Hard to Say Goodbye

Issue 76

Pressure built behind my eyes as tears threatened to fall, but I set my mouth into a hard line and nodded vigorously. He nodded with me and his eyes told me he understood this was a difficult choice. There were parts I wanted to keep and I was grateful he knew there didn’t need to be a legitimate reason. I could keep what I wanted simply because I wanted it.

I rubbed my hand over my swollen belly. Recently I’d been having the familiar tug of round ligament pain. As my bowels roiled with gas, inside me was movement. It called to mind the sensation of the first persistent stretches from a baby’s foot onto the uterine wall. I marveled at the physical memory being recreated. It was time. Things would get would only get worse but I was fortunate to have an end in sight.

I was big.

This felt like a final pregnancy.

My friend said it truthfully and painfully that women “fall into disuse” when our fertility fails and that prompted a brief rush of tears. I felt I would be somehow useless without my uterus. It’s not about having another baby but having a choice. There was something about taking the choice away that made me clench, that made me writhe in bed, racked with sobs months before. It felt unfair.

After delays, physical exams, scans and consultations with four doctors, the painful verdict was in: I needed a hysterectomy.

I grieved the unrealized potential. “I have so many good eggs,” I joked bitterly to friends, but really I was telling the listener that I still had value. I still meant something. But I had multiple fibroids in a misshapen uterus that needed to be removed. I could feel some of those benign tumors with gentle pressure on my lower abdomen when I laid down. The surgeon said my uterus was the size of a 16 week gestation uterus and came up just under my belly button.

It wasn’t just the size of the organ but the amount of blood I lost each month. Six years ago, after falling asleep on the morning drive to work and seeing my general practitioner to figure out why, I was informed by two doctors during followup that I could have died. Treatments followed which worked well to resolve the severe anemia and I had about three good years until the bleeding returned as a slow and persistent leak. Bloodless days became less and less.

Fear makes you forget when you’ve been brave. Scarcity makes you forget your abundance. I already had two good eggs, hatched, thriving, dynamic, and incredible beings. However, I could not help but spin fantasies about a third child and be tortured by what ifs. Another curly auburn Afro? Maybe a love for writing? The feelings were grounded in nostalgia but ultimately hollow because none would come, no squirming, pale person. I would instead have something removed but nothing added and it was this subtraction that stung my heart.

I tried not to dwell on these thoughts, because like the organ itself, I was holding tight to something with barbs.

I reminded myself that I never shifted my whole identity to one of the dichotomous online mom archetypes of either fanciful or miserable but as something else: the sage¹². I was a shepherd to a new person and it was my responsibility to love both them and who they loved, to teach them concepts and develop their discernment. It was my job to l. For me, motherhood changes as children do, and we must adapt with it. Parenting occurs for the rest of one’s life in one way or another and I already committed myself to two lives. I wasn’t even sure I could be a good mother to three, which was a years’ old consideration I already put to rest.

My inclination is to cocoon while I solve a problem or cope with deep emotions, but we are never bound by the ways we learned to survive. I started reaching out to friends and family to let them know about my surgery. What is wonderful about community is that every person nourishes you differently, with a mixture of laughs, tears, affirmation, and reassurance. The balance is natural, visceral, with little need for supplements.

One of the best was from my mother-in-law, who cheered me in the weeks before surgery:

ID: Text conversation citing a uterus’s “coming out party” and a willingness to help.

My uterus’s coming out party. In the middle of Pride Month. It lit me up from deep inside and peals of laughter resonated from my open mouth. It was perfect. I resolved to have a goodbye brunch where my organ would soon sashay away. I imagined a drag brunch where strangers and friends would celebrate this chapter. From then on, I could more confidently reaffirm my choice to get a hysterectomy since removing the tumors individually was not an option.

With more assurance than when the journey began, it was time to prepare. I roasted vegetables and froze them, chopped fruit, made oatmeal, and made chai. I called upon everyone in the house to take a corner and clean it. The was the type of cleaning where you go into the cobwebbed crevices.

Going about that strange task of readying my home and sick room for both recovery care and visits, I found a newborn cap still in plastic.

ID: Newborn cap in a sealed plastic bag

Surgery day came and I thought of a song to sing to the anesthesiologist. Everyone lauds the surgeons and nurses, but I don’t hear as much praise for the person administering the drugs to keep you asleep.

“Cloudless every day you fall upon my waking eyes…” I would began. She would smile and chuckle at the serenade, not knowing the artist was Pink Floyd. Despite my fantastical musings, no such thing occurred at showtime. On the operating table, I was afraid. There was no time for music. I squinted up at the ceiling and thought, this is major. I thought again about how wide they’d cut me, how a tube would be placed in my trachea, that my father said he would pray for me and my grandmother would be with me. I inhaled deeply then let a slow breath out. This was a routine surgery. Ordinary. I wasn’t going to die.

I don’t remember closing my eyes.

While wading through a haze of anesthesia, I called to the person transporting me to post-surgical recovery.

“My grandmother was supposed to be with me,” I said, weeping with my eyelids still closed. Then I fell into a half conscious sleep.

The weeks that have followed have been hard. I have to brace myself against a pillow to cough. I have hives on most of my body because my skin has been particularly sensitive. From an abdominal binder I was fitted with post-operatively to the fragrance in my detergent, the itchy eruptions have come in waves of intensity. I have had to let family help me with everything even though I’ve had no choice really. Some days are better than others. Everyday tasks leave me exhausted.

But I’ve gotten so many texts checking up on me from friends as far as the west coast. I received two bouquets of flowers. One of my best friend came over to give me a pedicure. I’m down over 10 pounds. There is so much time to sleep and read.

Most importantly, I don’t feel empty, I feel optimistic. Health issues originating with my troublesome organ will abate with time, not just the obvious one of anemia. I did not lose, but leveled out and am more at home in my body. An eclipse has passed and I am not in the birthing business anymore, but the business of conjuring ideas like magic, daydreaming and crafting fiction from it, and being a guide to those two good eggs.

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