Appt. 6
She tells me to tell her when it hurts.
(It hurts.) And I wonder what that means—hurt. To what degree? I mean, not the first time I’ve had hands lost up my cervix. I had the same IUD thing plopped in before—five years ago, sure, but now, at twenty-five, I can still recall the process back then feeling a bit, well, to make use of my extensive medical jargon, period-push-crampy. This time, though, if I close my eyes, I may think the woman’s nurse is simultaneously straddling me and kneading my uterus as though willing a balloon’s explosion.
There’s a headlamp over my doctor’s face. Appropriate—me, the frickin’ Cave of the Mounds up in there; her, specialized in just this, five-star reviews, brags Healthgrades, whatever that says. My sister says it can’t hurt, five being superior to one; she told me she’d come along if only she still lived in town, advised that I bring someone—Mom or Andy or, or someone. But I’m fine, I told her. Not a big deal. Not even worried. Can’t forever be relying on mommies and males for our whole adult lives, Laur.
I’m the female “Operation” body, legs locked up in the stirrups like spread scissors, the socks I borrowed from my mom—the blue wool ones, the ones with a sunflower on each ankle—my only clothing from my waist down. Each push of the doctor’s arm is the buzzer of that tweezer-looking thing, which, as a child, seemed like such an abstraction, a game—and, whatever it is she’s holding (There’s talk of a speculum? A single-toothed tenaculum? An endocervical brush? A hook?), it’s cold and it’s alarming and the cramps, they burn this time, vibrate almost, and I wonder Is this the hurt?, and as the buzzes build, electrify, magnify, I close my eyes for the nurse not to see them, see me, but this woman is buzzing and buzzing and her pokes are shocks and shocks and shocks and I can feel them, feel it, the build, the waves of electricity shredding up my crotch and I cry, I scream OKAYOKAY.
I’m embarrassed, scold myself for not taking it, worry I’m too much. But when I return to the visit notes a year later, read “pt looked well and comfortable, was in high spirits,” I’ll surge with delight.
But, for now, what I know is this: something’s different this time. And I knew this going in.
Appt. 2
I didn’t expect to be there, my bare legs stretched up and open like a goal post, a squat older gentleman urging me to scoot my butt closer. I was in Wisconsin, back home from school in Virginia on a winter break that would turn out to be a six-episode miniseries of vagina appointments. This time, a week prior to the aforementioned appointment, this man was up in there—some man the age of my father, some man who mentioned he, in fact, was my father’s doctor. Because my father talks, before he stepped into the room, shook my hand, this doctor knew I spoke Spanish and as such roared in with a “¡Buuuuuenos días!” And because he’d done some volunteer work in Costa Rica so many dozens of years ago, this doctor spent the entire appointment testing himself by speaking to me solely in Spanish while stretching for my uterus, administering a pap smear I hadn’t planned to have. But the week prior—the day I was scheduled to have my IUD changed—my OB/GYN’s nurse had informed me that I had had an abnormal test result two summers before.
Appt. 1
The nurse had done the height thing, the weight thing, the blood-pressure thing, the “age of first coitus?” thing, to which I said “coitus?” to which she said “sexual intercourse” and I felt like an idiot, wondered if the nurse’s keyboard-slaps were her recording notes on my brain capacity, and she continued typing, doing her “Mirena good then?” thing, the “sign here and here and here” thing, the “and this is you agreeing that you fully understand all the risks” thing, the “this is you acknowledging we’re not responsible if this and that and that happen” thing. But then she paused, said, “Oh.”
And I said, “Oh?”
And she said, “And you are aware you had an abnormal pap smear.”
Well, clearly the fuck not, said my face.
“You’ll need to take care of that first—a pap and colposcopy.”
“A cohl..pah…” The word made my tongue swell.
She stopped typing, stopped me. I figured this indicated she’d turn to finally face me, but instead she rested her head in her hand. “Kind of like a—a—mmmm…I don’t want to say scrape, but…”
“A scrape.”
“Mmm…yeaaaah.” Back to work. Her eyes clung to her screen. Whether her refusal to look at me could be credited to the rush of her day, to the anxiety I’d smoked out into the shared space, who’s to say. “A scrape. Up your cervix. That’ll let you know.”
Like a child, I stayed put at the foot of the exam table, watched her Ariana Grande ponytail flip and flap down her back.
“…Will let me know if I,” I said, “oh, I don’t know—have cancer budding and bleeding through me?”
