently; you have a $600-a-month repayment schedule to the debt relief scammers; and you also need food, a phone, electricity, etc.; how much money is left over after a $30 taxi fare to the hospital? Ding ding ding! You are correct: Less than zero. Hence the draining of your 401K, with all the financial penalties that this entails. What about the $2.75 subway fare, can you afford that? Depends if you can find a new permanent job in the next three months, instead of this patchwork of gigs, before your 401K dries up. Given that you’re now bleeding, and that this blood might cloud future employment plans, we’ll call that a tentative no.

  But wait. There’s still a doctor waiting for you in gynecologic oncology at Columbia/Presbyterian, eighty-three blocks north. Do you briefly contemplate walking? Yes. Because walking, as you’ve discovered, is not only an excellent antidote to the absurd cost of a modern-day gym membership—one gym quoted you $200 a month, and you literally lol’d—it’s also a stopgap solution to the rising cost of public transportation, which recently jumped from $2.50 to $2.75 a ride. So now you’re standing on the sidewalk on the corner of 85th and Madison, in front of a gleaming store selling designer yoga pants for $128 a pair, under an apartment listed at $28.5 million, crunching more numbers in your head. If twenty blocks equals one mile, and it takes you, on average, approximately fifteen minutes to walk each mile, how many minutes will it take you to walk to the hospital? The answer is a little over an hour, plus you’ll have to walk several blocks west through Central Park as well, so add on approximately fifteen more minutes. Not so bad, an hour-and-fifteen-minute walk, under nonemergency circumstances, particularly if it involves a stroll through blooming trees on a spring day. But the clown pad between your legs is growing soggi
er, and the 86th Street crosstown bus has just appeared a block away, and the ladyparts oncologist is waiting, so do you walk to the hospital to save the $2.75 or run to catch the bus to the subway?

  And the answer is…twelve: the number of seconds it takes you to sprint to the bus.

  Once on the bus, that great American equalizer, I glance around at my fellow passengers and wonder what hidden blood they bleed. A body breaking down is normal. That’s the fate to which all living creatures eventually succumb. But rushing to a hospital on a city bus, in the richest country on earth? No. Not normal. Or at least it shouldn’t be.

  Thankfully, I’m seen by the oncologist immediately. He takes one look through the speculum and orders an immediate cervical biopsy. “This will hurt,” he says, and I am both grateful for his honesty and flattened by the pain: imagine a foot-long needle followed by a set of pliers up your vaginal canal, yanking off a bite-sized chunk. He then places a pasty substance up there to stop the bleeding until we figure out what’s going on, which feels like a definite step in the right direction.

  The eventual diagnosis? HPV 16 and 18 and precancer of the cervix. HPV 16 and 18 are what are known as the “bad” HPV, meaning they cause 80 percent of all cervical cancers and lesions. They are also the main reason Gardasil, the HPV vaccine I was helping to market at the PR firm, was developed: Alas, too late for me, but all three of my children have been vaccinated, so let’s hear it for small mercies.

  By the time I receive this diagnosis, a few days after the biopsy, the cervical putty has fallen out, and I’m waking up in puddles of blood again. I meet with Dr. June Hou, one of the two gynecologic oncology surgeons at Columbia/Presbyterian who’s been trained in performing robotic trachelectomies (removal of the cervix). A date is set for an eight-hour surgery a week and a half later.

  “Why, if I may ask, did you choose not to have the cervix removed when you got your hysterectomy five years ago?” says Dr. Hou. I’m now dressed, sitting across from her, a desk between us.

  “I was told that it is believed to play a role in sexual pleasure,” I say.

  Dr. Hou, whose bedside manner has been as smooth as a glassy pond on a windless day, suddenly bristles, her mouth pinching into a line. “That’s been debunked,” she says.

  “What?!” I sit with this information, shaking my head and blowing air out of deflating cheeks. “Of course it has,” I finally say. “So now I have to undergo another eight-hour operation when I could have just had the whole thing yanked out five years ago and been done with it. All because my doctor gave me bad advice?”

  “Don’t blame your doctor,” says Dr. Hou. “We’ve all been in the dark. All of us.” Almost everything about women’s health, she says, has been conjecture up until now, and we’re only finally just scratching the surface of what’s actually going on inside of us. It was only a year prior, after all, that a 3D model of the clitoris was finally produced. Modern science has been either neglecting the study of women’s bodies or getting us wrong, over and over again, and every day, right here in her office, she sees the havoc wreaked by that ignorance.

  Dr. Hou and I both sigh. And then break into the laughter of exhausted soldiers who’ve been sitting together in a lifelong trench. Wars don’t have to be sparked by a gun-toting aggressor to be fatal, demoralizing, inhumane. Neglect and willful ignorance of the bodily mechanics of half of earth’s population are equally destructive and deadly.

