I’m sorry, Seb said, after a while, after we finished discussing the situation with his girlfriend, how it was at once unresolved and inevitable.
Sorry for what? I said.
That I wasn’t around when your dad was sick, and when he died. I’m sorry that I didn’t realize what it was like. I’m sorry.
It’s OK, I said.
It was. Seb and I had been friends for almost a decade after the fizzling of a brief romance of the kind you have when you’re twenty-five and you meet someone and they seem interesting and you think, Hey! Might as well. It’s rare that these liaisons end in anything but the imperative not to make eye contact when you pass in the street, but when our mutual ambivalences came to a head and I confronted Seb about it in the middle of a pavement in Finsbury Park, I said: Well, we can carry on like this and grow to hate each other, or we can stop now and be best friends for ever.
I choose best friends for ever, Seb said.
OK, I said, best friends for ever.
Then we shook hands.
Now, there we were on a cold night in his mother’s apartment on the Upper West Side, and we were lying in bed drinking wine, and I was telling Seb about the prophylactic hysterectomy. It was still a hard thing for me to put into words, to say: Because I am probably going to get cancer, I am going to let a doctor take out my womb and ovaries.
I guess maybe I’ll never have a baby, I said to Seb, which was something I had been thinking about a lot of the time, too, but had never said out loud. Until then, with him, I had just not allowed it.
I swallowed more wine.
I’ll have a baby with you! Seb said.
Ew, I said, no way. We need to diversify our gene pools, not have kids with other Jewish people who are bound to get cancer!
Seb frowned. He looked a little insulted.
That’s what caused all of these problems in the first place! I said. Jewish people! Having babies with other Jewish people!
I feel like I’m in a Woody Allen movie, Seb said.
I felt a little bit less alone.
5
The ultrasound clinic was also on the Upper East Side, but the waiting room was far brighter and cheerier than the other ones that I had encountered in the time since my diagnosis. The receptionists were smiling. The magazines were about fashion and parenting, and arranged in straight lines. The room was decorated in shades of blush, and not named after a dead person. The chairs were upholstered with fabric that indicated that the person making the design decisions was not preoccupied by concerns that the chairs would be sat in by people who had faecal incontinence.
It was a room filled with people who were waiting for joy. The other women in the room with me were there because they were pregnant, not because they were trying not to die. They were also all accompanied by men. I was the only person sitting alone. The women were all wearing wedding and engagement rings and the men were all looking at iPhones. To be fair, the women were all looking at iPhones, too. I was also looking at an iPhone. There was a lot of love in this room, between the pregnant women and the fathers of their babies, sure, but there was also a lot of love for iPhones.
This ultrasound of my uterus and ovaries was one of the exams that the genetic counsellor had told me was not very effective. Not as effective as having a hysterectomy. But I was willing to try. In part because I had a desire to prove the genetic counsellor wrong. But mostly because I wanted to keep my ovaries and uterus inside my body. I wanted to keep bleeding every month. Now, each box of tampons that I bought became an act of defiance. Now, my period was less of an inconvenience, more of an assertion that my body was still whole and still mine. I relished the sight of the blood.
It was nine o’clock in the morning when I arrived for the ultrasound and I was tired. I had flown back from a work trip to Europe the night before. I was exhausted from jet lag, and hungry because I had not eaten breakfast: because I didn’t have time, or wasn’t organized enough, or was too anxious to eat. One of those. To get to the appointment, I took a cab from my apartment in Brooklyn all the way to the clinic in Manhattan. This cost me about $50, and took an hour, but I did it anyway, because I could not make my body rise in time to take the subway, or because I could not make my body get on the subway. I needed to put the responsibility for moving my body from home to clinic into the hands of a man who was behind the steering wheel of a car that I summoned with an app on my phone. I could not do that on my own.
In the waiting room, my stomach growled. I fished around in my handbag to see if I had any snacks. The bag was large, and full of detritus from my long-haul flight the day before. I dug through subscription cards that had fallen out of the magazine I’d been reading, the stub of my boarding pass. A crumpled napkin from the Pret a Manager in Heathrow Terminal 5, smudged with lipstick and what was once the foam of a soy latte. I located a packet of individually-wrapped boiled ginger sweets that I had eaten on the plane to pass the time. One an hour, then two. There was a single sweet left at the bottom of the packet. I smiled.
I pulled the sweet out of the bag, and unwrapped it with the hand that was not holding my iPhone, and because I only had one available hand the sweet slipped out of the wrapper too fast and fell on the tasteful carpet of the clinic waiting room. I looked around the room to see if anyone noticed the sweet bouncing on the floor. I was very hungry. Everyone was still gazing at their iPhones, as if they were practising what it would be like to behold and love the babies whom they were in this ultrasound waiting room to admire. I picked the sweet up off the floor.
I guess if these people think I am pregnant and see me eat this sweet that I have dropped on the floor, I guess they might think I will be a terrible mother, I thought.
Then I ate it.
The room in which I had the actual ultrasound exam seemed fancy to me. But there were things that fanciness could not ameliorate: I still had to pull on a hospital gown. I still had to lie back on the examination bed and put my feet in the stirrups.
