(And some of it stays in Write-Ins. What part? You gotta attend to find out.)
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I ask you to save my fibroid. Dear Surgeon, I am serious. I want at least one look at the monster you say might devour me.
The first doctor is frustrated that she can’t enter my uterus with any of her tools or brute strength - she really leans into it. A woman thirty years younger than I am yells at me: “Do you not understand that it is very probably likely that you have cancer?! “ I sit up on my elbows, my socked feet still in cold metal stirrups. Dear Doctor, I do not know. This is the first I am hearing of it.
I want to ask her all the hard questions, but the look on her face. She is flushed, enraged, disappointed. I have done this to myself by taking Hormone Replacement Therapy. Da da da da…It’s always Da da da da…Her rubber gloves are pulled off with a sigh, and she tells me I can put my clothes back on. But I don’t ask that doctor anything else. I fire her.
It’s the next doctor that says simply: “Six months.” Tell it to me straight, Doc, I think. His words run right through me. I mean, at this size and rate of growth, if it is what we fear, then six months. I want to impale myself in his office chair. But not really. I sit and take it. He tells me he fishes off the rock jetty in the same bay where I swim in every day. I don’t know how I get a clue - maybe his even temperedness - but I ask him suddenly the question alcoholics ask each other when they want to be discreet: “Are you a friend of Bill’s?” Yes Doctor, you smile.
So this is the first of the gifts the fibroid gives. I get to look in the same bathroom mirror I looked into while my husband died. The same mirror I find him in, behind my eyes and looking back at me, after he goes. Now I can look into this same portal and ask: what if I’m smack in the middle of my life, exactly where I’m supposed to be, except with a six month expiration date?
What I want to do is watch. I’ve always wanted to. I can get lost in the lights in my eyes. It’s my most seamless addiction. What I want, Dear Doctors, is to be both asleep and awake on the operating table. If interns can observe, why can’t you set up a monitor for me to watch the movie? Nothing calms me down more. I want to watch you hesitating at the first slice, opening me at the front, and pulling all my lady parts out. I want to see if they dangle, one attached to the other like sausages on a line, even though I have never been attached. I want to hear you say: “Whoa, that was a big one! “ Like you’re reeling in a fish. There’s so much to fear, but what I mind is going under. Being put under. It seems violent to take my eyes away so I can’t lose myself in the plot of my body. But I’m tired of asking.
A flickering box was a loyal nighttime companion as a child. Soft fluttering, a sound and light show in the room off the carport, the couch I slept on, the almost inaudible English accent, Vivien Leigh and her eyes in a trench coat at a train depot, unbearably ashamed for something no-one will say, the deep deep blacks, coal and steam vapor rising behind, the unbearable white glow - even the grays are painted in. The test pattern and the hiss of television actually going off at night.
I’m sixty four. I am in possession of the knowledge that everything in life is a fifty-fifty shot. A roll of the dice. There are no more ‘good’ or ‘bad’ choices. Tragedy rolls around like tumbleweeds. You’ve got the same odds every time. This information should make things easier. But who listens? Dear Patient - who listens?
Most of the summer I wait with my six-months-to-live phantom shimmering everywhere I lay my eyes. By October I have used up three of the hypothetical ones I might have left. I’m not necessarily unhappy, but I don’t know what that means anymore. I drill down to the moments on the ground and in the baywater. My small blue pop-up tent in the shape of a pyramid, my bay, my swimming gear, the hungry gulls. I do ask myself if I would be doing anything radically different if I knew my fibroid better, and surprise myself by answering: Maybe not, dear patient. But who can really ever believe in their own disappearance?
One day on a stairwell years ago that I don’t remember I yelled to my husband: I just realized! We are here, smack dab in the middle of our lives. Yes! he yelled back.
I have no idea what color it was or how big my fibroid looked in your hand since you whisked it quietly away. At least I hope it was quiet. I ask you if it had hair and fingernails like a cyst, and you laugh, Dear Surgeon. One day you call me cute - you’re so cute - woman to woman, you know. One thirty something surgeon in a chic black vegan leather skirt to another in a barely blue paper gown. Cute.
Rather than an X-ray I want to place my rubbery monster on the glass of a Xerox machine like we used to do with our other body parts. To press the thin white top down awkwardly, squish it to get it flatter, and then see the beautiful captured distortion emerge slowly from the paper chute. Ah, to be human again with the Xerox machine.
