On the Subject of Bearing and “Other Options”

I am sleeping when the pain starts, dreaming of full hospitals and empty classrooms, a dark tunnel, dates on a computer screen, a diminishing roster of students, dead links, a riot of wildflowers—yellow to orange to code red—a superbloom of fires. My body jerks. My eyes open in the dark, and I am sucking air. The pain in my lower right pelvis is—I want to say—unbearable But here I am, bearing it, clenching my teeth, sweating, crying and shouting and feeling around for my partner in the king-size bed, roughing up the comforter, shaking down bulky pillows, calling his name, wanting to wrench him awake as if he could—what? We’ve been here before. But, oh yeah, we keep separate rooms now because of his snoring, my tossing, our constant disruption of the other. I yell out the three syllables of his name once, twice.

I’m not exploding. I’m not exploding. I’m not.

The dogs wake and begin to growl. Maynard, the little terrier, barks. The bedroom door opens. Everyone runs in. They find me crunched up in a ball, gripping the bedsheets in both fists. Jonathan doesn’t have to ask me what’s going on. He knows. He climbs onto the bed and wraps his arms around my crustacean-shaped body.

“Just breathe, baby,” he says. He demonstrates for me, counting as he goes. “Breath in and hold: one, two, three. Exhale . . . two, three.”

I am not breathing, not yet, not like that. I am breathing through my skin, through my ears. Absorbing just enough oxygen to stay alive. Jonathan tries to soothe me, but the pain, like a skillful, determined little fucker of a mountain goat, climbs to even higher peaks. The goat reaches the clouds, looks down at me waving for it to stop, blinks, and keeps going. I scream expletives, and the goat goes stellar.

“Fuuuck,” I groan.

“Good, let it out—exhale . . . two, three.”

Our epileptic boxer-mix, Beatrix, paces and pants. Maynard curls up on the floor, nose to navel, and bites his penis. I am saying all manner of things I don’t mean, not to Jonathan, but to the ceiling, whatever exists beyond it.

“I want to fucking die!”

He holds me closer. “This will pass. It always does. Just breathe.”

And eventually, with the help of a 500 mg dose of expired ibuprofen, it does pass, or at least settles enough for me to conk out. I wake again in the morning with Jonathan and Maynard on the bed, Beatrix snoring triumphantly on the floor, my heating pad having long since shut itself off. On the nightstand is a thermometer, a damp washcloth, a glass of water, and my little dish of morning pills. I swallow the pills and think about what a night at the under-staffed hospital in Joshua Tree would have been like: me crying into my N95 mask as we lean against a wall, all ten ICU beds full, the midnight ultrasound boring the tech to tears: More globs of ookie innards slobbing it up in a bath of dark—whoopee. “Did my right ovary grow back?” I would ask and watch the tech roll her bloodshot eyes back into her tired head.

It seems entirely credible that my right ovary, surgically removed in 2012, could have grown back over the last ten years. I’ve seen enough medical mystery shows to know. Plus, this ovary was a real badass bitch—her methods of cruelty were medieval. If anyone could respawn from a pool of acidic ooze, it would be her. For years she’d been generating endometriomas—blood-filled cysts—that would grow to the size of plums and burst, filling my pelvis with a toxic soup. Burst, regrow, burst. The bursting felt like how people describe the death throes of an appendix, except my pain went on all day, every day, for months.

Waiting in pre-op back then, as Carole King sang “It’s Too Late” over the radio, I tried to think of any good times we’d had together but found few. Before they put me under, I started giving away my innards like old knick-knacks: You like the ovary? Take the appendix too, and the uterus goes great with all that. I don’t need this left fallopian tube—take it. The female surgeon on crutches shook her head. She was certain my appendix was fine and that at twenty-eight, I should keep the uterus until I was done with grad school, in case I wanted to make a kid. She’d gone snowboarding with her teenage son two days ago and broke her foot in three places and what a great time they’d had together and, sigh—she didn’t want me to miss out. I was prescribed a low-dose birth control, and it worked to keep larger cysts from forming. The pain was manageable for a long time.

