Ask Me About My Uterus

by Abby Norman

  Oh, but I was teeming with life. And maybe for me, I reasoned—maybe for that man on the table who had died with his thin, bony fingers curled up as if he were making monster-hands at a little kid—living was just going to mean pain.

  Still, I chewed my lip impatiently. I jiggled my foot in bed, a nervous tick. Blood whooshed in my ears. And I felt that familiar pain inside of me, on the lower right-hand side, almost comforting in its predictability, its steady presence.

  What are you? I asked it, as the night enveloped me. What do you want from me?

  But it was silent.

  WHEN I RETURNED TO DR. Wagstaff’s office with my research in hand, it was a little over a year since I had seen him for the first time. He looked worried. Not because my condition had failed to improve, but because I looked like I was about to accuse him of something. I assured him that I wasn’t there to question his competence—quite the opposite. I had faith that he could still help me, and now I had more information. That is, I had more clues about my case.

  He waited patiently as I explained all the research I’d done regarding endometriosis—particularly, that it could be somehow related to my appendix-region pain, which had, in recent weeks, become worthy of several ER visits, including a particularly traumatic one a few weeks beforehand. That visit had been the impetus for making another appointment with Dr. Wagstaff.

  The pain had been agonizing, despite the fact that Max and I had not been having sex for weeks. I couldn’t even take a step without pain shooting through my abdomen as my heel touched the ground. I had gone to work in the hospital basement only to feel as though I was going to faint. My boss had sent me upstairs to the ER (extremely convenient, just an elevator ride away).

  It was a small hospital, and everyone knew or at least recognized everyone else. I was also still dressed business-casual and had my badge fastened to the lapel of my blazer—a grainy photo of me with the hospital’s emblem. A few nurses I knew waved as I passed through admitting, thinking I was there to collect paperwork. I practically fell onto the gurney, curling up into the fetal position, not wanting to move. I texted Max to let him know what was going on, but told him not to worry. He could come by after he got out of work if I hadn’t been discharged yet.

  The first nurse who came in asked me about my pain, and I must have rolled my eyes, because she looked a little bent. I explained that I’d had chronic pain for several years and my tolerance was, understandably, quite high. This pain, however, seemed louder, more exacting. I couldn’t even walk without it flaring up, like a light on a dimmer switch. She said she’d come back with painkillers, but I stopped her.

  “I don’t want anything until I’ve seen the doctor,” I grimaced. “I need to be able to articulate where the pain is when they ask. If you drug me up now, I won’t be clear-headed enough. This isn’t my first rodeo, unfortunately.”

  She frowned at me. “You don’t want anything?”

  It was my turn to frown. “Well, not until I’ve seen the doctor.”

  “It could be a while…”

  I snorted. “No doubt. Look, I work here. I get it. I know you have to check boxes and stuff, but just say I refused. I’m not trying to be difficult, I’m just afraid that when they finally see me, if you give me all kinds of pain meds and sedatives now, I won’t be able to tell them exactly where it hurts—because, see, this pain is different, and—well, I’m still trying to understand—”

  “Do you want to be in pain? Do you like it?” she sneered, folding her arms.

  My jaw dropped—my first thought was to tell her to go fuck herself, but I was so exhausted and nauseated that all I did was cry. She left the room without another word.

  The ER doctor’s note reflects my demeanor, though she didn’t know exactly what had precipitated it: “… She is extremely frustrated and even becomes tearful.”

  One of the first things the doctor, a petite woman in her early thirties, did was inform me that she was going to do a vaginal exam. I must have looked grim in response, because she paused in the doorway as she headed off to ask a nurse to come assist.

  “They’re usually quite painful for me,” I offered meekly. “Anything up there causes pain. Tampons, even. My boyfriend and I don’t have sex anymore…”

  She nodded and went to fetch the nurse—the same one from before. They put my legs up in stirrups without looking at me. I took a deep breath and tried to relax, having become quite skilled at metaphysically leaving my body to avoid the pain. The doctor went to insert the speculum and I cried out, my body contorting involuntarily up from the table. The nurse gasped, her mouth now open enough to eat her words from earlier.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay,” I said, my breath unsteady. “Just get it over with.”

