“We should remove your uterus,” the gynaecologist says. “Do you have children already?”
You let the questions hang in the air long enough for him to search for the answers he seeks in the marred edges of your silence.
No is your answer.
No is the easy way out but, again, it will not change anything at this hour.
This is the third doctor, repeating what the first two already said.
He says the tumours sitting in your womb are too big. If they must leave, the womb must, too.
His words find you when June is almost July and the weather cannot decide what to be. After the rage of a sun shower, cold and warm breezes alternate in the air. The words find you in your loop of endings as you rappel a canyon of dreams into the eye of flames. They fill your head all at once. Slowly burn in your chest. You pray, you plead, for the tumours to be removed and not your womb.
You wonder why now?
Why here?
To what end?
***
These tumours, this otherness, will make your veins syringe-ready and you will stick your ears to empty hospital walls fishing for soundwaves and the echo of belonging. You will spit the sting of its bilious green, the green of the hospital walls, into a future that has not come.
It will make an appearance like it has not been there all along. Like it has not witnessed the birthing of your days since the age of 14. The otherness will fill your being with questions so large that even the breadth of your existence will wilt. Then its bloodied hands will evert the crown of your womb until pain shoots off your abdomen like fire feasting on fuel. Until your womb is too bulky and it cries in lumps…
At 24 you will redefine motherhood.
At 25 you will hold it in your hands and strangle it to death, you will make yourself a house of dreams.
Sometimes hope is the rippling face that looks up to the sky when you stare into a clear stream. Sometimes hope is the very face rippling away into unknown seas.
Hand in hand, it will waltz to your anguish, with a cystic companion. The trypophobic patterns that frenzy your brain will look up at you from a sonogram, stark solid, forever embedded in the spectral memory of eyes. The otherness will make you friends with spearmint tea—turmeric tea—and impatient doctors who always have places to go.
You will remember how it hid in your teenage flesh, playing tic-tac-toe with the night nurses. How it sucked the iron out of your blood, turning your body into a crumbling void. How often it sat in sullen corners howling with laughter at the painkillers that crisscrossed in your bloodstream, unable to quell the very pain that had you reeling over and clutching your abdomen. Then, it watched you pass out, watched you burn your skin with hot water and yet, still sat heavily on your days.
Now in adulthood, your blood keeps ending. And you change plans on your cycle. You have wrapped your body around the scathing tendrils of pain, you scream hollow. You drink every concoction there is—you rid your diet of estrogen, and swallow white pills that will make it shrink. You want everything but surgery. So you double your daily exercise and get more into yoga. No proteins. No milk. No sugar and no wheat. Less carbs. More fruits. Beetroots for your blood. Flax, sunflower and pumpkin seeds for your hormones. You even quit your jobs.
But its menace does not end. It still emerges through the whitish grey of an ultrasound prompted by the cold jelly at the feet of your belly button. Your womb is six times its normal size. The harder you try to make them shrink, the faster they grow.
Now in adulthood, it sends you to the spaces where it does not exist. To the women who listen to you without hearing anything you say. It turns the world around you into a spherical void rotating and dropping off, one after another, dreams that you held on to dearly. Some hit you in the face, others drench you in their showers. It says someday a wither might survive outside of this rawness.
The doctors pry into that rawness, seeking reasons, responses that will validate their diagnosis.
“Why do you have this at this age? This should find you when you’re way older.”
“Many women live without wombs and they are happy.”
“Why are you waiting for spring when your body is an autumn garden and all its green has morphed into auburn leaflets?”
“Do you drink? Do you smoke? Do you pump your veins with nameless drugs?”
“Were you a tyrant without virtue? Is it a sin that was passed from the women who came before you?”
“This softness is unknown to the women who came before me,” you think. “This mass of pelvic pain is a language they do not speak. Perhaps the women before them did.”
To have an idiopathic condition is to breathlessly cling to a stag on easy days and to dangle on a rope on others.
***
Two IVs at the same time.
Again and again.
A steady nurse’s hand in your trembling patient hands. The distant sting of the anaesthesia injection on your epidural space. Your legs are warm and heavy. They turn into frozen walls of glass.
“Can you lift your legs?”
Of course not!
The saviour’s hands were like this when a spear pierced his abdomen too.
The operating theatre is cold but you shiver more out of fear. Everyone said surgery is easy. It does not feel like it.
They should play Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending”. They should keep the birds ascending for you—just in case this is how you transit into ethereal realms. You watch the faint reflection of blood and damp patting in the glass of the miniature bulbs inside little circles above. The surgeon has your womb outside and he is endlessly injecting it.
“Please, angels, don’t let this be a conversion into a hysterectomy.”
Then the pulling.
“Be gentle,” you whisper to yourself.
What is it that they are pulling so hard?
Smoke.
What are they burning?
Then the surgical lights above are circles birthing other circles, going round and round and round, growing bigger. You close your eyes and you give way to a steady seizure and foaming in the mouth.
Some women walk out of this cold room with babies they will watch grow. Others walk out with empty hands and wounds from tumours that were scrapped off—an uncertain journey ahead. You belong with the second lot.
You will look at the pictures later when a white bandage lies across your abdomen and your stomach is rejecting everything that gets into it. You will count the fibroids, then stare at the largest. From its steady girth to the round scarred wound-looking patches around it. You will sigh.
“Even that which grows into my body and feeds off my blood comes out of my body already wounded.”
How terrible.
The birth of stone from thorns.
How terrible!
***
After the fibroid infarction, you lie awake all night. Memories reticulating on your dazed brain. You think of a hospital bed when you were partially blind from the painkillers forced into your veins, and how you thought you were fading into an imperceptible death.
While the hospital is a recessed silence and you are prohibited from turning, you remember how the otherness had you chained, while men and women in boots paraded the streets of towns in the country with slogans in their hands and fury in their blood—fighting for a better country and against the sting of the teargas and water cannons which dispersed them, where they drank water, smoothened their placards, and, with whistles on their lips, began their fight again.
Scarred as it is, you still have a womb.
Oh girls, oh angels.
The cut of a scalpel changes you. The sutures separate the woman you are from the one you were.
Some wounds are dry on the outside so they can hide the granulating layers of soul skin that felt the sting of the surgical blade.
Some wounds are dry on the outside yet they stay wounds for life—giving you this, giving you that. You will tumble under the weight of whys.
Some wounds are dry on the outside yet they send the body painful reminders of what the body used to be.
No, you can no longer bend like that. No, you can no longer sneeze for some time. You cannot sit for too long without abrupt prickling abdominal pain. You can no longer lift this without flinching. Here’s back pain for today; tomorrow there will be cramping in the legs. No, the numbness of your belly will not end soon.
For girls who made it out of theatre halls and for the angels whose bodies returned to their waiting relatives covered in white; for the ones musing over the possibility of infarction; to the ones whose bodies have turned into abandoned castles:
Stretch out your will like linen. Take back your empathy from the winds. Carry your red, hold it in closed fists. Sometimes this finds you so you can also find others. It is okay if you hold your fight in open palms. It is also okay if your fight has you bent over, digging into dirt. There will be a singing about the light, until then you must count on your fingers the seconds of grace. You were bleeding before it all began—you will be bleeding when it is done.
May this otherness pass in you without leaving rubble behind.
Philly V. Vanisha is a Kenyan writer, web developer, and data analyst. She has co-authored the coastal story ‘Kas Kazi’ and had her short stories ‘Faded’ , ‘Sayonara’, and ‘Connoisseurs of Blue’ published in Hekaya Arts Initiative, African Writer Magazine, and The Kalahari Review respectively. She is an advocate for female reproductive health.