But here we are.

There’s coffee and the dogs’ routine and then we settle into scanning headlines on our phones. We hold up rashy red-and-purple bar graphs and blistering, hemorrhagic maps for the other to gape at. We make predictions about how long we’re going to be teaching from home and make exaggerated finger quotes when we say “teaching.” We check in with our parents via text: “How’s it going? Feeling ok?” “Yes, we got the box of rubber gloves—thank you.” “Fire still headed your way?” “I don’t know about putting bleach on apples; maybe just peel them?” We toast gluten-free bread and take turns staring out the smudged sliding-glass window into the desert studded with yellow flowers, waiting for the dots in the text window to temporarily relieve us of our concern.

“I have to make an appointment,” I say. “I can’t put it off any longer.” Punctuating a constant dull ache in my pelvis are murder-twinges, crackly pops of static that travel between hip bones. The resurfaced pain is just part of my “new normal.”

Jonathan looks up from his phone. “I know,” he says, with the somber acceptance of someone who’s been told it’s time to put his seventeen-year-old cat down. Apart from some early-morning double-masked, high-intensity grocery shopping, we haven’t left the house since mid-March. The thought of sitting in a waiting room among the coughing, sniffling masses feels unthinkable, but so does continuing to rent out my pelvis to reproductive parts that abuse me.

“And I’m going to ask for a hysterectomy again. I’m going to demand it.” The air of decisiveness I conjure doesn’t fool either of us. “It’s just got to happen.”

“I support that.” Pause. Our toast pops up. We butter our pieces lavishly, subconsciously thinking any breakfast could be our last. We let the conversation hang until—“But how do you feel about having major surgery during a pandemic?”

“Not great, but—”

“As an immune-compromised person.”

“Right, I know . . . and it’s not just me I have to think about, it’s that I could bring it home to you.”

“Don’t worry about me. It’s you I’m concerned about.”

“But by the time I actually get scheduled . . . I mean, this pandemic’s not going to last forever?”

“Uh.”

“I can’t not have surgery out of fear?”

I’m relieved when Jonathan gets a text from his father in Auburn, and we can change the subject. Then another text, then another. Seven separate dings to say that his neighbor’s brother has COVID. The neighbors might have it too. He and the neighbors ran into each other at the mailbox yesterday. The new delivery person had switched their mail, and they ended up touching each other’s to exchange them.

“We feel like sitting ducks,” the text says. “Will keep you posted.”

The attendance for my remedial English course was declining before the sudden switch online, but now I’ve lost nearly all my students in the dark tunnel between campus and the online portal. Many of them don’t have reliable internet. But the truth of the matter is that their hearts weren’t in it on campus either—there were evictions and lost jobs and abusive partners and probation officers and sick kids before the pandemic. Why worry about composing a compare-and-contrast essay when you’ve lost your job and there are three kids jumping around your head, all of them needing help with their long division? Who wants to wash windows while the sun explodes?

Entering my online Canvas course-management page is like walking into a digital ghost town in an Old West video game. The bar is empty, the saloon doors are creaking in the breeze, a rat darts between overturned tables. There are some scribbled notes on the bulletin board left behind by the panicked townsfolk: “To who ever find this, please just grade what ever I turned in—I can’t do anymore” and “Where’s the link to video? From two weeks ago? Help?”

Eventually my announcements begin to say things like, “Turn in what you have” and “Midterm exam canceled: just catch up on missed assignments.” And then before I know it, I’m just posting reminders of where to get COVID tests, recipes for DIY hand sanitizer, locations of food banks, tips for washing your groceries. When the assignments stop coming in altogether, I post: “Stay safe,” and it feels like the last ghostly message from mission control into the vacuum of space.

“So, your left ovary is quite large. And the uterus is a bit thicker than last time.”

The same gynecologic surgeon who scooped out my cyst-laden ovary nearly ten years ago is talking to me via Zoom. She’s got a wrist brace this time—a climbing accident with her grandson. She doesn’t look older than fifty, but she’s lapped me considerably in the progeny department.