Can I call Oxy a ‘slowcoach colleage’? My attendant to the gash? A giant of a Caribbean nurse walks me around the loop the next day. Dear Nurse, you talk to me like I am regular, but I am Oxified. You wrangle me up and ambulatory, insisting I need fresh sheets and water, tell me tales of your island and the fibroid you had removed that was bigger than a cantaloupe. Mine was fused inside my uterus, the doctor tells me in a dream, as if it wanted to occupy all the empty space. Turns out two out of three women I met in that hospital alone had their own monsters removed.
The woman in the bed next to me has questions. They happen from behind the curtain at fifteen minute intervals day and night: Where is she?! What is happening?! Where is everybody?! Why is she here?! I try to answer them, but she can’t really hear me. “Whaaat?! “ she yells through the curtain. “Heeeelp! Heeelp me!’” she shouts into the abyss. I can’t shout with my entire middle swaddled and bandaged. Oxy and I have to call in the team: “Heeeelp! Heeelp! Heeelp Meeee!” I scream. The woman next door goes silent. Three staff rush in to tell me to quiet down! No joke. I try to be reasonable, Dear Staff. I ask why I’m not being paid to look after her, since you completely ignore her cries, and run out of the room as fast as you can to get away from her.
I ask for some earplugs and you tell me this isn’t a country club. I really am pushed to the limit before Oxy and I tell the Dear grad intern, slumped on the floor with his back against the wall, that he is going to go behind the curtain and hand the woman with a thousand eternal questions the plastic thingamajiggy connected to her bed, and he is going to put it in her motherfucking hand and teach her how to push the call button so I can get some sleep.
I still don’t know, Dear reader, if I have only three months left to live in that crazy room in October, but Oxy and I feel it is the right thing to do, and we are gratified because the woman behind the curtain does not utter another word until daylight. Yes, you do exist, Dear neighbor. We made you real, and seen and heard, and now you know how to use the call button.
Dear fibroid ovaries and uterus, now that you’re gone I wish I had extracted you forty years ago. Your heavy interference kept me from the Silence. All the tears and gnashing of teeth and dying on hills, counting each month’s days as the moon swelled to its limit of damage. I’m sorry. But it’s getting quieter every day now that you’re gone. I would also like to thank my hormones for saving me from mad nurses and drunk men and speeding cars, walking bottles of whiskey and deaf women crying for help.”
Outside the local grocery store
I am greeted by poppy pushers.
Memorial Day looms in the patriotic air.
American Legion Auxiliary fellow, in his
crisp white shirt, white hair military grade,
his cap firmly on the dome, his belt buckle signifying Army.
He asks if I’d like a crepe paper poppy
and hands me a flyer with the war poem In Flanders Field.
“We learned the poem in high school English class
I ask, did you as well?”
I recite from memory
“In Flanders Field the poppies blow
between the crosses, row on row.
And in the sky, the lark still bravely singing.”
I am a valiant peace monger.
I ask the veteran about his perspective
of our current Commander-in-Chief
and the conflict in Iran.
He calmly collects his thoughts and answers
“It’s a misguided approach offered to us
and he doesn’t deserve our respect
for a leader only concerned for his own gain.”
I whew inside. “I agree with you, Sir.”
I ask his assistant to write down another poem
we memorized in 1965,
also of WW 1 era
called Dulce et Decorum Est.
refuting the patriotic idea of war
with its refrain:
“The Great Lie
Dulce et Decorum Est-
how sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country. “
Today I listen and weep to the girl child voice of Kate Bush
and her song Army Dreamers, out since 1980
and heard by me the first time the other day.
“He could have been a father. He didn’t even make it to his 20s,”
a lament for a young soldier who comes home in a tin box.
“Could have been a rock star, didn’t have money for a guitar.
Could have been a politician, didn’t have the education.”
Recalling those years when I grew up with a family next door,
had a son named Rodney.
They lived with too many kids and not enough $ for the month.
Rodney wasn’t much for school, dropped out, got drafted,
sent to Vietnam. Came home in a flag-draped box.
The Human Cost of War.
The Great Lie.
Truly, this helps immensely. And we want a big old circle to learn with, write with, resist with, create with, grow with, and support!
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