I’m lying on the paper-covered bed in the tiny room the very nice double named ultrasound tech escorted me into. We’re making awkward small talk as I push my slacks down and arrange the towel across my belly. ULTRASOUND TECH: You had a hysterectomy but you’re still having a period? ME: Yup. That’s why the doc sent me here. UT: That doesn’t make sense. Let’s see what we’ve got going on here. She squirts the warm goo on my belly and starts the scan. UT: You’re not very full. ME: Sorry. I did drink the 40 oz. of liquid. Should I drink more? UT: This should be fine. We continue with the silly small talk while she’s scanning and we’re both looking at the screen. She asks what brought us to Tennessee. I launch into the short long version of why, she’s nodding - and then she pauses. There’s a weird moment and then she asks me if I was sure the doctor took out my uterus. ME: Yup. Totally sure! I have picture of it. Why? She points at the screen I’m already looking at and says - UT: Well here’s your ovary… I see an ovary looking shadow. She moves the wand - UT: and here’s what looks like your uterus. And she points at a womb looking shadow. My jaw hits the floor, and my breath ceases to exit my body. I am speechless. I have never been speechless before. There are literally no words coming from my mouth and no words forming in my brain. Not one. Eventually my brain restarts and I stutter - Me: Um…WHAT? I have a… a… what? UT: I’m not sure. ME: Do they grow back? UT: No. ME: But… I… she… A WHAT? But I have a picture of… UT: This doesn’t make sense. And then a thought crosses my mind. ME: Could I be… Am I pregnant? UT: Well, if you have a uterus and you’ve been having unprotected sex it would be possible. I start laughing. Hard. The situation is so absurd I can’t do anything else. A uterus AND a baby. So awesome! She pokes around a bit more but the only things that keep appearing on the screen were the lone ovary and the shadow she thinks is my uterus. She tells me I’ve not got a lot of liquid in me so the scan isn’t that accurate. She’s going to do a second one, the transvaginal one. Yea for me. She leaves the room to let me change for ultrasound part two. I get myself ready and grab my phone to text husband. I send my text and lie back. I can't stop giggling - though there is a manic tone to the sound. I feel the phone buzz with text after text but UT comes back in before I can read them I’m in slight hysterics at the thought of what husband's face must have looked like when he read the text and at the bizarre state of affairs I find myself in; half dressed on a paper-covered table with a possible regrown womb. The UT isn't smiling. She’s upset with herself for blurting. I reassure it’s fine. I joke with her that I’m just trying to figure out what they took out instead. Am I missing a kidney or part of my liver? Was I a rare two-womb woman and no one caught it until now? At what point do I call the surgeon and tell her she screwed up. If it did re-grow, am I one for the medical books? Could I end up on Good Morning America with my look-a-like Robin Roberts?
Side note for all you lucky men and ladies who haven’t had the pleasure of a Transvaginal Ultrasound, it’s not enjoyable. Not one part of it is fun, not the please insert this into yourself part, not the moving about this way and that way to get a proper picture of your ovary and not the holding it at a very awkward angle for a very long time to get an audio recording of the ovarian artery. Not fun at all. Many very uncomfortable and silent minutes later – silent except for awkward tittering bursts of laughter from me - UT finishes poking and pulling and taking pictures of all that might be inside me and leaves the room with them to let the radiologist have a look. She asks me not to change until she gets back. It’s at this point I read husbands panic texts and start laughing again. I might get my Kitchen Bet winnings because I think this has totally scared him into getting his vasectomy. A win - of sorts. UT comes back into the room. She apologizes again for the blurt, tells me she’s in trouble for telling me anything, that I’ll get the results sent to me and then she tells me I can get dressed. I reassure her again that it’s fine, that it’s been an interesting time and I jokingly ask her if I’m going to need another hysterectomy. She leans down and pats me on my shoulder to reassure me but it feels like her subtext is - you poor dear. UT: There is no uterus. ME: Phew! Then…? UT: You just have a really prominent cervix. It takes me a moment to process this. Did she say I have a really prominent cervix? Does that mean… I am African American after all… I am speechless again but this time because I’m laughing so hard I'm snorting and can't breath. When words finally form a sentence, I speak - ME: So, a prominent cervix huh? Can I put that on a resume?
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At some point in my life, my body started seeing caffeine as a bad thing. I went from being able to drink coffee or chug a coke at all hours, practically mainlining it with my meals, as my meals, to suffering through a restless night if I even catch a whiff of caffeine after 10am.