“Why is the left one so big? Do you know?”

“It’s probably making up for the other one’s absence. Nothing to worry about.”

She asks me how it’s going so far on the MenopauseInducer5000, and I shake my head no. When I went in for my ultrasound two weeks ago, the nurse practitioner gave me a thirty-day supply of a medication that would essentially put me into menopause. My periods would stop completely. I’d be fifty years old overnight. The NP recommended yogurt and sardines for the extra calcium. I knew as soon as I reached for the brown paper sack that I’d be throwing it under my bathroom sink with the bleach and toilet scrubber.

“You didn’t start it? Okay—but it will literally stop your periods, stop the pain. So, what about the low-dose birth control?”

“Oh, yeah, remember I stopped taking that two years ago when I was having all that breakthrough bleeding?”

She bites her pen a moment and then taps it on her desk, begins writing. Luckily it was her nondominant wrist she broke while descending El Capitan with her physically gifted grandson. She doesn’t look up when she asks me, “So, where are you at with the whole… kid thing?”

For a moment I wonder if she is referencing something in the news—some controversial issue with kids—do they stay home from school all year or not? Is the toll of missing school greater than . . . but no.

“Oh, I mean. I’m thirty-six and underemployed. I have one ovary. My Hashimoto’s antibodies are through the roof.”

“Uh-huh.”

“My uterus has that—what’s it called—adenomyosis?—it’s extra thick, right? And Jonathan’s vas—” The screen glitches. I might be frozen to her, my eyes caught in a squint. Freeze—unfreeze—like a playground game.

“Hmmm.”

She’s looking at me now, munching on her pen cap like a rabbit with a carrot. I think I must be delaying her lunch with my daftness. Her face goes pixelated, snaps back, goes blurry again.

“I’m in constant pain. I’m having a period every two weeks.”

“But a pregnancy would change all of that—the symptoms.”

I am tempted to argue with her about how one even gets pregnant in my condition, but I cut to it instead: “No. What I want is a hysterectomy. I want it all out.”

She laughs. She laughs. And waves the thought away as though I told her I was getting into AcroYoga as a career.

“That won’t help much,” she says. “Endometriosis grows everywhere. It’s microscopic.”

“It won’t help at all?”

The blurry shape says something, but I miss it.

“Can you say that again?”

“What? Errr . . . 70 percent, I said. If you’re lucky.”

“My pain will be 70 percent less?”

“If you’re lucky. For some people the hysterectomy doesn’t help at all.”

The signal improves, and I can see her now, see her furrowed brow and devastated pen cap. I tell her that 70 percent is pretty good, and she looks disappointed in me, like we’re talking about a math exam I took. I notice all the framed diplomas hanging on her wall. I want to tell her that I am a state-school nobody, that I teach remedial night courses in my rural hometown, that Cs get degrees, that I slept through algebra. Seventy percent might be an F at Brown, but for me it’s a life raft.

I ask her if she can give me what I’m asking for, and she hesitates, looks down at the brace on her wrist as if wistfully recalling the smell of the pine trees as she fell three stories.

“I want you to pump the brakes. I want you to consider that . . . you’re still of reproductive age. That thirty-six is still very young.”

A few weeks later, the yellow snakeweed and the rabbitbrush have given way to the safety-vest orange of mariposa and poppy, globe mallow and paintbrush. An invasive stringlike parasite that looks like ribbons of orange plastic wraps around creosote and winter fat. The flower colors change like flags: yellow means caution, orange means impending threat. But I am one-foot-then-the-other forward into the fire-licked terrain. I find a surgeon in Palm Desert who uses robotics to perform all kinds of complicated gynecological surgeries. He’s performed thousands of hysterectomies this way, and I am disappointed when I see his photo and he doesn’t have surgical tools as fingers.