“Your visit notes say they gave you two calls that week,” she said. “Says your voicemail was full.” Her fingers continued to clapclapclap at her notes. When I read them later—“pt claims she was unaware of abnormal pap, notes show pt was contacted and referred to gyn two years ago”—I’ll remember the pinch of shame, of not knowing better.
“So, two calls? That’s the protocol for attempting to inform someone of their body crumbling?”
“You’re young,” she said. “You should have the app, you know. Says it all right there.”
I’d visited my doctor for two physicals since that test result. No one once said a thing.
Appt. 2
Dr. Costa Rica told me he couldn’t find my IUD strings.
“Sooo, that means…” I said.
He shrugged. “Podría significar una variedad de cosas.”
“…like?”
“Como…”
“Stuck in me, not in me, lost in me…”
(shrug) “Could just not be there anymore.” (shrug) “Could’ve fallen out.” (shrug) “Things happen.”
(He’s right; they do happen. But this is not the norm. My strings being lost made me about as lucky as a person could expect to be. A person with a plump little man fingering his way up her crotch while asking about her father.)
He was swiveling circles on his stool, his legs so short they didn’t even brush the ground. I, paralleling, legs, gown still open territory, was willing myself not to stress-diarrhea across his table.
“So, I could just be…” I couldn’t get the words out, worrying about my eyes, always my worst giveaways, how they swell and spill whenever my mouth tries to discharge anything of substance.
I tried again. “Be like…having sex…without…you know…”
“Could be!” he said. “Chance that what you thought was birth control is turning out to be as good a prevention tactic as prayer.”
My stomach felt like it was about to fall from my butt. All I could think, all I could think was Lauren.
His face said he found himself humorous. “Having sex often?”
I told him often enough to make me want to vomit right then and there. He told me I was funny.
“So, I could be,” I said, “oh, I don’t know…let’s say…you know…”
“Pregnant?”
I nodded, cadaverous.
“Who’s to say!” he said it as though we were discussing life on Mars.
My stomach bubbled. I moved to hold it before I made the connection, flung my arms from my belly, sat on them instead, said, “You. You is to say.”
Appt. 0
When the nurse practitioner was implanting the IUD the first time, I was twenty. She told me I had a beautiful cervix. This was the second time seeing me—an appointment that followed a required consultation during which the clinic educated its patients prior to committing to a birth-control option. It was at a women’s clinic, run by an all-female staff. It’s since lost its funding.
Appt. Never-Going-to-Happen
At sixteen, I was introduced to what could happen if I let anyone inside me. My sister was nineteen, Pooh Bear–waddling around her college dorm, pregnant and slowly suffocating under the weight of what it means to carry a baby she didn’t intend to have. By the time I was twenty, it’d been a four-year parade of Lauren with no income; full-time school; food stamps; my parents, already living paycheck-to-paycheck, pulling money from their retirement to do what they could, keep her floating when the lawyers would call, request more money, more thousands to concretize her custody; cries of “That’s it! I’m out! I’m the dropout! Here I am! Teen-mom stereotype!” when she could neither find nor afford daycare for my nephew, when she could neither find nor afford healthcare for herself, for her son, when she had to carry him to lectures—carry his carrier, his bag of diapers and wipes and whatever other butt-gear, his food, fresh-pumped, his mouth-stopper, whatever served as a prevention method against a child murder-scream that might distract the fresh-out-of-high-school-year-olds.
Later, when I was nineteen, studying and flirting and binge-drinking my insufferable way through that same Midwestern forty-thousand-plus campus, I would trudge up Bascom Hill at 7:30 each morning, my eyelashes frosted and frozen together in the arctic weather, and I’d wonder how she did it, how she must have daily pep-talked herself to keep going because, well, what the fuck other choice did she have?
A junior in high school at the time of my sister’s pregnancy, I watched as Lauren’s skin stretched, imagined what was going on inside, her uterus and cervix too, pulling like thinning threads; her hair stripped of color; her heart drumming, thrumming a constant build, a reminder of more to be done; I slapped my screen from Google’s illustrations of the ovaries, her ovaries, her fallopian tubes, vagina muscle tissue, breasts, face, hands, feet, of promises they’d all expand, consuming more space than she could afford.
It was all, just, heavy.
