Period Pain

by Matlwa, Kopano

  The lawyer we saw later asked why none of my colleagues that morning noticed anything different about me. ‘Different like how?’ I had asked him.

  ‘If you’ve just been raped ma’am, you don’t just go back to business as usual, and if you do, unless you’re dead inside, there’s something different about you.’

  Maybe I am dead inside. Or maybe I’m just pragmatic. You can’t cry in theatre. You can’t let your unsterile teardrops fall into an open abdomen. And you can’t cry between cases, either. The patients need drips, the blood results need to be fetched, preoperative medication needs prescribing. And even when you get home, you must shower, cook, eat, study and try to get to bed early enough to bank up some sleep for the next day’s call. When is there ever an opportunity to cry? You cry at church on Sunday if you’re lucky enough to have the day off. Crying is a luxury we just don’t have time for.

  ‘Different like how? You think I’m making this up? Why would I make this up? You think I’m crazy?’

  Ma said not to shout. The lawyer was just trying to get a clearer sense of the sequence of events. All of this was very confusing for everyone, and I mustn’t get so angry. Nobody wants to hurt me. They just want to understand so they can help.

  As a doctor you learn to endure anything. How to plunge your fingers into a pus-filled vagina without scrunching up your nose. How to look a mother in the eye and lie to her about her baby dying inside. How to carefully wipe infected amniotic fluid off your face without gagging. You learn to work with difficult people, crazy people, dead people. You learn to stay up, and continue staying up. To shrug off criticism, and to eat your lunch in between dissecting cadavers. So as I lay there, I thought, okay, this is bad, this is really bad, but it will only last a few minutes, at most 15. That’s it, 15 minutes of your life. Just forget it ever happened, don’t let 15 minutes of your life haunt you forever.

  There’s not much in this life one can count on to be there forever. Everything goes, everyone fades. There are peaks and valleys, then more peaks, but always more valleys. Some people call it exciting. They use words like ‘adventure’. All I know is, I look forward to it coming to an end. Then, so I’m told, we all go to a place where everything stands still. Where all our favourite people are safe and happy and close by. Where we get to meet the most famous man in the world, who knows each of us by name, all our secrets, every hair on our heads, the smells we try to hide with perfume, the scars on our face that we cover with make-up, the dirt on our backs that we can’t quite reach. And He loves us all the same, Father Joshua says. Loves us to death.

  If only there was a way to skip through all this stuff and get to that place.

  When I see Tshiamo there, I’m going to slap him first before I kiss and hug him. Slap him first for all the heartache he’s caused us by being so selfish and unkind. Slap him first for being a coward, for running away, for not thinking about us first, for only seeing himself and his own pain. But then I’ll hug him and kiss him, because I miss him even now. I still miss him like it was only yesterday that he chose to leave us. I miss him even though I hate him for what he did.

  Tshiamo never liked me to touch him much. He never let me hold his hand, never even just let me rest my head against his shoulder. It didn’t matter that I was really tired and my neck was sore. He said he didn’t like it, it made him hot.

  It hurt my feelings. It felt like he didn’t love me. I wanted him to hold me, even just my hand. Sometimes, late at night as we sat on the couch watching Friday night TV, I’d pretend to forget, to be fast asleep and not know what I was doing. But he’d still shrug my head off and inch away from me. I suppose he knew. He knew what he, what men, are capable of.

  I used to think it might be because I smelt of blood, of off blood, like fish. I couldn’t wait for Ma to let me use tampons so I wouldn’t stink so bad. I thought maybe that was why Tshiamo didn’t want me too near him.

  This morning I worked up the nerve to call the lab and ask for my results. The lady on the phone took a long time to find my name on the system. I had to spell it for her twice, and then give her my patient folder number. When she said, ‘Everything’s fine,’ I didn’t understand what her words meant initially.

  ‘Everything’s fine?’ I asked, a little annoyed at the liberal use of the word ‘everything’.