The medical group’s office is crowded at ten in the morning. The receptionists are already flustered, tired of having to remind people to stand six feet apart, to cover their noses and mouths. Every other chair has a fake succulent taking up the seat. Plastic guns are held to foreheads. People are grumbling that they are running hot because it’s hot outside, dammit. People have waited three months to see their proctologists, their urologists, their kidney specialists. People are throwing shade at anyone who coughs or clears their throat. People are jumpy. An older man with a mask sagging below his mouth has brought his gluey-eyed dog in with him—he’s filling out paperwork at the counter when the secretary tells him he needs to take the dog outside. “She’s a very good girl,” he protests, and immediately the gummy pooch viciously snaps at a woman bending from her walker to pet it. “Don’t touch her!” he shouts. “Do  touch her, madam!”

Inside the examination room, the nurse takes my blood pressure, and it’s high. “Everyone’s blood pressure is high,” she says. “We don’t worry about it right now.” The robotics wizard eventually comes in, and I quickly recite the ten-year backstory, the history with cysts and endometriosis, adenomyosis, the oophorectomy, the Hashimoto’s diagnosis, celiac disease, my total non-desire to procreate. He listens patiently, almost placidly, his totally human hands folded in his lap.

“So, what is it that you want to happen?”

I pause, thrown by his style of questioning.

“I want a hysterectomy.”

“You want to stop the pain?”

“Yes. I want to stop the pain. And the blood.”

“What makes you think the pain won’t stop on its own?”

I stutter behind my mask. He smiles like a sensei conjuring temperance to deal with the new student who can’t chop through the wooden plank with her paltry hand.

“What makes you think the pain you are feeling now will continue forever?”

Like smelling a stranger’s fart, my nose flares at the completely nonscientific use of the word forever.

“Uh, the past? I’m looking at the past and predicting what will come.”

“I see.” He turns to rifle through a huge drawer of prescription samples. He croons into his paper mask, “Nothing lasts forever. This virus won’t last…”

“I don’t want any pills,” I say.

Please, no more half solutions. Please use your merciful robot army to eradicate my insides.

I think of the smiling faces of the middle-aged women on the daVinci robotics website, their athletic skirts and tennis sweaters. They were smiling because they were relieved—they were freed of their periods, of their pain, they could join their husbands on the golf course and climb Everest with their muscled grandsons.

I don’t want to whine, but I do. “Why? Why can’t I have a hysterectomy?”

“A hysterectomy is not the cure for endometriosis.”

“What is the cure?”

But I know what he will say before he says it. There is no cure, there’s only managing. He pulls out a box of SuperLowDoseBirthControl and tells me to try again.

In the weeks leading up to the summer semester, the college president sends out emails that tell us to be ready to come back to campus, to be ready to teach online, to be ready to come back and then go online again. His emails report two cases of COVID among staff—three cases, four. We aren’t told directly that there are no classes for us part-timers; we just don’t get any offers by the time the semester begins. Reply-all arguments break out among faculty and admin—the older instructors don’t want to be “forced” to learn the newfan gled technology necessary to teach online. An adjunct pipes up in the reply-all and is swiftly reply-all-told to hush up.

Luckily, Jonathan and I are assigned some hours in adult education, grading the written assignments of students in the high-school completion program, which was moved from a campus lab setting to an online platform. We learn the platform quickly and spend about fifteen hours a week grading every subject at every high-school grade level.

Over and over, we are pointing out to students that they didn’t read the prompt correctly. They didn’t actually answer the question. Over and over, we are reminding them to write in complete sentences, to use periods and capitalization, to stop copying and pasting from Wikipedia and FreeAnswers.com. We invite them to Zoom tutoring sessions with little success. Quickly into the transition, students are breaking down.

“I dont know how to answer this I didnt go to high school so how would I know what the branches of govt are and what they do?”

“WHY ARE YOU MAKING IT SO DIFICULT?!”

“It’s all FAKE news so how I am supposed to do ‘research’?”

“I wrote three paragraphs and the computer timed out my work is gone!”

“Please I did my best now just grade it so I can move on with my LIFE!.”