  I fall a little bit in love with Dr. Hou at this point. She’s young. Smart. Passionate. No nonsense. She doesn’t wedge unnecessary words into the hard silences or rush me out of her office. She allows me to sit and take it all in before speaking. “I promise,” she says, “you will feel the full range of sexual function after this surgery. In fact, sex might even be better, now that you’re no longer bleeding and in pain. You’ll have to wait the requisite twelve weeks post-op, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “Nothing can go up there, understand? Not even your own finger. You’ll also need a caretaker after surgery for about two weeks or so. Do you have someone in mind?”

  Ah, yes. The dreaded emergency contact/caretaker issue when you are single. It rustles up that quinfecta of uncomfortable feelings: sadness, self-loathing, failure, abandonment, and fear. What kind of woman wakes up at fifty-one without an emergency contact? You do, you think. Take responsibility for the mess of your life, and figure this out.

  I think back to the situation at home after my hysterectomy. The blood on the stairs, the hernia popped, the begging for food that never came, my son in the taxi after midnight, three flights down, waiting twenty minutes for help with the fare.

  I cannot relive that experience, in any form.

  “I’ll figure it out,” I say.

  I run through the possibilities close to home. My older son is living abroad, teaching English in Thailand, so he’s out. My daughter’s away at college and about to head to Israel on an all-expenses-paid trip, and I will not deny her that experience. My little one, ten, is still too young to be a proper caregiver, plus he’s leaving for summer camp anyway. My mother does not feel comfortable either in my neighborhood or in my home. If the elevator goes out while she’s here—as it so often does—she won’t be able to deal with the stairs, she tells me. As for my friends, they’re all in the sandwich generation, dealing with ailing older parents and young kids while holding down full-time jobs.

  Which leaves Eddie.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Hospitals Are Not My Thing

  JANUARY 1, –JUNE 2017

  Five months before my cervix blew a gasket, Eddie, my Shutterbabe screenwriting partner, called from L.A. on New Year’s Day to tell me that he’d moved into one of his extra houses. He and his wife were getting separated, he said, and I was the second person he’d called. “Who was the first?” I said.

  “My sister.”

  “Huh.”

  So my Spidey-Sense was right. He did have feelings for me that went beyond collegial. And I could tell by the pregnant pause in our conversation—highly unusual for our particular verbal gymnastics—that he was waiting for me to speak first.

  I’d never thought of married Eddie that way, except to once wonder, when we were on one of our many walks, why I couldn’t find someone in my age range with whom I could feel as simpatico as I so easily felt with him. He was not my usual physical type: over a foot and a half taller than me and ill-at-ease in his body. And yet we worked well together professionally. We were already good friends and had been for several years. And I was the second person to whom he’d reached out after calling his sister to say he was getting divorced. Could I make the mental paradigm shift, after nine years of platonic friendship and now a professional partnership, from colleague to romantic partner? I’d made a vow to myself to keep an open mind when it came to finding love. Kindness, empathy, and honesty were nonnegotiable. Everything else was window dressing.

  Thus began a daily email, text, and telephone correspondence between us, during which feelings were admitted and dissected, all with a welcome lack of reserve and coyness born of an already well-constructed work dynamic and friendship. As with our screenwriting index cards, everything was immediately laid out on the kitchen table, to be sorted and arranged in whatever logical narrative arc we chose. Sometimes we’d speak several times in a single day, particularly on weekends, for hours at a time. It was decided that Eddie should come for the long President’s Day weekend in February, when my son would be with his father. The idea was to see if the two of us were as compatible in a hotel room without a script as we were with one.

  The answer was yes, with several caveats. First I had to tell him I just got fired in the meditation room, an hour before his plane landed: not the most auspicious start to our first romantic weekend. Then I had to leave to attend a memorial gathering for my friend and former neighbor Marco, who’d just died of lung cancer. His widow is one of
my best friends, and their children, who are my children’s age, had grown up as much in my home as in theirs.

  Marco, who’d cooked some of the more memorable Sunday meals of my family’s lives, was the Italian journalist who’d coaxed Nora into telling him all about her secret plans for Julie and Julia at one of my dinner parties. Much to Nora’s delight, Marco had also quickly identified both the Ligurian town and the name of the cheese inside the focaccia she’d once eaten and loved but had never been able to locate again. Later, Marco would memorialize their exchange in Italian Vanity Fair, a few days after Nora’s death:

  “That town is called Recco,” I say. “Stracchino is the name of that cheese; it’s better known as crescenza,” and she smiles again. And I am happy, and so is everyone else at the table, because then we can talk all evening about cheeses from Vermont and cheeses from the Ligurian Apennine Mountains, and about the joy of discovering that you have things in common with one another, such as finding the perfect dish in just the right restaurant, and about how some things cannot be separated from the place where they belong, because they’ll lose their flavor. A bit like cheese focaccia eaten far from Recco. Or New York without Nora Ephron.

  Now New York was suddenly without Marco, too. My grief over this was both brand-new and guilt-plagued: I’d been so busy trying to hold on to my job, I’d visited only once during his final days. He’d slept through the whole thing as his wife and I lay on their bed, holding hands and free-associating.