▴ ▴ ▴
But then I let someone in. I suppose I wasn’t going to wait for forever/until I hit menopause. And when it happened, I was twenty-one, feeling asphyxiated by my anxiety over the possible consequences. I’d press my stomach if it felt too bloated, consume solely the calories that treated by body as though it were my first weekend of freshman year, as though I could flush out whatever I felt in my chest, inside me, growing.
“You know,” boyfriend-at-the-time said to me of my IUD, “I don’t think that’s very healthy, stuffing in something…something…invasive like that.”
“I mean, that or pregnancy.”
“Why don’t you do the period-tracking thing?” he said. “You’re smart.”
“Why don’t you do the condoms-buying thing?”
He laughed as though he were on a stage. Young, saturated with feelings and naive to strategies for tying them up, he—we—treated most of our conversations this way, like theater, confident our life happenings made us unique.
I stared at him the way Julia Roberts stares down lawyer-Ed in Erin Brockovich. “You’re fucking kidding.”
He paced the bed, slowed, cautious of his word choices. It’s an effect that, with the gift of retrospect, I’ve worried I have on my relationships.
“I just,” he began, taking a seat with me, “just, I don’t know, don’t think it’s right.”
“Think what’s right?” Perhaps, I still wonder, it’s not my word choices that have made my partners cautious of their own. Perhaps it’s the tone, the bite.
“I don’t know.” His voice flattened, sunk an octave.
“Well you have to know. I can’t be alone on this. It’s not like I really understand what’s healthiest, what I should and shouldn’t be taking.”
He put his hand on mine, and I let him. “Don’t cry,” he said. “None of this is a big deal.”
“I just—I just know I have to.”
“Have to what?”
I huffed. He was so stupid, I told myself. “Have to take something. ‘Not a big deal.’ I can’t end up that way.”
His smile said he was ready to make a joke. “You mean, make your nephew a little cousin?”
He patted my belly. He wasn’t funny.
“I’m not funny,” he said. “I just mean all these, all these drugs, right? They haven’t been around that long. Maybe they’re going to have some effects on you later on that you didn’t even expect.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m not sure it’s even there, so…”
“What do you mean you don’t know if it’s there.” His questions, likewise, had a way of discharging like accusations. What a match we were.
“The strings,” I said. “You’re supposed to be able to feel them.”
“It has strings.”
“Yeah.” Breathing was like sucking a blocked straw. “I can’t feel them.”
“Ew.” He leapt from his bed, paced, laughing to himself. “That’s kind of disgusting, you know.”
I said I knew.
“And that would mean what then?”
I was too afraid at the time to even mention pregnancy, as though saying it would make it come true.
He knew. “You’re fiiiine. They’re there.”
“And you know this.”
“Know it when I feel it.”
“You can feel it?” I didn’t believe him, and yet, still, there it was, the shame.
“Yeah. Kinda weird. Would feel better without it.”
I said I was sorry.
Appt. 4
At the ultrasound, the technician’s lubricated dildo was up me, snapping pictures to ensure my IUD was in the same spot, to see if she could see what my father’s doctor couldn’t.
“I’ve been the fucking Mirena spokeswoman for years,” I told the woman. (convo pause) “OB/GYN says this is super rare, having trouble seeing the strings or whatever.” (convo pause) “Just a weird fluke. Really not bad getting it in, though; I mean, zero period, no babies, no babies, no babies, i.e., i.e., i.e., breathe and forget, you know?”
She “hmm”d, fidgeted the thing around and up in there like a Wii controller.
“I can’t even tell you how many people I see with accidental pregnancies on the IUD,” she said. (Later, when I will tell this story to my OB/GYN, she will roll her eyes at the technician, inform me, “You can’t fight stupid.”) Beyond her, a picture of whom-I-assumed-to-be her four children stared at me, matching white, I kid you not, polos, matching white smiles—no signs of slips or spills or play; my nephew’s little shorts, little tops always smeared in something. I shifted my eyes as though I’d been blinded, continued word-hurling because what else was there, the air’s breathlessness, the stubborn tension continuously reminding me of watching Hercules with my nephew that winter break, of him laughing and laughing at the Fates unsuccessfully chopping and chopping at Hercules’s golden thread. I clung to the memory of his giggles, so young, so light, spraying at me like bubbles I wanted to catch, cradle, absorb. This could be a story one day, I thought. I’d try to look for the humor.
