Bodies Without Borders

Two out of three of the inseminations are done. So, like the bar exam, I feel like it's now out of my hands. What has happened/is happening/will happen is already in the works. Not that I ever really had control, right? It's not like I could do anything to ensure this cycle resulting in a pregnancy. But that's really what's crazy and frustrating and so beautiful about pregnancy. We live in this culture where science trumps nature every time -- we live in a day of medications to change your brain's chemical makeup, and plastic surgery can give you a different nose than the one your grandmother passed on to you, etc etc. We have this belief that if we don't like how nature is, we can "fix" it. Even with pregnancy, we have IVF, where you can ensure you have a fertilized egg, and while I don't know that much about IVF, there's still an issue there right? They implant several embryos I think, in the hopes that 1 survives. And there's nothing anyone can do to choose how many survive, which one(s), and whether those embryos will survive an entire pregnancy, whether that baby will survive the first year (or three). As much as we want to feel all-powerful, in the end we are still the subjects of whimsy, or God, or fate, or whatever it is you want to believe has the deciding say in these matters.

How I feel emotionally, though, is not quite as clear-headed. Ever since my D&C in November, I've felt different about my body. I can't say whether it's more disconnected, or more protective. Perhaps both? I remember that doctor looking like Amy Smart, young and blond and intelligent, and being talkative and friendly. Factually, I know she was. I remember the nurse holding my hand when I cried. But in my head, in these flashbacks I have, the doctor's face gets contorted, floats towards me like it's the subject of some awful Dali painting that never made it into general distribution. She has become a monster in my memory. And even with the IV of anti-anxiety meds and pain meds, I remember feeling everything. I remember intense, sharp pains, cramping, toe-curling, nail-digging hurt.

Intellectually, I know now, and knew then, that this wasn't the doctor's fault, or her doing, but emotionally I still felt as though this procedure was the ultimate form of violation. Going into my body through that most personal, protected of paths, to take away what I loved even more than myself (how was that possible so early?) made this doctor a barbarian in my mind. The recovery from the D&C was more about recovery from my body's violation, from using my body against itself, than about physical healing.

Until things went wrong. Some pregnancy tissue had been left in my womb, and I ended up in the hospital. Five. Times. I knew something was wrong at the end of November, when I was driving back to Colorado from Thanksgiving with my family in Philadelphia. I stayed in a Best Western in Illinois (where a chicken roosted in a tree outside the front door), and in the morning I did an easyish workout in my hotel room. 21-18-15-12-9-6-3 push-ups, sit-ups, squats. (For those who don't CrossFit, that's 21 of each movement, then 18, then 15, etc). Doing the sit-ups, I felt sharp pains where I imagine my ovaries are. Even after I stopped working out, the pain continued as I walked to my car, shooting across my torso, up my body, radiating everywhere. In the car, sitting made the cramps worse, but pushing my seat back and laying down hardly alleviated the stinging.

When I went into the ER, after watching a thermometer obsessively track my temperature from 94 to 101 to 94 to 100 to 95, etc for a few hours, the doctors did a transvaginal ultrasound. I knew this what this would show me -- my uterus, empty. And knowing that terrified me. I didn't want to see what I knew my body had become. So I found myself, again, lying on a table in dark room, crying, as a doctor indifferently inserted tools inside me. I can't remember when I stopped crying this time, but I know I cried through the ultrasound, back into my hospital room, and through the consultation with another, warmer, doctor after she had reviewed my ultrasound pictures. I remember sobbing even harder when she told me I would have to have yet another D&C. I mumbled to her, "As though it wasn't bad enough the first time." When I said this, she was on her way out of the room, and she stopped, maybe seeing me as more than a patient for the first time, and put her hand on my knee. "I'm speaking from experience," she said, "you never completely get over this."

And right then, in that way that you can feel for people you don't know but who understand you, I loved her. Not for fixing my body, but for being honest with me, for what felt like the whole time in this entire ordeal. She was the first person who told me that how awful I felt was legitimate, that my month of angry, bitter moods and self-loathing and simultaneous self-pity was warranted, the first person who verified that when I snapped at people, "I can't get over this," or "No, it isn't getting any better," I wasn't just being stubborn. I was right. And I was normal.

After this ER visit, I had 4 more trips to the hospital before I physically recovered. But each time, my body felt less and less like my own. I felt like doctors had betrayed me, like my body had betrayed me, like all I wanted was to be able to heal, and my body was forcing me to feel physical pain so that I could not forget the emotional. And as my body felt more like something that belonged to doctors, to test and prod and draw blood from and discuss and "fix," I became more and more protective of the little bit of control I possibly had over it. I didn't want anyone touching me anymore, not hugs, not romantically, not supportively, not protectively. My body felt assaulted and invaded, and I wanted to close it off to everyone. I stopped going to follow-ups with my doctor, I stopped getting the prescribed blood tests. I needed my body to heal on its own, to maintain some kind of autonomy.

So what I'm getting at is this: This insemination thing has thrown me for a loop. And I know Kira reads this, but for the sake of emotional honesty, I'm going to talk about this anyway. While I so badly want to give Kira and Scott a child, especially knowing how it feels to have lost one, and knowing the pain Kira has suffered, this separation from my body for the sake of insemination is emotionally confusing. Again, I feel like my body is no longer my own. Intellectually, I know that this is for something good instead of what I have grown used to, but emotionally the feelings are similar, are overlapping and confusing, and I find myself having to remind myself of the why. When I get anxious about this, especially about the insemination part, I find myself needing to take a step back to look at the bigger picture, to reconsider what this is for. To realize that this isn't me losing, or someone looking at me as a series of blood tests and ultrasound images, but to realize that this is me creating something new and beautiful (a baby, a mother, a family). Even while this seems obvious, it is still emotionally confusing to go through.

Matthew asked if I wanted to back out of the agreement, if I wanted to take more time to think about it. He said he would support me whatever I decided. I know that that's not what I want, but I do want to get a positive test, to get past this awkward point. To finally make something good come from my body. To have doctors examining me not to diagnose, but to appreciate.