And thus the vicious circle begins; I am tired. I have a “the very big one” mint mocha. I drink it slowly because it is heaven in a cup. I finish it after the 10am deadline. I can’t sleep that night. I wake up groggy. I need a cup of coffee to open my eyes. This morning I’m due for that stupid ultra-sound where you drink 40 oz. of liquid and HOLD IT until they can push down on your bladder with strength of ten thousand men while the ultrasound thing takes pictures of your insides and you try not to pee your pants. I’m really looking forward to it – how could one not look forward to a test your doc has ordered because “I’d like to see what’s going on in there. Maybe something grew back” - but I’m typing this with one eye closed and my hands are still asleep and I really need coffee but I’m pretty sure if I drink 40 oz. of coffee, I won’t sleep for a week. I had this same type of ultrasound nearly two years ago right before they took out my baby maker. At that point I had a uterus filled with fibroid tumors, one the size of a twelve-week fetus. That guy was so badass; he started growing on the outside of said uterus. If I were telling you this story in person, this is the point when I would whip out my phone and ask you if you’d like to see a picture of my uterus. And this is the point when I would thoroughly gross you out or make you ponder the wonders of the body and how all our parts work and how cool it is that my uterus and tumor look like a heart. But we’re on the web so you’ll have to goggle pictures of wombs if you want to get all deep and awesomely icky. Squirrel! Anyway, the liquid combined with the alien bodies growing inside me made for a wickedly uncomfortable afternoon. Not helped at all by the fact that the ultrasound folks were running an hour behind. One hour feels like ten when your bladder is filled to the brim. The waiting room was filled with women doing various states of the one-foot pee dance shuffle hop. One poor nine-month pregnant lady peed her pants right there in the lobby after screaming, and rightly so, about the evils they were bringing upon us. I’m SO excited to be doing this again. Do you think 40 oz. of beer at 8am make a bad impression? I got lost on the way to get Husband’s car serviced yesterday. I grumbled about being asked. I griped about the inconvenience. I pissed and moaned about the extra errand in my day. And then I got lost.
Well, not really lost. I took a right when the lovely lady in my GPS on my phone would have rather I’d taken a left but she didn’t yell or scream or tell me I was stupid, she just recalculated and politely let me know what I needed to do next. And next was a beautiful drive car through the green rolling hills of Tennessee, dotted with occasionally picket fences and rolls of hay. Very different from the last time I took my car in for a service in California. I got lost then too but the lovely lady in my GPS wasn’t as nice. Nor were the drivers. No one waved to let me know it was my turn at the stop sign. No one smiled as they passed me on the road. Not one roll of hay was spotted –I’m totally not counting the stuff the guys on the corner were smoking as hay. I did, however hear lots and lots of cuss words – most of them coming loudly directly out of me. I suspect that GPS lady was also saying a few under her breath too but she was too polite to share. I did learn that when you end up in a not so safe neighborhood in San Jose because you got off the wrong exit, no one will smile at you and wave you on - unless you count the middle finger rapidly rising into the air as a wave. The good news, no one in the not so safe neighborhood wanted my Smart Car. The bad news, if they had tried, I might have been able to get directions since the GPS lady was failing horribly at directing me out of the hood. It took me two hours with traffic and my side sightseeing in the hood trip to get to the dealer for my service last year. Two hours of flop sweat and stress with my shoulders in my ears and my heart beating way to rapidly for a safe drive. Two hours there and two hours back that shot my day to hell and put a black cloud of doom above my head for far too long. Yesterday, my extra ten minutes of lost took me past these beautiful mansions, situated perfectly in the center of their acres of green grass, their mailboxes decorated artfully for fall with fancy ribbons and flowers and pumpkins. No one cut me off or cursed me out and I didn’t have to raise the finger or my voice once. I just drove and sang and looked at the pretty houses and trees and birds and took in deep calming breaths because I could and not because I needed to. It was like a guided meditation, it was so peaceful and lovely. And, when I got there, the service guy called me ma’am - in a polite and friendly way, not a ‘your old now’ way - and gave me a loner car while chatting with me about mundane things and laughing at my silly jokes. The other owners dropping off their cars actually smiled at me and exchanged pleasantries. AND two people actually said I had lovely hair and were amused when I laughed and laughed and laughed. Don’t tell Husband but I would actually take his car in for a service again. My attempts to live healthy lasted until we started to take the kitchen out. It is seriously hard to choose healthy over easy while standing in your dining room looking at all your kitchen stuff in boxes, or stacked on the folding table, or shoved on the floor. It’s hard to concoct a meal out of the frozen items in the fridge that’s living next door behind the plastic door we’ve fashioned to keep out the dust from the partially demolished kitchen. Or a meal made from the sorry remnants of the pantry, the items I thought were once a good idea while standing starving in the grocery store aisle. I no longer can cook the tins of soup unless I try to in the wonky microwave - the microwave that will sometime choose to heat things with the fire of seventeen suns if it heats things at all. I cannot bake the box of blueberry muffins – not that the oven would bake them, unless you consider burned to charcoal on one side baked. I do have the fixings for s’mores but that doesn’t make a meal healthy and 7am is too early to start a fire in the fire pit. Which leaves me with a packet of miso soup or packages of seaweed. For breakfast. Ugh. I spent far too long this morning trying to make my cup of tea. Husband had snagged the extension cord we’d be using for all the electrical appliances to power the fridge. (Yes mom, we were only using one at a time.) I found another cord but it was three prongs and the outlets in the living room were only two prongs so a hunt for a three-prong adapter followed by a hunt for an outlet. There is, for your information, only one outlet in the dining room. One lone outlet supposed to serve the whole dining room. One stupid over-painted outlet that didn’t even work because, we learned yesterday, some sort of creature ate through it.
