Negative Gynecology

I stared at the bead of blood. A perfect red pearl on my almost-shoulder.

“I’ll get something for that,” said the nurse. “Here, put some pressure on it.” She pressed a cotton ball against my skin, and I held it there with my pointer finger.

“I’m a bleeder,” I said, apologizing for my body’s reaction to a needle sliding in and out of my arm. At twenty-five years old, I’m trying birth control again. It was my third injection of Depo Provera. Synthetic progesterone. I wondered how a shot in my arm prevented menstruation, how the clear liquid in the syringe mingled with my blood cells and tricked my body into preventing a baby.

I learned in a post-secondary science course all the different ways women can prevent a pregnancy. Pills. IUDs (hormonal or copper). Injection. Abstinence. We talked about the birth of birth control, a product of the sexual revolution in the 1960s. The normalization of sexuality and the legalization of abortion. We discussed the end game of birth control—no baby. And as my teacher wielded a giant wood dildo, she taught us how birth control provided sexual autonomy. Women could take their bodies into their own hands and decide when they were ready to bear children. At the time, I felt empowered. But now, the concept seems abstract. I can’t understand my body.

“Any questions? Everything going good?” The nurse asked when she came back with a bit of medical tape, placing the strip over the ball of cotton and lightly pressing down in a clinical and intimate way. Why do these places never use band aids?

“No, all good.” My arm throbbed and I knew it’d be sore all day and the next. I stood, thanked her, grabbed my parka, and headed down the hall. I passed a room full of girls with blankets wrapped around their bottom halves—waiting for paps or D&Cs. This clinic was the only one in Northern Alberta that offered abortion services. They looked tired. I imagined these women getting up early en masse. Throwing hair up into messy buns and leaving the house with no makeup. Maybe they were lucky enough to have someone warm up the truck. I can see all their feet crunching through snow, their breath turning to mist in the cold air, and tears freezing halfway down cheeks.

***

The first time I saw a pregnant belly, I was nineteen. Natasha waddled into the break room, belly-first.

“Do you want to see it?” she asked, and I nodded. She peeled her shirt away and revealed her pale skin. Thin blue-white like low-fat milk, stretched too tight.

I think it was my face that gave it away, but then I said, “It’s so big,” and blushed. I willed the blood to leave my face and wondered how skin could stretch that far.

I remembered when she told me, almost eight months before.

“I’m pregnant,” she’d whispered. We worked at the bank, closing up. I ran hundred-dollar bills through the counter, getting ready to balance the tills.

“Wow,” I said. Then, quietly, “Congratulations.”

“You’re the first person I’ve told.”

“I won’t say anything. At least you won’t have to buy tampons for nine months.” She laughed, mouth open, head back. A big belly laugh. She told me it was an accident. A slip. A single night with her loser ex-boyfriend, after she’d had a few too many. And she didn’t want people to know yet, before she decided what she was going to do. It’s impossible to ignore a pregnancy. It can’t be wished away, the same way that it can’t be wished into existence.

I found out later that this wasn’t Nat’s first pregnancy—she’d miscarried once before. To me, it was three days of work she missed. To her it was an afternoon spent shaking on the ceramic tile of her bathroom floor, followed by days of bedrest, followed by weeks of sorrow. I never asked her what it was like because I didn’t want to know. It was easier for me to just imagine. Bright blood. Empty womb.

Natasha had to go on leave during her pregnancy—short term disability. Her blood pressure was high, and then it got too high. She wasn’t allowed to go to work or lift her own groceries anymore. Preeclampsia. It made me feel important to know what was happening with her body, to be involved in the process somehow. Her regular doctor’s appointments kept her in tune with her body, and I wanted that. I was closer to Natasha when she shared those parts of herself, and it tricked me into feeling closer to myself, too. When she came into the break room that day, I wanted to reach out and touch her bump, feel her unborn son press against my hand. What was it like, to have a person growing inside you?

“It’s gross,” she said, pulling her shirt back down. It was a fact, her fact, not self-deprecation. I wondered if the bigger she grew, the less she recognized herself. She’s tall for a girl, five feet, nine inches. But her big belly made her frame seem small. She seemed to come in second in her own body. Maybe I’d internalized these ideas—the concept that a woman was only worth as much as her fertility allowed. But that was the narrative I’d been fed. This was before I grew into myself and examined the way I existed as a woman, in a woman’s body, in this time and place. I’m still learning how to reconcile myself and my body. The way I’m supposed to fit and the way I want to.

***

I was eleven years old when I got my first period. I didn’t tell my mom for three months, wanting to hold on to my childhood for as long as I could. I willed the stains on my days-of-the-week underwear away, bundled in a mess at the back of my dresser drawer. I didn’t want it, any of it.