  She said it again. ‘Everything’s fine. Everything’s normal. Sero-negative, as in, no HIV, sisi.’

  She was in a hurry. I was probably the umpteenth anxious clinician who’d called that day and she probably thought I was just another needlestick injury. But still. There was no need to be rude.

  ‘Hello? Hello? Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘Everything’s fine. You’re negative. There’s been no seroconversion.’

  ‘Okay, thanks.’

  ‘But be more careful next time. We’ve had one or two come back positive this year. You doctors need to be more cautious.’

  Then she dropped the phone.

  Eight weeks to the day, today. Eight weeks to the day.

  I have no fight left in me. I’ve surrendered completely to the physics and the chemistry and the molecules of unanswered prayers that float above and past my head. I want nothing, and have accepted that nothing wants me. I am neither waiting, nor hoping. Neither disbelieving nor anticipating. I just am.

  The mornings are quiet here at home, nothing like at the hospital. There’s no singing here. Ma wilted when Tshiamo died, like spinach in a little bit of heat. She moves without a sound, appears out of nowhere, sits for hours alone in the dark. There’s no morning prayer in this place, no great Amen. The house smells of nothing. No industrial bleach to purge the floors, no wash basins bubbling with scented soaps sent as gifts by visiting family, no bells to chase them home. There’s nothing here.

  I miss it.

  I didn’t think that I’d ever feel like this. That I’d actually miss it. The hospital, that is. Perhaps it’s being so palpably useful that I miss, even if it’s in the most useless ways. Perhaps it’s touching people that I miss. Feeling pulses ten, twelve, twenty times a day. Thready pulses, bounding pulses, hammering pulses, fading pulses morning, noon and night. Perhaps it’s the smells: birth, death, soap, stool, coffee, alcohol, over and over again. It’s the most real thing I know. The only real thing I know.

  We’ve been pretty broke these past few weeks – haven’t paid the lights. I googled how long it takes before they switch them off, because data is something I still have. I feel guilty asking You for help, Lord, because I have a job, I can earn money.

  I’m just too scared go back.

  After five days of bereavement leave, I got an email warning that any additional time at home would be unpaid. Then, a few weeks later, a lady from Human Resources called to ask where I was.

  ‘Does she know she has to finish her internship within three years of graduating? She’ll have to rewrite her final year exams if she doesn’t come back to work.’

  I heard Ma shouting at her over the phone. ‘What kind of person are you? Do you have any idea what she’s been through?’ Ma insisted that I’d return when I was ready. She said we didn’t care if they stopped my salary.

  Of course we cared.

  I had thought all the problems were out there: the hospital, the nurses, the CEO, the clerks, the lab, the blood bank, the porters, the security guards, the dietician, the physiotherapist, the OT, the consultants, the lazy registrars, the cats, the cleaners, the mice, the community, the MEC, the minister, the government, the president, the country, the world. I thought if I could just hide here, I’d be fine. But somehow the problems seem to have followed me home, to where I grew up, found a way into the bedroom I shared with Tshiamo when we were little and I didn’t know that he was a boy and I was a girl.

  ‘Chaba, are you going to let those bastards win?’ Nyasha would say. ‘Get up, wash your face, and let’s get back to the business of our lives.’ Or ‘Chaba, when last did you bath? You smell like shit
! Get up, let’s go find those scumbags and fuck them up.’ Or ‘Chaba, turn this thing around. Don’t be a victim, be a victor!’ Or some lame crap like that. You know mos Nyasha, Lord. That’s all she’s good for. Talk, talk, talk. Where is she now?

  If it wasn’t for her, none of this would ever have happened.

  Ma asked me to go to Hillside Shopping Centre with her this morning. There was no food in the fridge and no money in either of our purses, but there was still petrol in the car. I think she wanted to see what we could get with the nothing that we had.

