Flotsam

{Part One}

Part Two:

On your second night in at Sarah Mawr you go to bed feeling unwell. When you awake soaked in blood you think for one confused moment that you have been hit by a stray bullet shot from a gun in nearby Yonkers.
Alas, it is only the first period of your college career. Luckily, you are in a unique pain-management position. The only holiday celebrated with anything resembling religiosity at Sarah Mawr is 4/20 (no one attends classes on that day, speakers placed on the steps of the administration building facing the courtyard issue forth the voice of Peter Tosh singing ‘Legalize It,’ etc.) and, as it turns out, nothing more effectively relieves the pain of menstrual cramps than large quantities of marijuana. In this way, the next couple of years pass with nary a protest from your beleaguered and (clinically) “irritable” uterus.
Now you are, oh, twenty one. You are out of school and have returned to more traditional analgesics for pain relief. (While at Sarah Mawr, you found that cannabis intake impaired your ability to accomplish much of value. The ability to make collages and write limericks is not much prized in the working world, after all.)
You have just been broken up with a man you dated for an embarrassingly short span of time. Your period is late—which could mean anything, really, but you take a pregnancy test that your roommate has in the glove compartment of her car and it is positive.
Oh, hell.
Afraid to actually say the word “abortion” your roommate keeps asking “What are you going to do with it?”
“I’m thinking of trading it for the ability to spin straw into gold,” you say. Wondering if the test could have been defective, you buy another a few days later and it is negative. Whew! Obviously the first test was a mistake! (Looking back later you will sigh for a time when you had never heard of a chemical pregnancy, and thought “beta” was merely a sort of VCR.) Your period shows up 12 days late with unusual violence. You see a gynecologist, who says airily that it was probably a miscarriage. You never told the man you were dating that you might be pregnant, as the positive test came less than 48 hours after he dumped you, and it seems foolish to tell him now. You don’t say anything about it, and more or less never speak to him again.
You notice that whenever you have an orgasm the contractions turn into cramps turn into spotting. You have a period that lasts for twenty-two days and drives you back to the gynecologist, furious with pain, for more birth control pills, this time to be taken continuously. For the first time you venture to ask whether there isn’t anything else they can do about Endometriosis.
“Technically,” says the doctor, “we can’t even be sure that is what you have, as it can only be diagnosed via laparoscopy.”
Hmm…Should you have one of those, then?
“It’s up to you,” says the doctor, “We can’t really do anything more to treat it than we’re doing now, so it wouldn’t serve much purpose except to tell us for sure that yup, you have endometriosis.” You think this is the most ridiculous thing you have ever heard, and say so. The doctor shrugs. You make a phone call and discover your bare-bones insurance doesn’t cover the procedure, and so decline the laparoscopy.

During the next several years:
• You start having migraines and are switched from pill to pill in an attempt to find one with enough estrogen to suppress your symptoms but not enough to give you a stroke.
• You discover Dr. Google.
• You start thinking about having children by yourself, with donor sperm.
• You learn, during a brief flirtation with charting, that you only occasionally ovulate.
• You meet, and almost immediately move in with, The Nearly Fiance.

Stay tuned for Part 3–Not Without My Uterus: This Time It’s Personal