That pissed her off, those stained panties.

“For Christ’s sake, Sarah,” she said. She closed her eyes, softening the creases in her forehead. “Is there anything anywhere else that needs washed?” It’s hard for her to let things go that exist out of her own control. And it was hard for me to be honest with her. She was premenopausal, exiting the phase of life I was just entering. I envied that—I wanted to skip ahead, jump right over the discomfort and chaos and back into the freedom of premenstrual life.

She bleached everything that afternoon. It turned my blue undies a weird splotchy peach-pink. I wished I could’ve told her why I was ashamed, even scared, of my body. The cramps in my lower abdomen squeezing and twisting my insides in a way I didn’t understand. The flow of blood slipping into my underwear while I sat in class. I was uncomfortable and overwhelmed by the knowledge of a period every twenty-eight days or so, for what felt like the rest of my life. I was exhausted at my future being a woman.

***

In our early twenties, my best friend, Julia, and I pretended that daily exercise provided balance to our unbalanced lives. We walked around the track at the rec center three or four nights a week.

“Did you at least use a condom,” she asked. I’d had a one-night stand. She can only have sex with someone she loves. I couldn’t understand that. To me, sex was a tool. I could separate my emotional self from my physical self. At least, I thought I could. Sometimes I project out of my body and it’s as if I have a bird’s-eye view of what’s happening to me, like a mirror on the ceiling of a trashy hotel room. This makes it seem like what’s happening to me is happening to someone else. Someone not me.

“No.” I concentrated hard on the way my runners looked against the flat blue track.

“Why.” It wasn’t a question. It couldn’t be. Julia already knew the answer because we’d had this exact conversation many times before. But at the same time, she didn’t know the answer because I didn’t know the answer. I couldn’t answer why I allowed myself to have unprotected sex. It was a level of self-loathing I couldn’t articulate then. I wanted to be wanted, and condoms got in the way of that. I also wanted to forget about my body. I didn’t even consider the risk of pregnancy, because I didn’t consider my body to even be my body. It was a thing that could be attended to or ignored. So, I ignored it.

Julia convinced me to take charge of my sexual health. She went with me to my first pap smear, sat in the doctor’s office as my GP’s cold latex-covered hands inserted a speculum and scraped a sample from my cervix. Julia convinced me to go on birth control pills. I chose Yaz.

It was at the rec center that I told her I’d stopped taking them.

“Why? Why’d you do that?” I tried to explain how they made me crazy. I felt far away from myself. Depressed. Angry. I felt like I was sacrificing actual control for a false sense of it. Later, Yaz was taken off the market. It caused blood clots, which caused death. My GP’s receptionist left me a voicemail about it. I never bothered to get my prescription switched.

***

It’s hard to get pregnant. At least, that’s what I learned in high school biology. That there’s only one day in every period of ovulation where an egg can be fertilized, and I wondered how anyone ever got pregnant when the chances were so slim. I was fifteen, going on sixteen, and my body was out of control. I wanted to reel it in, squeeze it back inside the prepubescent box.

I remember being nine years old. My sister Amy and I shared a room, but she’s older than me so everything that was ours was really just hers. She hogged the bathroom the most. So when I could get in there, I’d lock the door and sometimes just sit on the toilet, making her wait for once. I used to go through her makeup bag, streaking eye shadows across my smooth lids and smearing lipstick on my thin lips. I found her birth control pills one time. They were in a round plastic circle. Each pill had its own divot and when I twisted they fell out, plunked one by one into the sink and down the drain. At the time, I was asserting my claim on the bathroom. But now I think: How many women know what’s in birth control, what it does to their bodies? As I continued to learn about the female reproductive system, I thought of those pills, the size of a baby’s fingernail, packed full of extra hormones. I wanted to know why the small responsibility of a possible pregnancy fell on my shoulders to prevent.

I remember how my hip bones stretched the thin skin on my sixteen-year-old body. I remember how I noticed them one day, lying on my back, naked. It was like I was seeing my own body for the first time in those bones, a child-bearing width apart. When I reach down and find my hips now, insulated by fat, my body doesn’t feel like my own. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy for me to let someone else touch me because I am not in my body, not anymore. So when a seventeen-year-old boy thrusts on top of a sixteen-year-old me, I don’t care. When a man I’m dating in my mid-twenties rolls me over while I’m half asleep and forces himself inside me, I don’t care. When I’m in my late-twenties and a date goes bad, really bad, I don’t know how to care.

My body is anybody’s body but mine.