“Just timed getting a new one prior to losing my parents’ health insurance,” I said. “Year twenty-six, this one.” (I’d thought from that first time at twenty that by twenty-six I’d be good to get my own insurance, but there I was/here I am.) I told myself to stop, my mouth its own creature. “Booked my flight for the whole winter break,” it said. “That’s how it works now, I guess. Purchase flights cross-country; even with airfare included, still pay less to fly here and see a doctor under my parents’ health insurance than I would where I actually live.”
I’d induced her flood of sighs. “All these contraception methods they’re throwing at women these days,” she said. “All these women aimlessly thinking they know what’s best. Who knows what’ll come of it.”
All I needed to know, I told her, was a confirmation of no-babies-no-babies-no-babies because that shit’s just life-ruining, you know?
Her face said she didn’t.
Appt. 6
The OB/GYN exits me, shakes her head. “Once more.”
I want to say Again?, but I scold myself to tighten ship because what do I know.
She jumps back in, same routine, and I watch the nurse observe my face. And, once again, my body speaks for my mouth, launches out this gush of STOP.
The doctor pulls out of me again, wipes her forehead as though being pulled from a dramatic high-school basketball game. “I just…” she says to herself, her nurse. “I can’t.” She shakes her head once more. “It’s like I’m digging blindly up there.”
She says, “One more time,” pulls back out, slides back in. I urge my eyes to focus on my ankles, on the sunflowers, before laying my head back, committing the image to memory.
It feels like someone has lit a flame up my cervix. Another buzz and buzz and buzz; it’s as though a funny bone has been relocated to my uterus and I’ve been strapped down, powerless to the swing, to the tempo, building, of each freshly charged shock, until I cry and I say, “No. No, no!” I try to be polite, to look away, to quit being such a chore for them, to suck it the fuck up, surely she’s seen hundreds, thousands of women handle this just fine, not me, can’t, zero chance she’s not ripping shreds from my lining, and I cry and I scream to “STOP!”
The doctor scolds herself, peels back her gloves and begins to explain next steps, says she hates to do this, that she tried to prevent this mystery stage and then I hear “surgery” and I’m stupid and I ask if I’m getting it done now and she laughs because Ohhh, no, no, that’s separate, duh, and her head is spinning and I nod and nod and try to stare at her until I say, “I’m sorry. I feel really fucking rude this morning, but I think this is what it feels like when someone is about to pass out.”
She positions herself, lays me back. It’s normal, she says, this.
▴ ▴ ▴
My (is there a gentler way of labeling him?) ex-boyfriend Andy is in the waiting room. He smiles up at me from his laptop and I resent him for it. None of it’s helpful because looking at the people I love only gives me permission to cry. He knows it’s not good, that I’m not good.
“I hate men! I hate them!!” I scold-scream, leading him to the lot, the privacy of the car. “You just get to fucking chill, get your work done while I’m putting my life on pause in there for baby-prevention, as though I’m fucking myself, as though there’s no other contributor.”
He’s unresponsive, practicing his listening; he finally speaks, asks what the surgery is supposed to be like.
I scoff because how stupid. “Said five minutes to an hour, depending on difficulty.”
He nods, waits his turn.
“Five minutes of my life is going to cost thousands, though,” I say. “And I don’t have that money. And my parents don’t have that money. And because I popped out the wrong gender, here I am, another fucking burden! Couple thousand more, Mom and Dad, courtesy of your slut-slut daughter! Who’s paying? Who’s got it? In my mid-twenties and still needing to discuss birth-control costs with my parents. It’s like, like, I’m taught to quantify everything in order to make some kind of proof for why this is angering me, for why my feelings about this fucking matter.”
He makes a face—the one that bleeds concern, the one he makes whenever he sees me cry. It makes him look so small.
“How many appointments so far for this?” I say. “Three? Four? Five? How much copay? How many thousands? How much does this shit actually cost? How much would it cost me to fly overseas and get this done somewhere else? Netherlands? Germany? Sweden?”
He sits through the lecture because what other choice does he have?
“We’re the only developed nation that doesn’t guarantee basic health services,” I say. Naturally, I cite a former gender and women’s studies professor—a topic, I remind him, he chose not to bother studying. I say we’re the only country that allows people to go bankrupt over preventing vagina-death, preventing death-death.
The silence thickens, seconds to minutes, and he says, “I don’t know what to say.”
I huff, say, “Well that’s nothing new.”
