Flotsam

[As a student at Sarah Mawr, I once had the great misfortune of sitting through a film that consisted entirely of shots of the student filmmaker’s vagina. I found it just slightly less than not at all compelling, and so I will understand if the prospect of reading the history of my uterine failings does not fill you with glee. I assure you that I will not be offended if you choose to skip this and similar entries.]

On most infertility-related blogs there comes a time, usually in the first few entries, when the author takes us through a summary of her reproductive woes. This is useful in providing some context for future rants about doctors, cycles, etc.—it gives readers a jumping off point, a way to connect present fury with past disappointments, present symptoms with past diagnoses. The following is my attempt to do that.

Part One:

On the Sunday morning you first get your period, you fail to recognize it as such, and instead are certain that you face an imminent and perhaps painful death. Despite being the correct age to begin menstruation (one month from your 14th birthday), despite being perhaps the last of your friends to do so, you see the blood on the crotch of your underpants and think “Well, this is it then. I am hemorrhaging.” You go about your day tearful and gloomy, afraid to tell anyone what is happening, mostly due to a fear that the hemorrhage is some rare side effect of masturbation. Eventually you break down and confess to your mother in a studiously calm, now-don’t-get-hysterical voice, that there is something wrong with you, Down There. You are bleeding.
“It might not be anything serious,” you say, “But I thought I should tell someone.” Your mother looks like she doesn’t know whether to laugh or slap you in exasperation.

For the next year you are visited monthly by a force so cruel and unrelenting you cannot help but personify it. A full week of heavy bleeding, and cramps like someone is putting your most sensitive parts through an old-fashioned clothes-ringer. You miss two days of school each month and ruin countless sets of sheets and articles of clothing. During the week of your period, you sometimes faint in the mornings and most afternoons you spend on a cot in a dark crevice of the school nurse’s office, a heating pad over your lower half. You take Advil by the threes and fours, and develop an ulcer. You assemble a collection of hot water bottles more appropriate to a woman 5 times your age. The pain is worse every month, and you wonder why none of your friends seem to notice it. Probably you are weak and overdramatic. Tampon commercials astonish you—as if anything short of a horse tranquilizer could induce you to play beach volleyball during your period! At home, your mother visits you where you lay upstairs with your legs elevated and lets you sip a bit of her Martini through a straw, For The Pain. One Saturday you are at a friend’s house when you collapse in the bathroom and come to trembling in a pool of your own blood. Your friend finds you incoherent, babbling at her to please kill me, please, I cannot stand it for one more—and then you black out again. None of the adults in your life are perturbed by any of this.

The summer before high school you develop severe morning sickness. Every morning, like sinister, gastrointestinal clockwork, you retch until your throat is sore. You lose 5 pounds, which may not have been so bad, except you were only 85 pounds to begin with. Finally, you are taken to a doctor, where you vomit in the waiting room and faint after giving blood. The doctor asks if you could be pregnant. (You have not so much as kissed a boy, and this seems mournfully unlikely). You assure the doctor you are not. He has your mother leave the room and asks again. You laugh, bitterly, and say “I highly doubt it.” He sighs and orders a pregnancy test.
The test is negative, and the doctor throws up his hands, reminds you that there is still much we don’t understand about the human body. Probably it is hormones, an excess of estrogen. The morning sickness goes away on its own three months later, but the cramps become worse, and have become power hungry—no longer content to confine themselves to the week of your period and the few days before, they spread to the rest of the month as well, until you are missing as much school as you are attending. You go back to the doctor and have several excruciating pelvic exams before being diagnosed with endometriosis. You are put on birth control pills, which help but cause the morning sickness to return for a week, validating the doctor’s guess about estrogen causing your illness the summer before. This is probably the last time your doctor will be right about anything.

Over the next few years, the pill manages things pretty well—there is still pain, but no fainting spells, and you are missing only 2 days of school per month. You go off the pill for a year and a half and have only 3 periods. The pain of the last one is so dreadful you go straight back on. Six months later you go off again, have 3 periods in nine months, and then 3 in six weeks. When you have a week of excruciating one-sided pain your senior year of high school, you deal with it on your own with vast quantities of Aleve. You dismiss it as probably menstrual, and do not see a doctor. The fact that you are able to dismiss pain that causes you to double over at your job as a soda jerk and collapse under the ice cream counter, all because it is “probably menstrual” should perhaps be a red flag, but isn’t. Eventually you end up in the ER diagnosed with a kidney stone, and are given Percocet by a young doctor who is astonished by your pain threshold,
Oh now, you say bashfully. It’s nothing.

Stay tuned for Part Two–Not Without My Uterus: The College Years