  As we walked into the mall, we saw a R200 note on the floor. I’d noticed the white lady in front of us digging in her bag, and it most likely fell out of there. But the speed with which Ma picked it up and slipped it into her pocket shut my mouth.

  I knew Ma had seen the white lady too. I knew she knew. So when she said, ‘It’s our lucky day!’ I just smiled and nodded. Ma doesn’t believe in luck. Pagans believe in luck. Ma believes in God, Badimo, blessings and miracles.

  I feel guilty that I’ve brought us to this place, where Ma – churchgoing, ancestor-revering, scripture-quoting Ma – is reduced to stealing.

  I have to go back to work.

  But what if I can’t remember anything? What if someone asks who I am? What if they want to know where I’ve been? What if there’s a cardiac arrest and I have to do something? What if I can’t move, can’t speak, can’t think? What if I start to bleed? What if the men hear I’m there and come back for me?

  What if I mess up my second chance?

  It’s 5am.

  Right now the night-shift nurses are waking up, switching on lights, switching off heaters. Packing back the chairs they used as beds. Patients are stirring. Cellphone alarms are going off in the pockets of doctors – the young and naïve ones, who thought there might be an opportunity to sleep on a Friday night call, to sleep so much that an alarm would need to be set. Mothers who have delivered babies in the night are being marched downstairs to the overflow ward, so their bloodstained sheets can be cleaned for the next batch of moms-to-be waiting anxiously on the benches as their babies struggle to free themselves from within. Statistics of the night’s activities are being written up, estimated, changed. The bodies of those who slipped away in the night are being wrapped in plastic. Porters are scrambling for stretchers to wheel them off to the mortuary before the matrons and consultants arrive for their morning rounds. The security guard at the gate is whistling.

  It’s a new day.

  I can’t lie here forever. I have to get up and move past this. It’s done. There’s no point kneading it any further.

  Part 4

  You are my God; apart from You I have no good thing.

  Psalm 16:2

  I felt a beating in my stomach, as though my heart had grown so weary it had sunk to the pit of my thorax. It turns out that the sporadic thuds I’d been feeling came from the body of another, a little baby, living, growing, thriving in the darkness.

  After the rape, my periods were all over the place, like they’d always been. I suppose it was more spotting than bleeding. But what did I care at the time about some vaginal bleeding? It wasn’t like it was something I’d never experienced before. And anyway, I had bigger fish to fry. I’d just been raped. In those first few weeks, who could tell if it was the ARVs or the antipsychotics that made me vomit so?

  Nobody dared rouse me from my bed. I paid no mind to my lack of energy, lack of appetite, the urge to retch at the sight of Jungle Oats. What difference did it make? What difference did anything make? I only wanted to be dead.

  I am a doctor. I should have thought, should have suspected, even expected, that I might be expecting. But I didn’t. I didn’t think You could be so cruel.

  It never occurred to me that I could be pregnant, until she moved like a heartbeat in my tummy.

  I suppose pregnancy had never really been in the picture for me after all the procedures I’d had to calm my raging uterus. In fact, one outraged doctor, who couldn’t believe I’d been given an endometrial ablation so young, had told me that falling pregnant was both unlikely and dangerous.

  So when I saw her there on the screen at that first ultrasound – her heart pulsing at 140 beats per minute, her body perfectly formed, her thumb in her mouth – I didn’t believe them. Didn’t believe the sonographer and her student who was smiling from ear to ear and wanting to give me a congratulatory hug.

  A baby? I was going to have a baby?

  I could tell Ma was in disbelief too, because she said nothing all the way home. They gave us printouts of the ultrasound scans, and cards with appointment dates for all manner of investigations, but for the weeks that followed they remained on the dashboard of the car, untouched, just as we’d left them on that first drive back from the hospital.

