Playing the Woman Card
First of all, huge—HUGE—thanks to all of you. Your thoughts, messages, cards, texts, flowers and chocolates (SO many chocolates!) were gratefully accepted and enormously successful: my recovery has been smooth and well-attended. I had my post-op appointment today and all the pathologies were benign. A few spots were questionable, but none of those organs are there anymore. So…thank you. And now, this week’s essay.
If you’re following along, you know I recently had a hysterectomy. If you’re new—well, I guess you’re pretty much caught up. (Except maybe for this and this.) I write about everything in my life and lately there has just been one curveball after another. Not even curveballs—outright tragedies. It’s important to me to stay centered about it all, for myself and for my family and writing about it helps me process it all. Mostly.
At one point I felt like I was writing—and complaining—too much about my hysterectomy. After all, about 600,000 women get them every year1 and you don’t hear them complaining. I knew it was a common procedure because it seemed like every other woman who sent me a message of support was someone who had gotten a hysterectomy herself or knew a close friend or family member who had, with successful results. So, what was my problem anyway? Moving aside the irony of removing my uterus on Mother’s Day weekend a month after my daughter died and having to stay on the maternity floor, why was I acting like this was such a big deal? And why was I throwing around the words "hysterectomy" and "uterus" as if I was talking about shaving my legs or avocados?
Because, once again, it is a big deal. Women’s health and body issues are a big deal. When I Googled pictures of “abdominal organs” to try and figure out what would happen inside my body after several organs were removed, the only results were male anatomies. I ended up having to add “female” abdominal organs to get some idea of what was going on in there. How many stories do I have to hear about conditions that were never looked into because, “well, you’re peri-menopausal” or “well, you’re menopausal” or “aren’t you post-menopausal?” Pains and symptoms in women get overlooked and conditions escalate. I hear it over and over again and what I don’t hear is how things are improving. Women are looked at through a different medical lens—not always and not every doctor, but I bet it’s more often than not.
I realized I was succumbing to what I feel like is a subtle shame of having a woman's issue. I personally have been told often enough that my symptoms or pain or concerns are “typical” of one life experience or another—the menopause thing, or just being a woman. Like, we’re supposed to be in pain? I don’t think so. It sometimes feels like the health and well-being of women is largely—I don’t know—overlooked? Underestimated? Boring?
One night, a few days before the surgery, I woke up around 3 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. Angelo was out of town so there I was—alone and a tiny bit nervous and also missing Annie. I remembered she told me once that she used to give her liver a pep talk when she was about to get a biopsy or drain exchange. “I’ll take care of you if you take care of me,” she’d tell it. “I need you to do your job!”
So I placed my hands on my abdomen and directed energy and gratitude through my skin into my belly. I imagined my pregnancies and deliveries—both C-sections—and I thanked my uterus and ovaries and all the others for being there for me when I needed them. I thanked them for rallying together to do just what they were there for—creating other lives—and bringing me the first two lights of my life. And then I let them go.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about my other surgery—the first of two lumpectomies I had to have because of the cancer diagnosis. (I have stopped calling them “procedures” as if I’m having a colonoscopy or a cavity filled.) I said, “Our bodies are under attack and we women need to work harder than ever to advocate for our healthcare.”
We still have work to do.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8723888/
You are brave and have endured so much. I'm glad the surgery was successful. I can identify with what you say about women's health and the medical establishment dismissing us. They so easily throw out the word idiopathic-- another word for we don't know why or exactly what this is. There are so many autoimmune related diseases out there that mostly affect women. Yet very little research is done.
Brava once again. 🥰