Guest Blog by: Helen Masters ~Body Shots: Hell Hath No Fury
Body Shots: Hell Hath No Fury
by: Helen Masters
My pain is my fire. I burn hot like a furnace, furious and bellowing from rooftops. It’s political. And it’s personal.
My pain is in the wait room of a doctor’s office with stark, white walls and generic paintings. My pain is rhythmic and calculated: I go through the motions like a metronome keeping time.
This is my name. This is what’s wrong. Strip your pants and strip your dignity.
“Feet in the stirrups, sweetie.”
I grimace as a man I’ve never met inserts his fingers into me. It hurts like a bitch. I cling to my paper robe and the paper sheets like it’s the only thing keeping me from floating away. I cram my face into the space between my neck and shoulder and notice that the sheet is saturated with black mascara tears. He retracts his hand and removes his gloves. He says to me,
“There’s nothing wrong I can see. I’ll prescribe you something for the pain. I think losing some weight will help you. Otherwise, this is something you’ll have to learn to live with.”
And he leaves.
And I am left, cold and naked and drenched in my own tears and sticky generic lubricant.
I don’t know what I expected. This is the Seventh time and the Seventh person.
It’s like they don’t believe me, like they don’t even try. They pay no notice when I say, “I’ve changed.” “I’ve been bleeding for months.” “My belly looks different, like I’m pregnant.” “I’ve gained 20 pounds out of nowhere.”
Empty sentences that mean nothing to these men.
I clean the cold jelly from my thighs with a brown paper towel that feels like sandpaper, and I fold my paper gown like it was a dress I wore to senior prom. I get dressed and clean up my smudged eyes. I leave.
But I will never stop trying, I never stop feeling every micromovement like there’s something clinging to the inside of my skin, gripping and consuming. And so I grip too and I hold, steady and clawing slowly forward. Foreword. I feel I have to move forward. It’s instinctual, and I know that if I sit down for even just a moment I will not get back up.
And I finally find a woman who will see me. I take a bus to her office across town on my lunch break. It’s on Michigan Avenue on the 11th story of a tower.
And we commence the dance
This is my name. This is what’s wrong. Strip your pants and strip your dignity.
She offers to use a small speculum, and the act was so meaningful to me that it felt like she had given me the shirt off of her back. She uses a warmed lubricant, and she is very gentle.
I’m crying again, but this time it’s because for the first time in over a year it feels like I’m actually being heard.
But then she looks at me and she says,
“There’s nothing wrong I can see. I’ll prescribe you something for the pain. I think losing some weight will help you. Otherwise, this is something you’ll have to learn to live with.”
Big, cold tears roll down my hot cheeks as she finishes her sentence.
She looks at me like I’m a wounded puppy in her storm drain, and adds,
“…But…there’s no reason we can’t do a pelvic ultrasound just to check.”
It felt like winning 25$ on a scratch off ticket. I remember being absolutely jovial, practically skipping to the dark room down the hall.
The procedure was relatively comfortable despite the feeling of being probed like an alien abductee.
She takes me back to the room and I wait for a bit for her to come back with the results. I call my boss to let her know that I would be running a little late.
The Doctor comes in and shows me a clip of the ultrasound. “A cyst.” She points at a grapefruit sized mass on my left ovary, surrounded by a copious amount of fluid. Every few seconds the mass would be flooded with a thunderous red and blue.
“A cyst?”
She nodded at my question. But something isn’t right. “Cysts don’t have blood flow.” I said, pointing to the flushing of red and blue. She countered, “Well, it could be a hemorrhagic cyst, or an ovarian torsion. I don’t think it’s a torsion though because of the length of time you’ve shown symptoms.”
“What should I do?”
“We wait. I’ll call you in two weeks to follow up.” She patted me on the back and escorted me to the exit.
The next two weeks I continued to get worse. I was in absolute agony.
When she called I was at work, and I huddled myself in the conference room.
She asks me how I am and I tell her. In a sympathetic tone she assures me that
“This is just your new normal, sweetheart. I’m sorry.”
I start to cry, and in what felt like a whisper, I say,
“Please help me.”
She changes her tone and sounds agitated at me.
“Well there’s nothing I can do except cut you open and see.”
.
“I would let you.”
A week later I was in surgery. My aunt had died while I was being operated on after a year-long battle with lung cancer.
Two days later I was at her funeral. Wounded and bandaged I could hardly weep, a pain like black ice coated inside, they took so much of me. There was a light rain and the beautifully sullen chime of a bell. My mother was sprinkling holy water on my aunts’ casket when I got another phone call.
I hid myself in a hallway adjacent the Parish Office. My doctor sounded absolutely frantic as she told me that this was not protocol, but it was an emergency and I was scheduled with an oncologist the next day. Her voice hollow and guilty as she wept and chanted, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry”
I have stage 3 ovarian cancer.
And it’s in my ovaries and my lymph nodes and colon and my neck and my breasts covering the walls of my abdomen like a leopard’s spots. Chemo resistant. Untreatable.
And I’m standing in a hallway of a church I don’t know staring at the door of a parish office and I wonder if they will pray for me.
A few weeks later I was in surgery again, and they cut out most of the visible malignancy. They took a large portion of my abdominal wall and everything else that was safe to remove. The primary intention of this surgery was to remove the affected ovary.
They were supposed to.
That was the plan, the plan that I had eagerly consented to, the plan that I needed to survive.
But when I woke up I found that that’s not what happened. You see, my operating oncologist though he would do me the favor of trying to save the ovary. However, not for my own sake.
When I ask him why, he takes my weak and groggy hand in his and he says to me. “Sweetheart, what if one day your husband wants to have a child.”
Because of this malfeasance I have since had 3 recurrences.
And yet, here I am.
I have encountered so many doctors and none of them know why I’m still alive.
I am alive in spite of them, alive in spite of everything and everyone that has tried to make me feel as if I am undeserving of life. I am the woman who just won’t die.
I have over 600 inflicted scars on my body, yes I have counted because every single one of them is a battle won. There is a war written on my flesh and still I claw and ache for tomorrow.
I will never stop fighting, I will never stop screaming, I will never stop pushing because
I am still here
I am still here
I am still here
