Ladyparts

by Deborah Copaken

  That same day, I’ll receive an email from the WGA, reminding me that my health insurance premiums are about to go up from $150 a quarter to $2,398.39 every month—that’s $28,776 a year—on October 1, 2020: exactly one day before the Emily in Paris premiere.

  That night, I will sit down and write Darren a long email with the header “Some thoughts I needed to air.” “Dear Darren,” I’ll begin. “I have been avoiding writing this letter for over a year, but I realized that our friendship is too important not to say hard things when they must be said. In fact, not saying these things has already hurt our relationship, at least privately, on my side of it, and for the two of us to share an honest friendship, hard truths must be aired and told.” Over the course of the next several paragraphs, I will remind him of all of the work I did on the pilot that was supposed to have been exchanged for a “written by” credit on my own script: the key, for me, for procuring more work in TV. I will then ask for credit where credit is due.

  A pilot has three different credits: “created by,” “written by,” and “story by,” in descending order of importance. I will ask him for the latter, “story by,” to at least acknowledge the story’s origin in both Shutterbabe and in my own twentysomething expat life in Paris; in my subsequent position as an executive in pharmaceutical marketing at the PR firm; and for my dozens of all but unpaid hours of hard work in fleshing out Emily’s world. “I’m not even asking for writing credit on the pilot,” I’ll write, “or for money. I just want an adequate acknowledgment, through a proper shared ‘story by’ credit, that I put my barely remunerated sweat equity into that pilot.”

  He’ll apologize, kindly, for not keeping his end of the bargain. He’ll tell the production company to fix their mistake and add my name as “staff writer” to the listing on IMDb. But he will also claim he cannot give me “story by” credit on the pilot. That’s not how things work, he’ll tell me over the phone. He will offer me a script for season two but not a job in the room, which not only makes little sense, it contradicts the terms of our oral arrangement: a guaranteed job on the show and a script, in each season, for my uncredited help with the pilot. “Will you put that promise in writing?” I’ll ask of the season two script.

  “No,” he’ll say.

  Colleagues who worked with me on the show will urge me to take action. “Of course you should have story credit on that pilot!” one of them will yell at me. Several of them will urge me to contact the WGA: That’s what you pay your dues for, they’ll tell me. For situations just like this.

  Distraught, I’ll email the WGA and ask for help resolving this amicably. The next day, Darren will block me on Instagram.

  “Don’t take it personally,” the TV executive will say to me.

  “But I do,” I’ll say, holding back tears. “I’m actually more upset about the loss of the friendship than I am about the loss of credit.”

  The week before the show airs, when Darren and I should be high-fiving each other and sending congratulatory texts, an icy silence will descend. I’ll read all of his interviews, in which Darren will say his backpacking trip through Europe as a nineteen-year-old was the origin story of the show. “Star studied French through college and used to imagine living in Paris,” Alexis Soloski will write in The New York Times. “So it didn’t take much effort to put himself in Emily’s shoes, no matter how high heeled.”

  Darren Star is worth a purported $120 million. I’m still living paycheck to paycheck and paying $2,398 every month in COBRA fees.

  Suffice it to say, the health insurance part of this is utter insanity, all of us having to figure out coverage through our jobs, which for many of us are constantly changing. Or in my case, sometimes you have no health insurance or obscenely expensive COBRA, because you’re sick or recovering from surgery or you’ve been fired or sexually harassed; or sometimes you have four jobs all at once because feast or famine. During one twelve-week period at the beginning of 2019 my schedule looked like this:

  4:00 a.m.—9:30 a.m.: Write this book

  9:30 a.m.—10:00 a.m.: Walk to work

  10:00 a.m.—4:30 p.m.: Work in the Emily in Paris writers’ room*2

  4:30 p.m.—5:00 p.m.: Walk home from work

  5:00 p.m.—11:00 p.m.: Alzheimer’s and cognitive science writing

  11:00 p.m.—4:00 a.m.: Sleep

  Weekends: Catch up on all of the above plus Atlantic writing

  Meanwhile, Harvey Weinstein’s sentencing today felt less like a birthday present and more like a sad reckoning long past due. I do not celebrate his incarceration over the next twenty-three years, but I am glad for it. The next man in power who tries to use that power to steal a woman’s dignity or paycheck or reputation for the sake of his own sexual gratification will have to think twice before dangling work he never plans to provide and promises he never plans to keep, should the target of his manipulation not submit to her own violation or mortification.