Jonathan and I work in our separate corners of the house and can hear each other grumbling and groaning, saying things like, “What? What does that even mean?” We announce to the other that we’re taking a Zoom call with a student, followed by several minutes of silence. “No-show,” we call out. “False alarm.”

I sit with my heating pad pressed into my gut, writing out step-by-step di-rections for how a student should revise her paragraph on the water cycle. The internet cuts out. We call our local internet provider—a family-run business—and so does everyone else on the outskirts of the high desert. Outside my office window, the hedgehog and beavertail cacti are opening pink. The desert five-spot is the most vulnerable shade of lilac I’ve ever seen.

“Internet go out for you?” I call to Jonathan.

“Yep.”

“Well, fuck it.”

Except for the years when I was too sick, walking has always been our way of dealing. Of processing. Of bearing. On a practical level, walking tends to lessen my pelvic pain. We walk in our shorts and tank tops as the sun goes down, pointing out white iguanas and zebra-tailed lizards, the occasional chuckwalla. The glandular purples of beardtongues. The bruised indigo of desert bells. The fresh-blood red of claret cups. Every spring walk is a show-stopper.

We can’t help but feel somewhat giddy in a took-too-much-medication, smoke-gone-to-our-heads kind of way—the rebelliousness of nature’s splendor in the face of mass destruction. The stuff of poetry. We talk about Jonathan’s solo album, a soundtrack for a novella-in-verse I’d published the year prior. He’s got a new poetry manuscript he’s about to send out—what to call it? I skip, just a little, when I describe a collage that I designed in a dream last night.

“What do you want for dinner?”

“Something rich. Something like a last meal.”

“Grilled cheese?” A black vulture swims across the sun, which looks like a beating heart in the sky. Fires raging in San Diego make the sunset pop so hard I want to tell the sky to Stop, stop it, you’re killing me. Have some decency and fade already.

Professor-friends text to say they are evacuating the San Bernardino Mountains again; they are getting divorces; they are losing their minds, and can we take their dogs? The power goes out. We sit and sweat and cough because the smoke of fires is coming from every direction.

I feel somewhat selfish, somewhat guilty, somewhat obtuse vying for an elective surgery while the world falls apart. We have enough employment; we can work from home; we have government-subsidized health insurance; we aren’t on fire; neither of us has caught COVID. Yet here I am in my crinkly paper gown, my thighs sticking to another examination table, wanting what I don’t have.

The new doctor comes in with two masks and a face shield, her blond bangs and ponytail, her light blue scrubs, her reading glasses. I realize that I can’t really see her, or that I can only see her because she’s wearing clothes—she’s like the Invisible Man.

“I read your chart,” she says, looking through a file folder. “Diagnosed with advanced endometriosis in 2013 when your ovary was removed. And your uterus is pretty thick—you’ve got the adenomyosis diagnosis here in 2016. And your health survey—you’re having a period every two weeks?”

I perk up a little on the exam table. She’s reading the prompt, I’m thinking, she’s actually reading it. Now we might be getting somewhere. Com-mun-i-ca-tion.

“Yes. And for months I’ve had this intermittent sharp pain where the right ovary was—like I’m being stabbed. I sometimes wonder if I have chronic appendicitis or if the ovary has grown back.”

She asks me what my pain level is right now. She nods. I have her attention, I think, though it’s hard to tell, given that I can see only about an inch of her person.

“Has anyone told you about your options?”

“I have options?”

“Yes, of course.” She laughs a little muddled laugh from underneath the layers. “Ablation to start.”

“A-what-shun?”

“Essentially shaving the uterus so it’s not so thick.”

“Shaving”

“There are also fertility drugs.”

“No, no, no. Look, my chart says that my husband had a vasectomy so—”

“Did you freeze his sperm?”

“No.” I try to imagine what it would take to freeze Jonathan’s sperm, if that was something we could have done ourselves using freezer bags or perhaps ice-cube molds or would a person have to pay for a special sperm refrigerator? At the time we were just two underemployed students too poor for propane and surviving off Trader Joe’s frozen egg rolls. Planned Parenthood took it from there.