The exam was a transvaginal ultrasound. Hello, said the ultrasound technician, in a monotonous voice, and inserted the wand inside me. That was a bit of a shock. Before I came in for the appointment, I had googled the procedure on the internet. Of course I had: just like I googled all my appointments. When I googled, I discovered radical feminist health forums that argued that transvaginal ultrasounds are in themselves a kind of sexual assault, a form of forced penetration. The forums suggested that women should be able to refuse internal ultrasounds as a matter of feminist practice, as an assertion of being in charge of their physical selves.
What is the word for when someone penetrates you without your enthusiastic permission, but where you feel in one way or another complicit, or at least resigned? This hospital examination room is not the only place where it’s happened to me. I’m not unusual. Like many women I’ve had times in my life where I’ve gone to bed with men willing to participate up to a line that a man then decided to cross. I’m not unusual to have decided afterwards to accept some culpability, to think I have only myself to blame, rather than to consider the implications of having been the victim of an act of betrayal of trust. Men whose attention to what I desired was strong but then, when it was most important, vanished.
Most of the time I’d find ways not to think of those men, to forget about them. But I thought of them now, during this exam, because it reminded me: because this penetration did not feel like something that I wished for, but it also didn’t feel like something that I had the ability or agency to refuse.
The technician said nothing while she moved her wand around. I winced: once, twice. Again. The technician typed on a keyboard with one hand. She clicked on the screen with her mouse and typed some more. I looked up at the monitor. The images looked familiar: just like the ones that popped up quite often in my Facebook feed. Images posted by women I hadn’t seen since high school, or who I’d worked with for six months, or who I’d met one time years ago at a party. On occasion, the images were posted by men. The
images I saw on the screen reminded me of them, except that in this case, the uterus was empty.
Would it be funny, I thought, if I posted these ultrasounds on Facebook?
I decided it would probably not be funny.
The ultrasound technician removed the probe and left the room to show the images to a radiologist. You can sit up, she said, in her monotone voice, as she left, but don’t get dressed.
I sat up. I didn’t get dressed. I had been to many appointments and I had become good at following instructions. At one of the appointments, there was a poster on the wall, an image from a breast cancer awareness campaign. As I sat there in an ugly hospital gown, waiting for a pathologist who’d stabbed a small lump in my right breast with a needle to finish looking at her slide in order to tell me whether or not I had breast cancer, I looked at the poster and thought: Guys, I could not be more aware.
(It was an insect bite, it turned out, in the end. Benign, the pathologist said, and I repeated it in my head as I walked out of the clinic and the few blocks back to work, as if it was the most beautiful word in the world: Benign, benign, benign.)
As I waited for the results of the ultrasound, again alone, again wearing an ugly hospital gown, I wondered: Is it odd that I always come to these appointments on my own, that I always spend these blank times waiting to hear if I have cancer without anyone to hold my hand?
But I didn’t know who to ask: there was no one with any obligation. After my diagnosis, my mother had written me an email saying: I will come to New York to go to your appointments with you, and I knew that she meant it, as long as she lived in Baltimore.
But it seemed like too much to expect her to travel to New York from Baltimore each time yet another part of my body was being examined. I had close friends in New York – Seb, Kylah, others – but how do you get someone to rearrange their weekday schedule to sit in a clinic waiting room just in case you have cancer, when you have to come to these clinics again and again and again? When every week you might have cancer? I did not want to waste anyone’s time. I also did not want to make a fuss. A fuss might be a problem for other people. It might mean that I really had a problem.
They didn’t leave me waiting as long at the ultrasound clinic as they had at the breast surgeon’s, which meant that the ultrasound technician returned before I’d had time to think about the things I usually considered in these situations: what poems should be read at my funeral, and also whether poetry was a thing I would have time to become interested in while dying.
He doesn’t need to see anything else, the ultrasound technician said.
The he that she was referring to was the radiologist. Her voice was still so flat and affectless I wondered: What does it sound like when you deliver news that is not good?
But no matter. On that particular day, it was not my job to find out.
The MRI came next. This time, I didn’t notice the state of the waiting room because I was too busy being afraid. I was more frightened of going in the MRI tube than I was frightened of cancer. This was maybe odd because my father had been one of the people who had invented the tube. This was also maybe odd because I was going in the tube to see if I had cancer. But it was not odd because I knew that I was definitely going in the tube, and after all those exams I had begun to think it was unlikely that I had cancer.
I remember feeling real panic in a small space for the first time when I was ten, at the Smithsonian, in the American History Museum. We were on a family vacation to Washington, DC, walking up and down the Mall on a warm spring day. It was raining, suddenly, so everyone poured in from the open green space to seek shelter, and at some point the First Ladies exhibition was so packed that I got squashed – just ten years old, still less than five feet tall – against the glass of a case that contained a sparkling evening dress once worn by Nancy Reagan. From that day forward, I always looked for exit routes, often cried without consolation when flying on a plane.