  Actress Mira Sorvino, whom Weinstein blackballed to every director in Hollywood as being difficult after she refused his advances, performed in a lip-sync, rock opera version of Wuthering Heights with me back when we were both undergraduates. Mira landed a bit part in the chorus, as the wind on the moors. I danced around her half naked as Isabella. Despite having one of the smallest parts on that stage, Mira was hardworking, humble, kind, and collaborative: a team player through and through. Weinstein deliberately ruined this talented, dedicated, and brilliant woman’s reputation. He went out of his way to destroy her career. She’ll never get those years back. It pains me to think about Mira’s loss of potential after her Oscar win. What other Oscar-worthy performances did we miss out on because she said no to this monster? How many future dollars did he steal from her children’s mouths? And she’s just one actress of many.

  My friend Al is sitting across from me, next to Will, aglow with candles. A talented writer with a big heart and nimble brain, she started out as an actress, but found the casting couch intolerable. What performances did we miss out on from Al because men kept asking her to use her body as a conduit to success, and she said no? “Quick! Blow out the candles!” she says. They’re dripping all over the cake.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I’m still thinking about my wish. Um…uh…” A world in which #MeToo is no longer necessary? A string of normal days for all women? I open my eyes. “Okay. I have my wish.” A string of normal days for all of us, I think, looking out at my friends. Imagining all the other vulnerable bodies out there. Then I repeat it in my head a second time, in case the wish fairies require dedication: A string of normal days for all of us. I don’t believe in wishes coming true, but hey, why not? It can’t hurt at the beginning of a pandemic. To wish for my fellow humans not only to live but to live decent lives, free from unnecessary suffering, with their minimum basic needs met. That’s all I really want.

  The last supper, indeed. Tom Hanks has it! That’s it. No one’s safe.

  But of course safety is an illusion during the best of times. My daughter just spent three terrifying hours, between midnight and 3 a.m., hiding from a home intruder. She barely escaped her tiny village on the back of a motorcycle, clutching her kitten. Suzi and Franklin, sitting to my left, just lost their twenty-three-year-old daughter, Maddy, to an icy road and an oncoming truck. One week to the day following their daughter’s death, Franklin insisted on celebrating Suzi’s birthday, because what else are you going to do? The wax is melting. It’s the ritual itself that’s soothing, curative. A reminder that life goes on until it doesn’t. So you blow out the candles. Poof.

  A week after blowing out my candles, I hand in this book to my editor. Or rather, I hand in the happy-ending version of this book I’d signed a contract to write a year earlier, which ended with Part VI, “Brain.” To celebrate finishing, I go out for a bike ride with Will. The air is finally warm enough. My right foot finally feels strong enough, one month after surgery, to
press down on a bike pedal without too much pain, as long as I favor the left foot. Lockdown in New York has just begun, but we are being urged to step outside every day for a little exercise if we can.

  Usually, my elation over finishing the first draft of a book produces a kind of euphoria that lasts for days, but this ride lasts all of ten minutes before I feel a wave of fever and exhaustion and have to turn around.

  I chalk it up to my latest UTI, which has been raging for more than a week: the last UTI I will ever have before going on estrogen replacement therapy,*3 which has, I’m happy to report, completely solved the problem of recurring UTIs while also—added bonus—lifting the brain fog of menopause, alleviating the severity of my migraines, and making me feel like myself again. But this last UTI is a doozy, and it is not going away without a fight.