“Well,” she says, and pauses for inflection, “there are other ways ” Behind her shield and glasses, she is squinting conspiratorially. She makes the smallest gesture with her chin like she’s nodding toward some secret backroom where they keep the frothing, fertile males chained up. I linger for a moment on whatever type of divine intervention science has cooked up recently but then snap out of it.

“Look, I get the whole Eve-ate-the-apple-whatever situation here, but I want a hysterectomy. I’ve suffered enough.” We look at each other for a beat, searching each other’s exposed skin for clues about how to proceed. If we could just see each other! I imagine unhooking the elastic loops of my mask from my ears, imagine unwrapping each other in a slow-motion montage, lifting her plexiglass veil and risking it all, placing her hand on my bloated belly, Feel my pain, doctor—but she is beginning to back out of the room, mumbling excuses about success rates, my age, how she can’t guarantee anything, extended wait times. It’s as though I’ve asked her for a late, late-term abortion, like my kid is sixteen and would she please just take him camping in a forest and leave him there. She wants no part of it.

“It feels so heavy,” I grovel. “The uterus. Like it weighs ten pounds. I hurt so badly. It feels like I’m pregnant with a . . . demon.”

She winces at my analogy, tells me I should come back in a few months when the virus is under control. When the vaccine is out. Come back, and we’ll discuss . . . other options.

Ever since the sharp pains started in March, my mother has been my hysterectomy cheerleader, sending me texts that read: “Just get it all out. You aren’t going to use it!” “Just be done with it. Best decision I ever made.” “Sex gets even better without a cervix!” “No more pap smears. You’ll be so relieved.”

But I am starting to have my doubts. And as soon as the doubts start, my period stops coming every two weeks. It waits a month, two months. The pain changes. It builds up like layers of sediment. Maybe I am pregnant. I google things like: “effectiveness of vasectomy after ten years?” “can get pregnant vasectomy?” I look down at my bloated belly that doesn’t match the rest of me and think about how maybe the doctors are right—maybe it would be easier if I had not fought my programming. Maybe if we had had a couple kids instead of getting second masters’ degrees, I could have slowed the growth of the endometriosis. Maybe my cancer risk wouldn’t be as high. I’m in the kitchen, barefoot and nibbling on gluten-free cake, when a heavy, burning sensation rends my belly. If I knew that in so many months I would give birth to whatever was ballooning my stomach and shoving on my bladder, I’d feel relief. The doctors have to deliver a baby, demon or not. They don’t, apparently, have to give me a hysterectomy.

Waves upon waves of red flowers have joined the fray. Claret cups, freckled milk vetch, desert paintbrush. Skyrockets. Jonathan makes me several flower presses from scrap wood, and we fill the garage with eye-watering pollen. We wait several days and then open the presses, sneezing and rubbing our eyes with the backs of our hands while we admire how scientific we feel. The claret-cup and beavertail blossoms look like slices of human flesh, the kind that researchers might observe on microscope slides. The Canterbury bells look like flattened arteries. The peachy lobes of the bladder sage are emptied alveoli. We rub our chins, arriving at no new conclusions, and I store the pressed flowers away in plastic tubs beneath my bed.

July and the flowers are gone. Tourists shoot off bottle rockets and M80s for weeks. There is a plague among the rabbit population, and we find them dead under the cars, next to the trash cans, on the side of the road. It’s called rabbit hemorrhagic disease. Fevers, internal bleeding, liver failure, death. The plague gets so bad that Jonathan insists on doing a sweep of the driveway before we go outside, trying to spare me the sight of baby bunny corpses having fallen from the sky. One complex fire gives way to another. After a negative pregnancy test, I start the SuperLowDoseBirthControl pills again and stop telling people I’m having a hysterectomy. The election is drawing near. My mother has a small heart attack—the first and only health scare she’s had in my adult life—but we don’t visit out of fear of the virus. A gender-reveal party in a nearby city burns over thirteen thousand acres of wilderness. Images of refrigerator trucks full of bodies. Beatrix gets up one day and can’t stop limping. It’s difficult to sleep. My bladder wakes me up every few minutes. At the kitchen table I make small collages with crumbling ephemera, half-awake. I am so tired I run into things, my shins covered in bruises. I mistake glue sticks for ChapStick more than once. One morning I accidentally give Bea’s seizure meds to Maynard, and we have to induce vomiting with hydrogen peroxide while I sob. Occasionally, alone, I slap myself in the face. Nine months lurch by painfully, awkwardly.