  The doctor looked at me a moment, then tried again—I screamed, tears streaming down my face, and felt a warm hand take mine. When I opened my eyes, I saw the nurse looking down at me apologetically.

  Of course they’d found nothing and sent me home, but when I noticed my own ER document in a stack of paperwork in medical records when I went back to work the following week, what jumped out at me from the page was that the emergency room physician had noted me as being anxious to the point of tears.

  Yeah, no shit, I thought as I ripped staples out of charts with a little more effort than was strictly necessary. I can’t eat, sleep, dance, walk, or fuck. Wouldn’t you cry, too, if it happened to you?

  When I presented my findings to Dr. Wagstaff, he didn’t know quite what to make of it—or of me.

  “You’re either brilliant or the most well-educated hypochondriac I’ve ever met,” he said, shaking his head lightly. He agreed to do another laparoscopy; at the very least he could remove my appendix so that I wouldn’t have to worry about it. Aside from that, he warned me that if the procedure turned up nothing he’d have to discharge me from his practice. There just wasn’t anything else he could do.

  AT THE BEGINNING, MAX TRIED to bolster my spirits during my many days and nights of pain and the endless string of doctor’s visits. I remember him sitting next to me as I sipped on pink contrast dye before a CT scan, saying, “StrawBarium Pink Drink is what they should call it”—and I had genuinely laughed at that. But after several rounds of this with no signs of improvement, he had grown frustrated. He was twenty-something years old; he wanted to have a normal life, party with his friends, and have a cute girlfriend he could show off. I think he was at first disappointed that I never felt well enough to join him. Then, he began to resent me for it. He began to feel that his needs weren’t being met sexually, and he was absolutely right—they were not. I was not a good partner. I couldn’t possibly be one in the state I was in. Of course, my sexual needs weren’t being met either, but no one really asked me if I was sexually frustrated. The prevailing theory seemed to be that I had so much pain with sex because I didn’t like it.

  I offered to stay at his parents’ house to recover, which would essentially get him off the hook. He wouldn’t be stuck having to help me get up to go to the bathroom, or bring me tea, or accidentally knee me in my tender stomach in the night. His parents had a guest bedroom that was a very short limping distance to the upstairs bathroom. I could stay there relatively unobtrusively until I was well enough to go home and look after myself.

  The night before my second surgery, I washed my skin with the antiseptic soap the hospital had given me, staying in the shower at his parents’ house a lot longer than I needed to in order to get clean. I was trying to cleanse myself of something else: the pervasive thoughts that maybe I was just making this all up. Maybe all of this was in my head.

  Max, and his parents, knew so much about my childhood. They knew how hard it had been, and I know they felt for me, wished that it could have been different. Still, they marveled at what I had achieved. Financial independence, for one. I owned a car, though it was a beater, and made sure all our bills were paid on time. More importantly, that my bills were paid. I had close to $10,000 in medical debt racke
d up by then, not to mention student loans that were coming out of deferment. I’d hoped to invest what little I could save so that I could begin to put away money for my brother, as I was to assume legal guardianship of him when I turned thirty (the magic age at which I, my parents, and the legal system had assumed I’d have my shit together enough to do so).

  Although I hadn’t been able to go back to school, which was what I really wanted to do, I’d gotten a perfectly respectable job with benefits, sick days, and paid vacation. I had friends with college degrees who had been unable to wrangle that in the economy they’d graduated into. I think Max’s parents had started to expect that Max and I would get married, and if it hadn’t been for my waning health, and the stress it had put on our relationship, that may have happened. As Jane had predicted years before, I’d learned a great deal about myself through my relationship with Max. I’d matured emotionally in ways that allowed me to trust, and to become comfortable with being vulnerable once in a while, and I had certainly acquired a little more self-esteem. I still became considerably agitated about people throwing up, though, and I still hadn’t managed to tame my zeal about whatever weird new thing I’d learned about in a given week. I wouldn’t even dare hazard a guess as to how many hours of TED-style presentations Max sat through after I learned about the “random article” button on Wikipedia.