  I’d told the young, male doctor at the nearby urgent care that Keflex, the antibiotic he prescribed for it, wouldn’t work. I even told him which one would work—Cipro—but he wouldn’t listen. He knew what he was doing, he said. I’m sure he did, I said, and I understand why Cipro has to be the antibiotic of last resort. I even worked on a seminar about antimicrobial resistance for the World Science Festival, so I get it. But I also know my body and how it reacts to various medications, and after dozens upon dozens of UTIs, my urinary tract has become resistant to every antibiotic except Cipro. But the young doctor would not be swayed, no matter how vehemently I argued. “That can’t be true,” he said.

  “But it is true,” I said.

  Dear Medical Schools: Please teach your male doctors to listen to their female patients. We know a thing or two about what goes on inside us, even if we may not know why, how, or what to call it. We also definitely know which medications have worked and not worked on our bodies in the past, so please treat that information as valuable.

  I took the antibiotic the doctor prescribed. It didn’t work.*4 The infection worsened.

  I call the urgent care on March 18, after my aborted bike ride, to get a new prescription. But their office, which does not yet have the means to test for Covid-19, has become so overrun with a surge of patients showing up with hacking coughs, they’ve stopped answering their phones. I can’t visit my regular primary care physician, because that would mean taking the subway to see him, plus he’s been stricken by Covid-19 and isn’t seeing patients anyway.

  Epidemiologists now believe that by March 1, 2020, roughly 10,000 coronavirus infections had already spread through New York City alone, undetected. My first visit to the urgent care, to be given what I knew was a useless antibiotic for my UTI, was on March 9.

  On March 19, with a raging fever, I hobble over to the urgent care on my cane—yes, I’m still using a cane to walk for more than a block at this point, post foot-surgery—and open the door. “Hi,” I say, peeking my head in, but standing firmly with my body outside on the sidewalk. There are several patients coughing violently into the reception area and struggling to breathe. No one is wearing a mask. “I came in here for a UTI a week ago, but the antibiotic the doctor prescribed didn’t work. And now I have a fever. And you guys aren’t answering your phones. Can you please tell the doctor I saw to send in a prescription for Cipro to the same Duane Reade as before? I’d rather not come in, for obvious reasons.”

  “You have to come in,” says the harried receptionist. “We can’t give you a prescription without a positive urinalysis.”

  “But you have my pee from last week!” I say, panicking. “Use that pee! Nothing’s changed. It’s just gotten worse.”

  “Sorry,” she says. Those are the rules.

  At this point, I have two choices, both zonks. Behind door number one, go home and wait for a kidney infection to settle in, which will mean having to enter a coronavirus-inundated hospital later on. Behind door number two, risk contracting Covid-19 today by walking through this urgent care door right now and peeing into another cup.

  Untreated UTIs are not only painful, they can kill. I choose door number two and spend forty minutes marinating maskless in Covid-infused air, hearing other patients in severe distress in various exam rooms. Meanwhile, patients continue to arrive, gasping and unabated. When the receptionist asks them what’s wrong, they say, “I can’t breathe,” between labored breaths and hacking coughs. Many beg to be tested for Covid-19, but tests are still weeks away from becoming available to anyone who hasn’t visited China.

  In other first world countries (are we even first world anymore?), it takes four to six hours.

  The immediate results of my UTI test are clear: It’s still bad and getting worse. It feels like fire when I pee and smells like burning tire; there’s blood in my urine; the compulsion to pee now comes every minute or so while producing only a pathetic stream with each visit to the bathroom; I have a fever.

  I pick up my prescription for Cipro by standing in line with several unmasked pharmacy patrons who look at me as if I’m crazy for wearing the mask I nabbed at the urgent care.

  Back at home, I wipe down my cane and face mask with bleach, strip off my clothes, and toss them immediately into a scorching hot wash. Later that day, Will comes down with a fever, as does my younger son. Then Will becomes violently ill with gastrointestinal distress, which at the time is not yet being reported as Covid-19-related. A few days after that, on March 23, while organizing my spices into new containers, I notice I can’t smell them. I lose my sense of taste the same day and become too nauseated to eat. The next day, I have a raging sore throat. A day after that, wracked with body aches, I find I’m unable to breathe. I feel like a fish flopping on shore, gasping for each breath.