  Our medical aid was suspended due to non-payment, so I had to give birth at Amogelang Regional Hospital. I was petrified, of course. I expected the worst: a large swig of my own bitter medicine. Instead I was under the care of a kind man with a kind heart. He introduced himself as Dr Haffejee, and looked like an angel sent from God as he sat by my bedside, taking a history in his white flowing thobe. He raised an eyebrow a little when I admitted that I hadn’t attended antenatal care until the third trimester of pregnancy.

  I explained that I didn’t know, didn’t think, hadn’t realised it was even possible, because I’d bled so much, and had had an endometrial ablation in my late teens. He put a soft hand on my arm and said it was okay. It was so reassuring, it made me weep.

  I explained that the baby was conceived through sexual assault, that I was on call when it happened, and had been too scared to tell anyone, other than my roommate, who I then stabbed. So I was put on antipsychotics and antidepressants. I explained that I had prescribed the post-exposure prophylaxis myself, using a page in one of my patient’s files, which I later tore out after the medication was dispensed. I was no longer sure whether I’d taken the morning-after pill, if I’d prescribed it or forgotten, or taken it and vomited it up, or taken it and it simply failed. I was too sick those first few days, mentally and physically. I could remember so little. So much still didn’t make sense, and anyway, with no lining in my womb, was it even possible?

  He said I shouldn’t be so hard on myself, or feel guilty. As doctors we aren’t trained to take care of ourselves, only to care for others. The system had failed me that night. Someone should have noticed. Someone should have picked up that I wasn’t okay.

  He said some bleeding in early pregnancy wasn’t un common, even for a normal, healthy uterus, but with my history of endometrial ablation I was at greater risk of recurrent bleeds during pregnancy, and was fortunate to have carried successfully so far.

  I wasn’t sure if I agreed with the word ‘fortunate’, but he was such a nice man, such a godly man, I didn’t want to upset him with my ambivalence towards the new life that I would, in less than 24 hours, be bringing into the world.

  He explained that they would have to deliver the baby early via Caesarean section, due to the risk of uterine rupture. I had been added to the theatre list for that evening. A nurse would soon be with me to prepare me for theatre, and all I needed to do was rest, relax and let them take care of everything.

  I don’t remember feeling anything. Not in my body, not in my heart. Everything was numb – my toes, my legs, my soul. When the nurse handed her to me, I was afraid to look at her face. What if it was like the face of the one who bit my tongue, or the one who laughed when I started to cry …?

  But she looked like nothing, like a blank page, like a fresh start. My fresh start.

  I was happy she was light in complexion. At least God had given her that. Being dark on top of everything else (a child of rape) would have been too much.

  But Ma had to take that away from us too. She couldn’t just be silent and enjoy the unexpected fairness of her complexion.

  ‘You can see by the ears that she’ll be as black as night. The ears always tell you the t
rue complexion. The lightness won’t last.’

  I wondered which of the three was her father. The one who ejaculated before he could put his penis in, or the one who shouted, ‘Where are your kwere-kwere friends now?’ Or maybe it was the one whose belly protruded beneath his striped T-shirt?

  Or was it all of them? Is that possible? Could all of them be her father?

  Is it possible that some goodness in them (because surely there’s goodness in all of us?) came together to form her, despite their evil intentions, in spite of their evil intentions, to spite their evil intentions?

  Is that possible?

  ‘Do not worry,’ I told her. ‘Don’t you worry about a thing.’ I’ve spent my whole life worried. I worried in Grade One that I’d never be able to read. Then I worried I’d never make friends. Later I worried about bleeding to death. Not a day ever passed when I didn’t worry. Would I ever learn to drive? Would I ever fall in love? Would a man ever love me? Would I ever be happy again?

  When the midwife asked if there was anything I wanted to tell my baby before they took her to the neonatal ICU, I told her, ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry about a thing.’

  Will I tell her about her father(s)? I don’t know. How do I explain the violence? That she was born of violation yet wanted still? That she was both the worst and the best thing to have happened to my life? That because of her conception I wanted to die, but that it was her life that forced me to live?