  My head was already full of so much, I thought as I stepped out of the shower, sinking down to sit on the edge of the tub. I couldn’t imagine that my brain had the bandwidth necessary to construct some kind of elaborate medical crisis. Maybe if it had only lasted a few weeks, I could have accepted it as some kind of glitch in the matrix, but it had been going on for years now. I sat there dripping, growing cold as the fog dissipated from the room, and I was paralyzed with fear: What if I was lying, to everyone—even myself? What if the pain wasn’t real at all, what if it never had been? Had Dr. Wagstaff been right all along? Had the trauma from my childhood, which I had diligently worked to resolve, which I had taken copious antidepressants to dull the ache of, somehow escaped my brain and taken up residence in my bones? Could anguish live, truly, in your actual heart, and not just your metaphysical heart? Was my body shutting down in response to years of being unwanted and unloved, of being alone and unaccounted for? Had my brain succeeded in convincing my body that it had no right to live? Could emotional pain actually cause your physical body to slowly rot away, like some sort of dramatic, psychological consumption? Was I really losing my mind rather than my body? Was I a Freudian hysteric with an iPhone?

  All night I tossed and turned in bed, the heaviness of my body’s ache feeling as though it would send me down, down, down through the mattress and the bed frame, and the floorboards, through the cellar and into the ground, until I settled six feet below.

  Max and his mother took me to the hospital early the next morning. Only one of them could come into pre-op with me, and although I reached for Max, there was a part of me that would have preferred his mom. Less specifically, a mom. I was scared shitless, once again, and Max had grown distant.

  Earlier in the week, he’d told me that he thought it was only fair that he got to sleep with other girls while I recovered. I was aghast and asked him if he no longer intended to be monogamous. He immediately scoffed, saying that monogamy wasn’t a fair expectation given the circumstances. I tried to see his point. I felt ashamed enough that I had failed to be a giving partner, and part of me was just so exhausted by living that the thought of him getting his needs met elsewhere was almost a weight lifted from my shoulders. Except that I have always been a girl of principles. Even as a little girl, I’d had a stringent sense of right and wrong. If we had agreed to be monogamous, then we should be monogamous. If he no longer wanted that… well, maybe we should break up. Neither of us really wanted that, but we were beginning to feel the necessity for change. We couldn’t go on as we had been. Or at least he couldn’t.

  Then again, he wasn’t tucked into a hospital bed, attached to an IV pole, putting his fate into the hands of an anesthesiologist who made awkward, off-color dad-jokes. Unlike the first surgery I’d had years before, I wasn’t awake when they took me into the OR. The sedative knocked me out midsentence while we were all still in pre-op.

  When I came to in recovery several hours later, I felt different before I even opened my eyes. There was definitely an absent feeling in my abdomen—a sensation I had come to understand intellectually the previous year, when my best friend Hillary had given birth to her son, one social event at which I had been present.

  She’d had an emergency C-section at the last minute, but certainly she, too, had experienced a distinct feeling of, “Wow, there’s not a baby inside me anymore.” Having never been pregnant myself, I guess I can’t claim it’s at all the same thing, but I was startled to wake up and have something that I had become so accustomed to, a familiar feeling inside my body—even when it was, at times, a real fucker—having completely vanished.

  The nurse noticed I was coming around and started feeding me ice chips. My eyes struggled to focus on his face, but when I’d centered myself, I had only one question.

  “What was it?”

  He and the other recovery nurses exchanged a look between them, and he kind of shook his head in disbelief.

  “You were right. It was your appendix.”