***

I used to work with a woman, Noshi. She’d been trying to get pregnant for twenty years. She and her husband immigrated to Canada from Pakistan because the health care here is better, her chances of pregnancy are greater. They’d been trying the old-fashioned way, and nothing was working, so she drove from Edmonton to Calgary to receive IVF—in vitro fertilization. A three-hour drive between prairie cities, only to be told that she wasn’t eligible.

“They said I should lose weight,” she told me, and patted her belly, “I’m too fat for a baby!” She laughed, but we both knew it wasn’t funny. She was almost forty years old then, and I was in my early twenties. I was still annoyed at my period. But it took on a new meaning when I saw Noshi, desperate for a child. Wishing her body was different. Wishing she was different.

“Have you ever considered adoption?” I asked one time.

 “No,” was all she said, sitting with her small, careful hands folded over her barren womb. I felt my fertility branded on my chest, marked with the possibility, the privilege, of bearing a child. And I thought about wanting what we can’t have. I thought about why we never seem to talk about where babies really come from.

***

After my third Depo injection, I never went back. The birth control had been deemed mostly necessary by a relationship I decided to dissolve. Though by that time, the damage had already been done. I’d picked Depo Provera on a whim. It was a box I ticked online when I booked my first appointment. I wished I’d googled it beforehand. I wished I’d asked more questions at my consultation.

I look at my naked body in the mirror. Ruddy stretch marks creep across my torso, accentuating the presence of an extra layer of fat. I think of the things I can’t see. The lapsed periods. The low sex drive. The depression (again). The aches in my shoulders and upper back. I’m disappointed in myself, in my body. I look at the person staring back at me in the mirror and I’m scared because I don’t recognize her.

I googled the side effects of Depo Provera: Hormonal imbalance. Loss of bone density. Depression. Weight gain. Decreased libido. Infertility. I’ve spent so long ignoring my body, using a prescription I don’t even understand.

I think of those women with the blankets wrapped around their legs, sitting in donated La-Z-Boy recliners. The last time I was at the clinic, I watched one of the girls start to cry. Her body heaved with quiet sobs. I don’t know if this was grief or relief or something else. To me, all made sense. I support the right for all women to make the choice about what happens to their bodies. I also support the right to have emotions in a liminal space. Most feelings don’t need to be either-or, and pregnancy is complicated. People are complicated.

A peaceful sadness permeated the whole room, the whole building. I’m reminded of the nurse (“Any questions?”), and I wished I’d asked her to explain what was happening to me. I imagine myself saying, “I don’t understand my body anymore.” Maybe I never did. The words were a bundle at the back of my throat, and I swallowed when I should’ve spoken up.

***

I got my period today. I’m twenty-seven years old and it was a surprise (just like the very first time). I remember the way menstruation was the gauge for switching from girl to woman. In elementary school, we split into two groups—girls go with girls, boys go with boys—and we watched videos on how our bodies would change. Alone, I watched the movie My Girl on YTV in the early 2000s. When the main character gets her period she says, “I’m dying! I’m dying!” and tells her best friend (a boy) she can’t see him for “five to seven days,” before slamming the door in his face. She’s a woman now and must play by those rules. Once, a tampon commercial came on while my brothers and I were watching TV. “What’s that for?” My little brother asked. My older brother laughed at him and said, “You don’t wanna know.” I was thirteen years old then and understood those were my rules, too. Menstruation is seen, but not talked about. No wonder I thought I’d be better off without it.

I thought I’d lost it for good. It had been over a year since my last menstruation and I’m shocked by the bright red in the toilet bowl. Crimson rolls down porcelain, bleeding into the water where it’s pulled apart, diluted to pink. “Oh,” I say out loud to no one. I live alone. There’s no one to tell and it wouldn’t matter anyway. This is just for me. It makes sense, when I think about it. The chocolate bars I keep buying and eating. The way my bloated belly pushed against pants that should fit. The mild cramping and loose stool I’d thought was a result of undercooked salmon, dinner last night. I welcome those discomforts now, knowing it was my body doing its work. I never knew I’d long for it until I didn’t have it anymore. I need to bleed as a reminder that I’m whole, healthy, here. I flush and stare as the pink water swirls, collecting used toilet paper and sucking it away.

-Sarah Hamill

Sarah Hamill is a writer from the Prairies, currently making her home on the West Coast. She writes short fiction, even shorter fiction, and memoir, mostly. Her work can be read in The Pinch, Funicular, Agnes & True, the San Joaquin Review Online. In 2020, her piece “Natural Disaster” took second place in Room’s annual CNF contest and the piece is forthcoming in the magazine’s Spring issue. Sarah lives, works, and writes on Vancouver Island.