When I was a teenager, my father and I would often stop by his laboratory after we’d finished running errands on a Saturday or a Sunday afternoon: I’d zoom up and down the shiny hall floors in a rolling desk chair while my father caught up on his work. On one particular day, I don’t remember when, on the way into the building, I remarked that I could understand why, when my father told people what he did for a living, that he worked on the development of MRI, they often said: It’s so claustrophobic!
I was at that age, I guess, when you say things to your parents to show that you are prepared to challenge their beliefs.
It really looks claustrophobic! I said to my father, about the tube.
Get in, my dad said, and I climbed up on the tray and he put me in the MRI tube as if I was being scanned.
OK, I said.
This is what it’s like when they scan your back, he said, and then he made the tray bring me further back into the tube.
It’s not that bad! I said, because I knew if I said that he would take me out. He did. Then we went to the supermarket together, and then we went home, where, with my mother, we drank a cup of tea.
But my time in the tube under the watchful eye of my father was not a cure for the feelings that I had in small spaces. As I grew older, the claustrophobia got worse. It got so bad that I balked and had a panic attack and got off a plane before it took off: once, then twice. When I was nineteen, my dad paid for the cognitive behavioural therapy I needed to get over my fear of flying. At the sessions the therapist taught me how to moderate my breathing to reduce my heart rate. She talked to me about the reasons that I was really afraid of flying: because I didn’t want to be in a small space, because I didn’t want to feel like I was not in control. To test me, she shut me in a small bathroom with the lights turned off.
How are you doing? she called. I was sitting on the linoleum, looking at the light that was coming through the gap at the bottom of the door.
Fine, I said, I am not afraid of bathrooms.
I guess it was ironic that I was on the verge of having a panic attack on my way to my first MRI because I was being scanned in a machine that my father partially invented, because of a gene that I inherited from him. Ironic that he could save my life from this gene he gave me, even though he was already dead. I thought about saying this to the MRI technician, telling him how ironic it was, but the man running the test was not very talkative. I decided to keep the thoughts to myself.
Instead, I climbed up on the tray that was like the one in my dad’s machine all those years ago. The technician put a pillow under my head. He put foam earplugs in my ears and prodded with his fingers for my hipbones. He was rough. I need to find your pelvis, he said, after he had already started the prodding. I felt less upset than I once would have. By now I had crossed that Rubicon of healthcare where you come to understand that in certain contexts your body becomes a faulty object that must be prodded. By now I had learned to choose my battles.
The technician retreated into the control room. When the tray moved back into the tube, I closed my eyes and recalled what the therapist taught me to do all those years earlier when I was trying to get back on a plane. In the tube, I breathed in on a count of eight and out on a count of eight, and then I did it again. I did it again and again, and then even though I knew it was not a good idea, I opened my eyes. There was a thick stripe of glossy grey paint above me, down the middle of the empty whiteness of the tube, I think to define a depth of field for the patient’s eyes. The stripe helped the tube feel more like a space and less like the blankness of death.
The tube was a bit shorter than the ones in the machines my father worked on twenty years earlier, and I realized that if I moved my head a bit, tipped it forward and back, I could see the room at either end. I was not in a coffin. I was almost relaxed. A switch was flicked and the ratatatatataatat began, still loud through the earplugs. When my father died, even on the actual day that he died, he was working on an experiment to make the machines quieter. I stared at a flaking blister in the grey paint. It had been
a while since I cried about him, because crying on my own felt worse than being on my own but not crying. I’d learned to control it. But now, in the tube, as I lay still, my eyes welled up. I thought: Oh, Dad.
6
Around that time, I decided to start having sex. Or, to make an effort to have sex. I decided to start having sex because I suspected that when I had a hysterectomy, I might lose the desire to have sex. I suspected that when I had a hysterectomy, I might lose the appeal that I had to men. I suspected that it is problematic to be a single woman in your thirties because men assume you are desperate to have children, but even more problematic if you are facing surgery that is going to make that impossible. I also suspected that all of this is moot because these are not the kinds of conversations that you should have with a man unless he loves you very much. Being loved very much by a man was a thing that had not happened to me for a long time. I had a degree of belief that it would not happen again: that I should not expect it. I decided, instead, to have sex.
I was not very promiscuous, by nature or habit. When I decided, in this strange and sad time of my life, that I should be having more sex, it was counter to my previous belief that I should eschew sex unless I was having it with someone who I thought could love me. It contradicted my previous understanding that sex was something that I should try my best to withhold unless I was certain that the person I was having it with would offer me some kind of security.
The guilty way that I thought about sex was probably similar to many women my age who grew up in middle-class mostly-white mostly-Christian suburbs in the late 90s, who turned eighteen around the time Bill Clinton was impeached for getting a blow job from Monica Lewinsky. We disapproved of Monica Lewinsky. We disapproved of premarital sex. We didn’t really know what blow jobs were. We’d heard rumours. Which is to say that it took me many years to feel OK about the fact that I could choose to have sex and enjoy sex and not feel bad about my desire for sex. Which is to say that even now, in my early thirties, I was still a bit afraid of having too much sex, of being a slut.
This Really Isn't About You Page 16