  It wasn’t just that it was my appendix, though. It would need to be confirmed with pathology (which it was), but it appeared that the infection had been subacute and chronic, meaning that, as I’d hypothesized, it had been going on for quite some time. The appendix was extremely long and densely adherent. Adhesions, in and of themselves—particularly in the bowel—can certainly cause a person pain and suffering. On top of that, the portion of my intestine from whence the appendix emerges, the cecum, was “floppy,” and not attached to my abdominal wall as it should have been. This abnormality, sometimes called “mobile cecum,” probably occurs during fetal development. But, because the cecum can move, that means that, so long as there’s an appendix at the end of it, that can move too. When Dr. Wagstaff found it, it was retrocecal—behind the cecum. That positioning had probably been part of the reason why the whole mess hadn’t shown up on any scan.

  I stared at the hot, white ceiling, not yet able to move or really say anything else. I had never wanted to be right, only to be well. Dr. Wagstaff, admittedly, didn’t know what would happen next. Maybe I’d have lingering problems, or maybe I’d feel better. There wasn’t a lot of research on it, and the majority of doctors didn’t believe it was even possible. Even among those who regarded it as a possibility, the infrequency of the condition in medical literature implied that few doctors would see it in their careers. Dr. Wagstaff half-joked that he should write a paper. After he left, I turned to Max and said, “If he does, I think I should at least get to coauthor it. I did all the research.” I’d never defended a thesis or even gained enough credits for a degree, but I’d completed enough research to save my own life, which had to count for something.

  In any case, I would have a story to tell myself about resilience and determination, about advocating for my inner, visceral truth. Maybe it wasn’t bound in leather and sitting in a university library or hanging framed in a corner office, but the scars on my abdomen would do.

  I had managed to vanquish one pain from my body, cast it out like a pacing spirit, but I mistook that minor exorcism for salvation. Pain was not done with me, and though I felt prepared to stare it down, it would find ways to lurk in the shadows, unnoticed, until it decided to angrily beat its wings again.

  IN THE END, IT REALLY didn’t matter how much I loved Max, just the same as it had never mattered how much I wanted not to be sick. When we finally went our separate ways, I felt responsible. The continued intimation, on the part of doctors and society, that my inability to engage in sexual intercourse was somehow by my choosing, that it was something deeper than parts that didn’t work in accordance with my desires, only made me question myself and my
role in the relationship.

  If I was truly in love with him and attracted to him, wouldn’t I put up with whatever pain our intimacy caused? Indeed, I had, for quite some time by this point. I had buried my face in a pillow feigning pleasure when I was crying from pain. When I finally reached the point where I couldn’t lie about it anymore, my truth became a broken record that sounded like an excuse. It must have sounded like I wasn’t attracted to him anymore, and that I didn’t love him. But relationships are complex because humans are complex. He moved away to battle his own demons. I have since realized that’s the only way it could have been—because I was one of them.

  I stayed in the apartment we’d shared together because I wasn’t ready to leave. I had never stayed in one place for so long, and even though memories hovered thick in the air, after some time had passed, they cleared like a fog. The ones that lingered I could gently coax down with a broom or some incense.

  I stayed in touch with his parents, since we still orbited one another in the same community. I found that I missed them in ways I could not miss Max, and that there were times when their loss was heavier than his.

  Several years later, Max came to visit, and we met for coffee at the same café where we’d met half a decade earlier. He looked almost exactly the same—his hair a little shorter, maybe, his voice a little tentative, unsure. But he was more centered. On an even keel, he would have said, being the sailor. As we talked, the sky unleashed a downpour.

  We had become, as time allows, very different people. But we found relief, and a little delight, in those split seconds when our eyes lit up at the same joke, or we recalled some shared memory. He was getting ready for a late summer trek into the wilderness with his parents, escaping from his new city life for a week. I accompanied him to a sporting goods store in town so he could get a rain slicker. We sat down in some very small folding chairs, next to where the pop tents were displayed in the carpeted, interior woods. It was a strange place to spill our guilt to one another, but it was also kind of the perfect place.