He doesn’t respond and it’s unfair; I feel like a loose flame. I say, “I mean, it’s convenient, right? To have no response when your world is so comfy? You do realize not everyone has parents sending them thousand-dollar hi-from-mom checks in the mail?”
His eyes haven’t moved from his feet. “That’s out of context,” he mumbles.
I cry, and I wish I could credit my anger at him for me doing so, but I’m hating myself. I say, “Is it?”
He reaches his hand to touch me. Mine moves to the wheel on instinct. “Don’t,” I say.
We drive. We don’t know where to drive and decide on a coffee shop, but my stomach starts cramping and I begin to cry more—the quiet kind, the kind where I’m driving and wishing to erase him and wishing he’d speak so I can tell him to stop talking once more, the kind where I’m facing forward, he’s facing forward, world gutted of music, and it all feels like a Lifetime movie—and I say I want to be home.
We sit at my parents’. I bring my laptop to him, stand over him on the couch as though he’s been waiting for my diatribe.
“You know public costs are accruing in the billions for adolescent pregnancy and birth?” I read. “All cleaving to the convention that girls are responsible for boys’ sexual behavior.”
He nods. I begin again.
“And did you know—this. This! And with all this! We have the highest rate of STIs, highest rate of both teenage pregnancy and highest rate of abortions in. the. developed. world., regardless of chip-chopping access to sex ed and birth control. This stupid, stupid country. These stupid, stupid male overlords. Guess the scaryscary eighth-grade health-class birthing vid did no help in scaring off the pubescent penises!”
He doesn’t speak.
“Tell me, Andy? How much must it cost me not to have YOUR baby?” I’m closer now, lasering down at him, laptop closed, crying again—both of us, him, me. He looks up at me like a child. I know not to continue, and still I say, “How much? Not like any of you guys ask! Not as though you asked about my baby-prevention methods the first time you stuck your dick in me! Leave it to the female! Like, my. god. What. fucking. year are we in?”
And this is when I know I’ve pushed too far, too far into him.
He’s crying harder. He says he’s sorry.
▴ ▴ ▴
It’s March, two months later. I’m in my mom’s car, just flown in from Virginia and now driving from O’Hare back to my parents’ place near Madison. It’s spring break. I’ll be having surgery in two days. My mom tells me our insurance is charging an extra 2,000 out-of-pocket for the surgery, that it’s 10,000 total, so it’s really not that bad; we should feel grateful, even.
I cry, what’s new, open my phone, begin the math-work. I make 17,000 per year to teach two classes per semester, need to pay 1,300 per semester, 2,600 per year in student fees and who the fuck knows what that covers, but that brings me down to 14,400; subtract 2,000, I’m living on 12,400, subtract my 550 per month toward housing, and I’m at 5,800 for the year to eat and fly home for this motherfucking surgery and maybe pay for other health needs and maybe one day consider my 53 grand of undergrad student loans. Sounds right.
My mom tells me the negativity won’t help. I have health insurance, she says, good health insurance. (When the insurance will later call, tell her it’s an extra 2,000 on top of the 2,000, tell her they’ll call and report her credit if we don’t pay up, she’ll ask how that’s legal, possible. She’ll cry. She’ll call and ask me how I can put a positive twist on this. On anything. Because it won’t feel good to her. Nothing will feel good right then, and she’s not going to pretend, she’ll tell me, that shit like this will.)
I tell her DID YOU KNOW, citing Melinda Gates, as one would—new book out, how could she not know—that women spend ninety extra minutes per day doing unpaid labor. NINETY, I say, which adds up to seven years of the average woman’s life. Whyyy did she get married? Whyyy did she have us?
She sighs.
I should’ve let the doctor do it, I tell her. Let her just dig her way until she got her hand around the fucker. A $2,000 pathetic-ass yelp.
Appt. 7
When my doctor sees me before my surgery, she says she’s sorry.
“For the surgery part or for my ensuing poverty?” I ask her.
She makes the same laugh one makes when their uncle tells sexist jokes at the dinner table. I tell myself it may be time to relax with the theatrics.
“It’s rare,” she reminds me. “But, even so, it’s a very simple procedure on both of our ends…well, at least with respect to everything but the financial part.”
I smile, she smiles, and I swear it’s the first time I’ve seen her do so. She seemed to know when I needed some humor.
“It’s not your fault,” I say.
And the surgery will be fine, will last five minutes, will halve my grocery budget, but what was she supposed to do about that—leave it there? Snatch it out pro bono?