“You gotta get out of bed, open the curtains . . . let in Christ’s light . . .”

“I’m going to turn off that radio.”

“Don’t. Just leave it.”

“Come on, put your feet on the floor . . . Do it for Je-sus!”

“Did the song just say, ‘Do it for Jesus’?”

“I’m turning it off. The static is insane.”

“Just turn it down.”

Jonathan gets out of his chair and marches toward the tiny radio in the corner of the waiting room. As soon as he sits back down, one of the ladies in pink scrubs leaves her post at the counter and turns up the radio, louder this time.

“They could at least get a decent sound system.”

“Oh my God, she just rhymed Christ with rice.”

The towering cross outside the main hospital building is not for show. This is a Seventh-day Adventist medical campus. Even though my first scheduled appointment was canceled by the doctor due to a COVID exposure, I still got a call from the survey robot, and the first question was: “Did your medical practitioner offer you spiritual guidance?”

The surgery center is world-renowned—if you can get an appointment, if you aren’t disconnected so many times you pitch the phone against the wall, if you can get the surgery approved by your insurance, if you can afford the co-pays, if you don’t die waiting for the surgery. If all these things, then you will receive excellent care and feel 97 percent certain a surgeon won’t sew you up and then pat her head, looking for her bifocals. You are 100 percent guaranteed, however, that a fleet of young residents will be drawing sketches of your innards in their notebooks and whispering to each other about who they went out with the night before.

My right side is splitting as if hewn by a hatchet. I am exhausted from pain and lack of sleep, awash in existential dread. I want to know: What does it mean for something to be bearable? What are the limits? How far do our obligations to the god of endurance stretch?

In high school I was terrible at memorizing facts. Lines in a Neil Simon play, easy—what year the one guy did the thing at Mount Whatever? No way. As fascinating as I found some aspects of world history, I was a creative, not a scholar, and that sometimes felt disappointing. “It’s a strength to know your weakness,” my mother assured me when I enrolled in community college. And even though my father could be a real hard-ass, he never forced me to finish my dinner. If I ignored his shouts to pump out ten more push-ups, it’s not like he kicked me. Since then, I’ve tried to pay attention to which arrows are piercing my heel. I’ve been judicious about sitting out the rounds I know would end in my head getting knocked off. But now I am being told by an entity much larger than parents or teachers that I am not allowed to quit my reproductive system. I am trying to tap out after thirty-six years of playing the game, saying, “Uncle, uncle” and the ref has his fingers in his ears.

I am essentially being told that a hysterectomy is the Ultimate Abortion—thou shalt not kill The Organ That Houses Life. Thou shalt grin and bear it, bear children, even if it turns you into a surly, shambling bear of a person.

Have I clung too closely to the belief that my body is solely mine?

The answer is a definite yes. I lay my head on Jonathan’s shoulder and listen to commercials about investing in gold, Spring Bible Camp, and a makeup company inspired by scripture.

“I don’t know about this,” I say.

“Keep the faith,” Jonathan says, and sings much too loudly, “Do it for Jee-sus.”

When the doctor comes in, I am sitting in a chair, fully clothed. She offers me an elbow, and I offer her my fist for a bump, and we end up doing an awkward combination of hand-waving and limb-tapping. She sits in a chair too, and already it feels different than previous times.

She takes a moment to show me her face, pulling her mask down below her chin, smiling, then pulling it back up, as intimate and scandalous now as flashing a breast. I do the same.

