The Story of My Uterus
By Sue Eisenfeld
The first time I bled through my pants was a bloody Rorschach blot on a fabric chair while teaching a writing class for the county. Then I left the building and had a Niagara Falls in my car.
During my monthly massacre, there were days when I could not leave my house. I could not go to book group one evening because the host had white furniture, and I did not want to rehash The Red Badge of Courage. I could not swim in the river with my friends one hot summer day because no combination of feminine products was enough to dam the Johnstown Flood. I could have a perma-period for ten or twenty days, or I could have a crime scene’s worth of clots chunking out of me in an hour.
They say stories should begin in the middle, and so here we are: the…er…period… from age 37 when the Red Scare began, to the time my cup runneth over on a kitchen chair at my dad’s house the morning after Thanksgiving, age 46. I finally agreed to the IUD my doctor had been advocating for years but that I had been too afraid to use because of online lawyerly warnings of organ punctures.
Within months, that miraculous T-shaped plastic object kept the blood baths in check, and within a few years, the crimson wave had tapered off entirely. I still suffered from post-traumatic stress from the near-decade of surprise sanguinary attacks, having to bulk-purchase feminine products and use them preventatively for hiking, backpacking, yoga classes, or social events to forestall a savage tsunami, having to plan my life and activities around how I’d manage the coming Carrie “Bucket of Blood” scene in my pants.
The beginning of the story is the part with hope and promise, when as a teen and early 20s to early 30s adult, my evolutionary programming gave me a ripe and juicy pear of a vessel, all ready for what uterus-bearing humans were meant to do: incubate and nourish a living DNA transmitter and beget the next generation. But aside from my very young childhood in the 1970s when I was still playing with dolls, I never envisioned my uterus being a womb. Instead, I suffered pointlessly through my first few dozen years of fertility with monthly killer headaches, cramps spreading down into my thighs, and raging mood swings.
When I transitioned into the decades-long SooperDooperLooper of perimenopause, my body went bananas partly because of an egg-sized fibroid growing within the muscle wall of my tortured organ, a benign growth that served as a limitless fountain of flow. It was, unfortunately, unreachable through the dilation and curettage (D&C) surgical procedure I underwent, and so the IUD finally became my holy saving grace, thinning the lining of my uterus so there was nothing left to shed.
What was it all for? My husband and I became permanently (snip-snip) childfree by choice in my late 30s.
In my early 50s, follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) tests indicated my ovaries had waited around long enough, and I was finally considered menopausal—time to move on to the next stage of fun body changes, like a muscle atrophy, eczema, and vaginal dryness. I thought my uterus had, at last, stopped wanting to be the center of attention, and this whole story would come to its natural close. I thought time and age had finally pacified the vampire into submission.
But, no, the narrative had reached a false climax.
I had my IUD removed after 7 years—blissful years when I mostly got to live my life unencumbered: a weeklong rafting trip in Idaho, regular plans out with people, wearing skirts and dresses and light-colored clothing! A week later, my uterus gave me a Psycho scene in the bathroom of my mother’s apartment. It became a fire hydrant that took hours to turn off. An ultrasound and a painful uterine biopsy ruled out uterine cancer (because, who knew, that this could all be leading to something worse). A year later, my uterus wanted to make a splash again, at an evening baseball game while eating cheesesteaks with my dad, a blast of red fireworks in my cutoff jeans, until I acquired supplies at the First Aid station halfway across the stadium. Another Code Red held me hostage in my own house, hovering over the toilet while a river of blood like the plague in Egypt flowed downstream. This time, I followed the carnage with a myomectomy, surgical removal of the fibroid that had over the years filled the interior of my uterus. But my doctor said it was much bigger than the imaging had shown and she could not get all of it.
Each year of my post-50 life—51, 52, 53, 54, I think the organ has finally reached the end of its long and useless life—the denouement, the part of the story where the plot is resolved, conflict comes to an end, complication is untangled. You close the book. You put the book away. But then each year I get an unwelcome surprise, a Groundhog Day visit from Aunt Flo saying, Hello, I’m just reminding you I’m still here mini-downpour. Nobody likes a story that never ends or a guest that never leaves. But even though I’m now a bona fide member of AARP and soon to be receiving senior discounts—the time of life when a uterus and even the whole apparatus has become entirely evolutionarily defunct, I’m still buying sanitary supplies and worrying about Satan’s waterfall like a teenager wearing white terry-cloth short-shorts in gym class.
What are my options?, you might want to know, hoping to wrap this thing up. Hysterectomy, which is kind of major surgery. Burning out the lining of the uterus to make it stop bleeding (“endometrial ablation” is the medial term that makes it sound less horrible). Cutting off the blood supply to the fibroid by putting “sand” in the blood vessels (an elementary description of “uterine artery embolization”). Hormone medications, like birth control pills, which have some pros and many cons once you get to be my age.
And then there’s the easiest and the hardest option: wait and see. Risk the chance that the deluge will engulf me once again—some inconvenient time and place: at a graduation or a family reunion or on a plane or giving a presentation. Or just hope upon hope, again and again, that the fleshy bundle will, as it is supposed to, shrink as my body loses the estrogen that’s feeding it (cue “Feed me, Seymour,” from The Little Shop of Horrors as our waiting-room music).
In her April 2020 pandemic essay, “On Letting Go of Certainty in a Story That Never Ends,” the writer Rebecca Solnit says, “We are waiting, which is among most people’s least favorite thing to do, when it means noticing that you have taken up residence in not knowing.” To not know, to have faith, to go with the flow (so to speak), and to be comfortable with uncertainty is what this last option asks of me. It’s untidy, it’s unfinished, it’s illogical. It’s annoying, it’s lazy, and it is uncontrolled. It leaves the writer and the reader hanging in uncomfortableness.
Will she learn anything from this monster within her that keeps clawing its way back out, this albatross in her abdomen, this Whack-A-Mole she can never hit?
Will she embrace instability in this unstable world?
Will she feel gratitude for her current ob-gyn who is the best doctor she’s ever had, who listens, who expresses empathy, who comes up with creative ideas, who’s open and honest, who asks about sex and brain fog and aching joints, who messages her on MyChart like a texting friend?
Will she recognize that her body isn’t betraying her, isn’t an enemy; it’s just operating differently?
Or will she end up with just another laugh line, another jab at her messy myoma, a fun piece of word play that comes from her writerly joy and deep internet searching of movies, songs, shows, and cultures and has acted as a stand-in for deeper meaning, answers, and conclusion? I mean, what else can she really do at this point except laugh (or cry) and wait for the communists to leave the fun house?
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Sue Eisenfeld’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Forward, National Parks Traveler, The Washington Post, Potomac Review, Delmarva Review, Little Patuxent Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Full Bleed, After the Art, and Gargoyle. Her essays have been listed six times among the Notable Essays of the Year in The Best American Essays. Learn more: www.sueeisenfeld.com