This meant the outlet we were using in the Good Room next door was supposed to power the hot water pot, the toaster, the microwave, and the toaster oven. (Again Mom, only one at a time.) Of the three other outlets in the Good Room, one was occupied by the piano humidifier-which I never knew was a thing till we moved here. One outlet held a security camera and the useless light from Ikea that looked great in our last house and now looks like we’re camping. And the final one was housing another security camera and the Wi-Fi booster. It took me ten minutes of moving the damn cord around the room, all the while trying not to let it lie on the Good Room couch or rug or floor because it was last used in the dirt to power my rototiller and, after all that, I ended up on the same outlet as the fridge. (Sorry mom. I tried.) Meanwhile, Tigger the Dog was freaking out at my growing angst and the increasing volley of cuss words coming out of my mouth. She started to “help” the situation by winding herself around my legs, two ‘babies’ in her mouth, her panic whine increasing in volume at the same rate as my cursing. Keep in mind while you visualize this that I’m carrying a dirty twenty-five-foot extension cord that is slowly unwinding from its perfect looped state. So, an 80lb anxiety ridden dog attempting to follow my unclear manic path across the Good Room floor resulted in me tripping over her, stepping on her tail, falling onto the couch and hitting myself in the face with the end of the cord -really not how I wanted to spend the first few moments of my morning. Breakfast this morning was a cup of tea, half a bag of Doritos from yesterday’s lunch and a bruise on my face. Doritos have corn in them and tea is from a plant. It’s going to have to count as a win. I really need one right now. Ten years ago in August, my mother was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Nine years ago October 4, she had a bone marrow transplant.
Considering the ride the Cancer had taken us on, the transplant was totally un-climatic. The nurse conformed she was my mother, took a small bag of platelet goo and hooked it up to her IV and that was that. She went home a few days later and a month after that, she was fighting to drive herself to her follow up appointments. My mother was a horrible patient. When you get a bone marrow transplant, all your stuff is rebooted. If you get your marrow/stem cells from someone else, you get their blood type, their allergies and even, someone said, their food preferences. Mom had an Autologous Transplant, meaning her bone marrow was her own so no new blood type but her cells were all brand new. She was essentially a baby again. The nurses even call it her birthday. Neat huh? As Mom’s caregiver, I was required to attend twelve weeks of classes at the hospital on the transplant processes and her after-care. Week twelve was the after-care session and it happened to fall a few days before Mom got her transplant. In the after-care class, I learned about the shots she’d need to get again, the daily appointments she’d need to attend, changes that might happen in her personality, the fact that the treatment could give her cancer and when she could begin to have sex again. The doom and gloom followed by this morsel of information was too much. I tried but there is no way I could stop the giggles on that one. I put my head down and pretended to be taking notes as they told me the timeline for my mother sex life. Which means no one saw me totally lose it when they told me SHE COULDN’T HAVE ANAL SEX FOR A YEAR! Now I’m not sure about you but, as a grown woman, I still get all wiggy when I think of Mom and her boyfriend ‘doing it’ and I have NEVER ONCE considered that she would be doing anything but missionary. (giggle giggle snort) The anal sex statement threw me. I was instantly back in 5th grade when we were learning about vaginas and penises and Thad Whatshisname gave a report on the testicles and I turned bright red and laughed so hard I cried. I couldn’t keep it together then and I couldn’t keep it together now. Everyone else in the class was totally serious, nodding and taking notes. This was a serious situation we were all in with the dreaded Cancer and all but really folks. Anal sex. They were giving us a timeline for our loved ones to have anal sex! Not one smirk at that? Class finished and I went into the ward, washed hands, gloved and gowned up and snuck quietly into Mom’s room. The room was dark. Mom was half way through getting the horrible nuclear bomb of chemo drugs they give you to kill off all the Cancer. The drugs that also happen to kill off all the other cells so the transplant has a clean slate to start in and it hurts. Her room smelled of whiskey, she had a wicked ‘hangover’ headache and she couldn’t keep her legs still, side effects of one of the last batch of major drugs they had given her. The batch of drugs that included Thalidomide, the drug that resulted in babies born without arms and legs. I pulled a chair up to Mom’s bed and said hello. She was lucid and in major pain but still Mom. She asked how class was. So I told her. ME: Well, you’re going to have to get your Measles, Mumps and Rubella shots again. Your treatment might give you cancer. But Mom, the really bad news, you can’t have anal sex for a year. And Mom said, - without a pause and as dry as it gets - MOM: Well, you’ll have to tell Boyfriend that. And we both lost it, laughing hard while her legs danced and I got drunk on her chemo drug fumes. Happy NINTH birthday Mom! You are truly one of a kind. |
AuthorMy name is ej. I'm a girl. I say that because with the short hair and the short initials, folks aren't always sure. More brilliant insights to who I am in About me Archives
April 2019
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