I got my period when I was 14, exactly as Dr. Joos had
predicted after poking me in the midsection. It was fairly uneventful, except
that I couldn't go tubing at the lake that day because I was a woman now.
One month later, I was back in my brown brick and angular
prison of a middle school, sitting in class and suddenly I was in so much pain
that I sincerely feared that I was going to die before I could get to the hospital. I went to the school nurse, who asked if perhaps
my pants were too tight. I girlishly agreed to go into the school bathroom and
check. On the other side of the door, I realized I was bleeding and I was breathless
shocked.
The pain was perfectly normal.
Because middle school is already a series of stark moments where
you are forced to understand that some brutality or injustice is just part of adulthood, I was perfectly primed to snap up my pink shorts, lift up my
chin and walk with grotesque acceptance back to class, telling the nurse I’d
made a mistake.
Every month or so from that one on, I would get this spider
sense that it was coming. Not a physical sensation, just an intuitive doom. Not knowing its source, I still learned to
trust the premonition, and when I felt it, to drop what I was doing and make a
contingency plan.
About the pain, it can’t be described. An approximation
would be to say that it is as though a slotted head screwdriver with a dull
blade about two inches wide is pushed onto the place directly between and
slightly below my hip bones. It starts out
light and then gets harder, slowly, and deliberately. At some point, the head
of the screwdriver breaks the skin and begins to turn, wrenching the viscera
there tighter and tighter into a twisted agony, like a wet shirt caught and wound up in the blade of the washer.
A different pain
works on the base of the sacral promontory. A dull, cannonball thud at
increasing intervals, that hits to crack the bone, sits in the crack and then swings back to hit again. It radiates out and
sends shocks of pain down towards my knees, and also up, veering on a lightning
fork path away from my heart and out my fingertips. It is something like that,
and it lasts for about four hours, eight at the longest.
And also there is a more metaphysical experience. In the way that amputees describe phantom
limbs, the field of what can be thought of as me extends an inch or two outside
my body, and the space there, which
contains no flesh, throbs into awareness
and aches sharply also. The line between me and the world becomes uncertain,
the pain leaks into the surrounding area.
Describing the pain, and also feeling it, triggers in me the
knowledge of people’s assumption that I am exaggerating. I know that what’s
dully called “cramps” as a cultural joke, and as always the broader thinking
contends with my experience for legitimacy, even in my own mind.
Therefore, in addition to the physical experience my shame
gets clicked into high gear. The shame
of being female and irrational, not measurable by the appropriate tools. The
shame of weakness. I have no discipline for this feeling. I cannot sit still
and consider it, it won’t be breathed through. The pain owns me and manipulates
me and drags faith from my animal parts because I pray and pray when this
happens for it to stop or for a minute to rest. And in those resting minutes I
dwell on the nature of the pain whose scale is a sign of my feminine inability to
accurately assess what’s true.
Or maybe my pants are on too tight.
In high school, when this happened, I would bite into the
flesh of my hand, or if I was alone, take a hammer or the corner of a book and
beat myself in the lower belly. It was a relief compared to the pain inside and
besides, I could control it. In front of school we had some metal posts with
rounded tops to prevent cars from driving into the schoolyard, and they were
low enough that I could throw the lower part of my body on top of them like a
battering ram to get a moment of that aching relief.
I inevitably ended up in the nurse’s office. A girl with cramps. An embarrassing cliché. I would try to be
stoic, but inevitably the lightning strikes of pain would cause me to hit the
wall with my fists and feet, to moan and squeal, to tear at my hair. Sometimes
the nurse would ignore me, and sometimes suggest that I take my histrionics home.
I learned about medicine, how much advil you could take
before you got a stomachache. (6 or 7) But it hardly made a dent. In Canada, I went
to the emergency room and the Canadian doctors gave me codeine for the pain.
For the first time in my life when the air quivered portentously, I had a
defense. The codeine dulled the physical
pain to almost nothing, quieted the mental experience, because it gave me
control and I was no longer embarrassing myself.
Then we moved back to America, where they wouldn’t prescribe
the codeine anymore, and it was back to the floor and the hammer.
In college I went to the emergency room twice more because
the pain had made me pass out and throw up. Both times, the doctor was really
pleased with himself when he located the source of the problem by asking
whether I was menstruating. “It’s your
period,” one told me. “Sometimes there’s pain with that.”
On my third emergency room visit, I was referred to a gynecologist,
the first doctor in the history of my life to look at what was inside my womb
in response to my complaint. I was diagnosed with uterine didelphys, which
means I have two uteruses, and with endometriosis, which means the walls of my
uteruses are thick with extra tissue and scars. I was prescribed birth control
pills. The pills were great for pulling me out further on the tide of madness, but they didn’t do much for the pain and
I stopped taking them.
Around that time, I had a root canal, for which I was
prescribed Tylenol 3. I bore down on the root canal and its aftermath
and saved the pills for my periods. I started seeking out dental surgery. I
found out that I could buy codeine over the counter in Canada and more
sketchily in Mexico, and when I went to these places, I would stock up,
especially after I graduated and lost my health insurance and access to
dentists. I counted, saved and plotted.
In China, where not even aspirin is available, I did
without. I made it a habit to rent a
hotel room every month so that I could scream without being heard through my
apartment’s thin walls and so that I could vomit into the shower or a western
style toilet, since it was unsanitary to
lay on the floor of a Chinese bathroom and I did not like puking in my room.
A year or so after I returned from China, I started to get
the warning pain when my period wasn't coming.
Not the full blown experience, just a whisper and a twist. It got to the
point when I was feeling it every day, but I didn't want to go to the doctor
because I didn't want to find out
I had some horrible cancer that would bankrupt me before it killed me.
When I got health insurance again, I went to a gynecologist.
I requested a woman. As soon as I sat down on the table, I started crying so
hard that I couldn't choke out an answer to the doctor’s questions, which embarrassed
and annoyed her. She sent me to a specialist, who did tests and another specialist
who did tests and I cried and cried until I hit the end of the testing line, a
kind of souped-up ultrasound. The doctor sympathetically told me that he couldn't
find any reason why I would be having the pain. He was sorry, but there was
nothing there that could be medically seen. So I left.
It never really got solved, and sometimes I feel it, but
what can you do? My new doctor, blessedly, put me back on the codeine, which I am
allowed to have as long as I come in for a drug test every six months, and
mostly it works.
Every once and a
while, like yesterday, the pain gets through, and I am back on the floor, back
at the mercy of it, passing out and waking up in the shower, asking Andrew and
Rachel to make the pancakes, exiting mid-rehearsal to barf. And that is part of my life. It’s not rational and it’s not karmic
(rest easy, Eve) it’s the fact that existence is in part brutal and that
demands submission and that it will remind you of this.
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