“Sorry I’m a little late. Our printer froze at page seventy of your file.”

I tell her it’s okay. I’m used to waiting. Her eyes show me that she’s sorry, that the mouth behind the mask is sad. At first, I question whether she’s genuine, but within a few minutes of me telling my story we are both tearing up. She hands me a tissue and then takes one for herself.

“What I want to see is that my patients have tried other options. And you have. So you are the perfect candidate for a hysterectomy.”

I am standing and coming at her for a hug, and she lets me do it. We laugh a little. She tells me she is excited for me.

“I hope you know what I mean,” she says. “I’m excited for your quality of life to improve.”

“Excited is the perfect word,” I say, gushing.

I give her the list of organs I want removed, and she is of the same mind. “You don’t need that appendix, and it’s obviously causing you pain. There’s probably scar tissue on it.”

“So—let’s do this. How’s next week sound?”

She laughs. I don’t.

“Next month?”

She shakes her head, furrowing her brow.

“It’s March 7 . . .” She counts in her head, looking at the ceiling to confer with the Great Surgery Calendar in the sky. “So . . . May? June?”

I sink a little in my chair. How quickly the mind can negatively frame a boon.

“Well, my semester ends in May . . . so May is good. June is okay.”

“You’ve made it this far, right?”

“Right.”

I have made it this far, I think. We shake hands, then hug again. The next time we see each other, I’ll be on a mild sedative, naked inside a blue-and-white-checkered hospital robe, my hair in a shower cap, ready to lie beneath her scalpel.

On the drive home, Jonathan and I smile at each other, giddy, eating the plethora of gluten-free snacks we picked up from the AdventistSuperHealthFoodEmporium. “Is it real?” I keep asking. “Do you think it’s actually going to happen?” Navigating traffic, he assures me that it’s real. I feel happiness, relief, but I also can’t help but hear a patronizing slow clap arising from the boardroom of the medical-industrial complex—You did it, kid. You passed our tests. Barely.

July 7, 2021. When my eyes flutter open, a nurse is there, smiling behind a mask, giving me more of whatever drug has got me feeling like I’m a root-beer float. Jonathan appears with a protein shake and gluten-free crackers. My mother and stepfather are there after a long drive down the coast, and I immediately launch into a convoluted story about two professor-friends of ours whose lives fell apart during the pandemic. I have a lot to say, but I’m saying it slowly, slurring like I’ve been hit in the neck with a tranquilizer dart. I take small drinks of water, gagging while I talk—my throat still recovering from the tube—gesticulating with my IV-laden hands. My parents squint, nod, trying to piece together the fragments of backstory. Somewhere near the climax, when one of the professors, now homeless, finds herself sleeping in a grove of orange trees, I take a sip of the shake and immediately regurgitate it back into my plastic cup.

It is good to be taken care of. It is good to have doctors and nurses come to my bedside and ask me how I’m feeling, to tell me the surgery went fine, that at the very least, the choice I’ve made has been honored. The drugs are magnificent. I dream of wildflowers and fires and rabbits and the people I care about who lost things they will never get back, but this time I am not afraid. I wake and walk down the brightly lit hall with my IV pole and bag of urine, and there are so many nurses and interns. The back of my gown is open, and I can feel the warm hands of an angel tying it closed. I smile at all the helpers, nod and say, Hello, hello—my mask hanging from the pole like a white flag of surrender—and someone is there to help me put it on. I think to myself: Now, was that so hard? Was it so hard to let a person choose what happens to their own body? To decide what they can bear? A big bouquet of flowers has been placed at the end of the hall for me to walk toward: flowers that don’t grow where I’m from. Tulips and carnations and baby’s breath. I get a little dizzy during my walk at three a.m., and someone pulls up a padded chair for me to rest in. All these helping hands. Where have they been until now? I tell everyone Thank you, thank you for your kindness.

If I have regrets about this or anything—today, tomorrow, next spring—and surely, they will come, by God, let them be my own.

Read more from Issue 20.1.