When she asks if I want another inserted while I’m put under, I feel gratitude for her encouraging it.
“You sure you don’t want me to come for a separate appointment?” I say.
She gives me another smile, says, “Let’s try to make this your last appointment for a while.”
▴ ▴ ▴
How grateful I am for her, for my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin when I think of where I’m living in Southwest Virginia—the beautiful, baffling place to which I’ll soon return, the place that makes my Midwestern bubble feel as though it’s being run by Jacinda Ardern. It’s the same place where, in my most recent semester as a graduate student teaching composition, my student found himself impassioned enough to “look out for”—no, no, sorry, to “fight for”—and write about girls, specifically this “beautiful, beautiful girl” from his high school. “And she was a really kind girl and good girl and beautiful girl,” his draft read, “and her mother was raped and she would not exist if her mom would have chosen to abort her after being raped and thus we should not allow abortion and must address legislation on not only ending the evil, single most demented and twisted mass murder any government ever allowed, but also on restricting access to contraception” to which, in response, I opened my Canvas comment box, typed, deleted, re-typed, etc. “What in the honest fuck.”
On my class list, my students are whittled down to name, year, major(s). This guy’s: biology. Pre-med, he’d often remind me.
How grateful I am! Because no matter how many times such moments recycle—that moment of me, freshly fourteen, a week from high school, refusing to play strip poker and consequently being cornered in a basement by a pack of boys clawing their hands up my shirt, squeezing for a share of my peach-sized breasts, memories of how the subsequent moment of calling my mom to pick me up felt so infantile, how the boys telling me to take a joke made me burn, how the car ride home, me silent and bleeding, dripped of sex, beamed evidence of a threshold crossed too soon; or that moment of waking up drunk to that friend(?) of mine flipping up my skirt, sliding aside my underwear as my body tightened, instantly glacial, his dick pressed to my butt, naked, hard; or that moment of boyfriend-at-the-time swearing he’d never wear a condom, that I’d have to be okay with pulling out because it’s fiiiine; all those moments of trailing silence, of allowance, as though those spaces, those tics of quiet were their permission to, yes, please, proceed—yes! No matter how many times these moments boomerang right back, there’ll be no need to worry about carrying his and his and his child! Creating cousins! Costs! Problems! Tears! Not a big deal, so I’ve heard! Find the right zip code, right country, right someone and—voila!—silence those worries of abortion’s costs and closures!
▴ ▴ ▴
“I’m grateful for it,” I tell my friend when she asks whether she should get one too, whether I now see it as worthwhile. She asks me how much it’ll be.
I channel the voice of GWS Professor Goddess, like a textbook bullet-point-list my class notes of it being the safest long-term, highly effective birth control, it decreasing the chance of endometrial cancer, it decreasing our death-risk (because women are fourteen times more likely to die during childbirth than of complications from a legal abortion, did she know; the U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate, in fact, of all industrialized countries, did she know), it supporting the no-babies-no-cramps-no-periods-for-five-years thing. And, I continue, helll-oh to small-dose hormones! To no birth-control alarms! Remember how everyone in high school was embarrassed about (and—oops—punished for) pulling out their pills during class because, like, no need to throw flashing lights on the thing, that adolescent promiscuity? And good-bye to popping the morning-after pill because who knows how many we’ve bought for embarrassed friends. It’s not like we enjoy it—all that vomming, all that fear of vomming the pill back up and our bodies sucking those swimmers back in. Good-bye to having to tell males about such experiences because—oh, shit—that might bother them, might make them uncomfortable; good-bye to paying month-to-month to put our uteruses on lockdown and hello to being able to fuck when we want, where we want, whom we want, how we want, without overpopulating the overpopulated world.
She laughs, sips her beer; I worry I’ve become one of those lately—crazy-eyed, unproductively bitching.
She swirls her drink around, thinks. “I just want to feel free,” she says, smiles, “free to, I don’t know…yeah…free. I don’t know why I thought this would get easier.”
▴ ▴ ▴
I’m back on campus for my final semester, carrying the advice from my OB/GYN to make an appointment to have my new strings checked. Part of my light $2,600/year student fees covers the student health center, so I call there, call in to their women’s center to make an appointment for a check. They say, “Seeing this is the women’s clinic, you know there could be an additional fee, depending on what you’re going in for,” and I say it’s fine, that I need this, and they say to get on the waitlist. It’ll be a while.