  My hunch is that my two visits to the urgent care are to blame. And yes, it is not lost on me that had I known—or had any of my many doctors told me, as I entered perimenopause—that topical estrogen works well to combat UTIs, I would not have had to make that first visit to the urgent care, at the beginning of a pandemic. And had the urgent care doctor trusted my knowledge of my own body’s reaction to various antibiotics, I would not have had to make the second visit to seek out a prescription for the antibiotic I told him to give me in the first place.

  Sexism in medicine nearly killed me once, when a lack of understanding of the shape and mechanics of the clitoris and its gift, the orgasm, resulted in my being advised to keep my cervix during my first hysterectomy, which then led to the second major surgery to remove the cervix five years later. Which, in turn, led to my bleed-out. Now ignorance of estrogen’s curative role in managing recurring middle-aged female UTIs, along with the medical establishment’s abysmal track record on proper UTI prescriptions for women and lack of trust in my own understanding of my body, its ailments, and its drug resistances, has put my life at risk for the second time in three years.

  I wonder if I were a man saying, “Keflex won’t work,” to the urgent care doctor, would he have listened? And why did it take a female urologist reaching out over Twitter, after reading my story in The Atlantic about the link between estrogen loss and Alzheimer’s, to tell me what should be common knowledge among menopausal women with recurring UTIs? Or at the very least one of the recommended courses of action by our doctors.

  Even migraines, the prevalence of which researchers have found can often intensify in women entering perimenopause, are still today being treated as unsolvable clinical mysteries at our neurologists’ offices instead of as a possible side effect of hormonal fluctuations. I was “health-care gaslit,” in fact, by two neurologists, who told me hormones had nothing to do with my migraines, before finding a third who would both listen to my theory and believe me when I said I’d had intense migraines as a young child, prior to puberty, but then they went away completely until perimenopause.

  Even so, it took a conversation at a wedding reception with a stranger to inform me that the migraines from which I’d been suffering sometimes daily could be eliminated—completely!—by a new drug she was taking called Aimovig, a m
onthly self-injection that contains a monoclonal antibody called erenumab, made from immune cells. This monoclonal antibody blocks the activity of calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP), a protein that causes the inflammation and vasodilation in my brain that leads to severe migraines. She was living proof, she said, that it worked, and she was right. Since starting the drug in 2019, I had three migraines—instead of an average of fifteen a month post-hysterectomy—during the first month and zero every month thereafter.

  My neurologist still had to argue with my insurance company to have this miracle cure covered, by proving that the three other medications we’d tried had all failed, two of which produced such intense brain fog, I could barely work. And yes, men have to fight just as hard as women to have the $603.18 monthly cost of Aimovig covered by insurance, minus their co-pays, but migraines are also three times more prevalent in women as they are in men. Why? Recent research suggests a drop in estrogen is believed to play a significant role.

  We women also visit our doctors more often than men—33 percent more often, by some estimates, and that’s excluding visits for pregnancy and childbirth—for yearly Pap smears and annual physicals, which are two separate visits (why?), as well as to have our prescriptions filled for medications that are either necessary for our survival or keep us from getting pregnant. Never mind that 76 percent of all doctors believe that oral contraceptives should be available over the counter, without having to first visit a doctor for a prescription, and that more than 100 countries worldwide already provide this benefit to their female citizens. We are also fourteen times more likely to get a UTI than men. And every time we get a UTI, instead of calling up our doctors and saying, “Got another one, can you please call in a prescription?” we have to pay an in-person visit and pee in a cup just to prove what our bodies already know. And when we pay in-person visits to our doctors, urgent cares, or hospitals for easily treatable UTIs, we are that much more likely to catch whatever bugs are floating around that day.