Every Nicked Kiss :: In Corpore Sano Presents Megan Merchant
A poem and practice statement from poet Megan Merchant
Poet and editor Megan Merchant was diagnosed with type II Von Willebrand’s disease after years of having her symptoms ignored by the medical establishment. In the poem “Breakthrough Bleeding” and accompanying practice statement, Merchant investigates the disease and the consequences of feeling “shamed and unheard” in her pursuit of proper diagnosis and care.
Expanded and additional work from Merchant appears in the forthcoming initial print volume of In Corpore Sano. [Pre-order here.]
Breakthrough Bleeding
My body as malfunction, as smear,
as blood-stacks not tall enough to fall
over each other and mold, the harsh
diagnosis named after a German man,
as in his phrase leaking from my body,
as in scabs are harder to redline into
scars, left unsealed longer, as in I am
an open wound, fragile but not precious,
could die from impact, as in step carefully,
the bruises-small storms along my skin,
as in my mother would hide for days
in shame, as in heredity, as in the inability
to hide where a man gripped her wrist,
rested his weight, as in biting my tongue
could flood my mouth, as in I had to watch
with every nicked kiss to keep from drowning
his voice, as in I learned how to hold poems
soft against gums, tight between my teeth.
Invisibility Factor
I have heard that doctors don’t take a woman’s pain as seriously as a man’s. I’ve lived a long history of this. I was diagnosed at age 24, which for someone with type II Von Willebrand’s disease is unheard of. It wasn’t that the symptoms and trauma hadn’t been there the whole time — it was that no one cared enough to truly listen, to believe my story.
I was a scholarship swimmer in college and trained for triathlons after. I was also a frequent flier in the emergency room. Every time I arrived, soaked in blood, they performed embarrassing and fruitless tests, sending me home with a nondescript diagnosis of “free fluid in the abdomen”. This was internal bleeding from small muscle tears. It was visual proof that never interested anyone enough to investigate further. Over the years, I learned that it costs a lot to feel shamed and unheard in our medical system.
I saw every type of doctor that my terrible insurance allowed, and was told more than once that the horror show bleeding that caused me to pass out in public restrooms (and have to be transported via ambulance) was “called a period, get over it.”
It was a brilliant and kind OBGYN who noticed that I bled and bruised with the lightest touch. She was the first person to say “I think I know what’s going on and no, you are not crazy.”
A hematologist finally confirmed this, and during the exam, exclaimed in shock, “Seriously, how are you still alive? You should be living in a bubble.”
If you think of the clotting factors like dominos, in my body — the eighth one is either absent, or too short to continue the cascade to form a clot. The invisibility combined with the mutation is actually a variant of this disease. Most people only have it one way, or the other. Also, for most people, this inheritance should be remarkable enough.
But not for me. After a series of miscarriages, another determined and brilliant female OBGYN found out that I have dueling disorders — one that doesn’t clot and one that does, excessively. It isn’t until I’m pregnant that the hormones mute the Von Willebrand’s and the MTHFR rears its ugly head and forms blood clots in the uterus. The first time that I heard that phrase, MTHFR, I thought they were being cruel.
After this discovery, I was able to sustain a pregnancy. On the day that marked exactly twenty-four weeks, I went to teach my regular senior woman’s yoga class and started bleeding. I called my husband, who is a firefighter/paramedic, and he rushed to get me in an ambulance. When we arrived at the hospital, I asked immediately and repeatedly for them to check the baby via ultrasound. I was crying, but not hysterical. The nurse kept saying she’d get to it, then made fun of me for arriving in an ambulance because of a little bleeding. My husband took her aside and told her the number of pregnancies we’d lost because of my disease. I will never forget how quickly she grabbed the ultrasound wand and said “Okay mama, let’s get a heartbeat for you.” It took a man for her to listen. It took someone that she deemed as more of an authority than my own narrative when it came to listening to the story about my body.
In writing, I have watched time and again how certain voices are tended to, believed, cared for, and promoted, while others are discounted and discouraged.
Recently, I went to a local reading series where a very accomplished and celebrated poet made fun of confessional poets and their craft. More than once she ridiculed their work, saying “No one wants to hear about your bodily fluids. It’s just gross.”
This too is a form of erasure, of heavy editing for only the most pleasing, known, and anesthetized parts of the human existence.
My narrative does not fit neatly into that box. It is messy. It is traumatic. It is very human. In writing, I’m not asking for, or expecting, the reader to understand in a way that means it aligns with their own experience, or knowledge base. I’m asking for expansion, and for imagining. With each visit to the ER, I was asking the same.
In a recent podcast episode of “On Being”, writer and teacher Lyndsey Stonebridge shares an antidote to this kind of disconnect. She explains the aims and work of Hannah Arendt, author of The Origins of Totalitarianism:
What she says to do is not just to empathize, but which is to actually build blueprints, or worlds, or frames for understanding experience that is not ours, that cannot be incorporated into ours. So why I think it’s different from empathy or pity is, when you are imagining — because you’re imagining to be empathetic or to share suffering — you’re immediately incorporating that experience into a view of yourself and your own worldview.
What Arendt wanted was actually something a bit more radical than that, is to imagine something that’s not your world, that makes you feel uncomfortable. And that’s where the work has to start.
Poetry can be this kind of blueprint. It can be a world that extends beyond our already-knowing into someone else’s truth. It can be what connects us.
Megan Merchant lives in the tall pines of Prescott, AZ, with her husband and two children. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections with Glass Lyre Press: Gravel Ghosts (2016), The Dark’s Humming (2015 Lyrebird Award Winner, 2017), and Grief Flowers (2018), four chapbooks, and a children’s book, These Words I Shaped for You (Philomel Books). She was awarded the 2016–2017 COG Literary Award, judged by Juan Felipe Herrera, the 2018 Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, and, most recently, second place in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She is an Editor at The Comstock Review and you can find her work at meganmerchant.wix.com/poet.
IN CORPORE SANO: Creative Practice and the Challenged* Body, is a transdisciplinary collection and conversation by, on, and for bodies-against-within-despite, in the form of an ongoing web series and a forthcoming print:document series (preorder a copy here!). If you’d like to be a part of ICS, rolling submissions for the project are once again open.
With thanks to managing editor and lead facilitator Elæ [Lynne DeSilva-Johnson].
