Seriously though, put the beer down for a sec.
One of the reasons I didn’t drink is also because I wanted to avoid a scary miscarriage. I was afraid the second I got sloshed my womb would be like “ok, fuck THIS”
and splooooog.
For all you ladies who got some procedures scheduled this week!! The Internet Gods Will Smile Upon Thee!!
(Thanks to Hillary for this plushy awesomeness)
Why Avoid Alcohol? Baby Steps!
I’ve mentioned a couple times that only this weekend was I able to get my drink and my step on again.
Lot’s of email asking why I couldn’t calm my nerves with the salty whore known as booze during the pregnancy.
No other reason except the fact that I couldn’t keep it down. I couldn’t smoke either. Everything that wasn’t salty broth made my stomach swirl and my knees buckle. Even the most biblical and holy of vices: cupcakes, fucked me up something awful.
(Still not able to cut it, actually. I downed a Stella and a half at a social/work meeting with a boss who has blistering smarts this weekend. I got in the cab and the nausea hit like a fucking anvil. I nearly threw up several times. Then I had to sleep. Could have been nerves. Or my genteel constitution. Either way, baby steps!)
But shit, if you’re prego, expecting to abort, and can handle your liquor I hear that cigarette after drunken, unprotected sex with multiple partners is really as good as it gets.
It’s important to be a role model. Smiley face!
Panic at the disco
After the mandatory counseling session, came the screechy, wrinkly, yenta, morphine counselor: Dr. JewyGoldenBergSteinBlatt. She was a terse cunt. Her job, I think, was to counsel me on the effects of the sedation. She would smack her lips in between talking and cock her head to the side. Pursing her little lamprey mouth while I spoke.
In a snippy tone she “explained” :
“If you’re nervous the sedation makes you forget the pain. But its not a painkiller. You’re not that far along so you could do the sedation or not. It will make you pretty sick but its up to you.”
This freaked me out because when my mother came out of a surgery a couple years ago she was was in total agony with nausea and vomiting for several hours after the operation. After being through weeks of physical torment, the idea of willingly increasing my nausea and ache seemed insane to me.
I asked her if she thought that the costs of the sedation would outweigh the benefits.
“That’s up to you.” She had all the concern and warmth of a DMV bureaucrat.
I’m not sure what the fucking training is like in planned parenthood but they are fucking shit-show when it comes to giving pro’s and con’s to anything. The emphasis is a woman’s emotional state rather than just answering straight forward medical questions. Find a fucking balance, people! Fuck this is pisses me off to no end!!! The anger, it burns!
I was hurried out of that room. Put back in the waiting room for an hour watching girl after girl leave the back office with crackers, water, a paper bag with the soppository they would be taking that night.
After a whopping 5 fucking hours wait I was called into the exam room to have the procedure.
I figured out that of the 36 or so women in the room about 30 were taking the pill leaving just about 6 of us to get the hose. We happy few who were getting the surgery had to wait until every one else had taken the pill. Why? I have no clue. Please email me if you have insider intel.
Then they called my name, I flashed a sideways peace sign to my mom —Diddy style —and off I went.
They put me in a hallway with three chairs. The hallway was not lit and it was silent. I sat next to the older sobbing blonde woman. She was calm and Polish. I asked her if she was having the surgery. She said yes and explained that she was 15 weeks. I said that I was nervous she said she was nervous too. Then they called her in.
Then I got fist fucked by my own emotions. I was absolutely terrified that something was going to wrong and I was mad at myself for being in this position. As much as I like breaking it off raw and as much as I hate the petty amount of weight gain that the Ring has put on my body none of it was worth the level of fear and anxiety that I felt at the moment (looking back now, if for some reason I had to do this again which I don’t plan to, I don’t think I would flinch).
I was mostly terrified the idea of some one manually opening my cervix. Then having an contraption shoved inside of me. Now at this point I had totally psyched myself out and considered going home and doing it another week at a private clinic where I could avoid the wait, the protesters, and slip into general anesthetisia.
They called me into the operating room. A very friendly nurse saw that I was crying and spoke to me in a soft soothing voice. She looked at my chart and then quizzically said “You’re getting the sedation…?”
Exasperated, I said “I don’t know. I don’t know if its a good idea. What do you think???”
She said “You can talk to the doctor about it.”
Ughhhhh!! Then she made a sudden movement as I was looking down at my feet. She had covered “the machine” and explained “it makes some women nervous looking at it”
I sat on the table. Naked from the waste down and just stared the sheathed machine. And the wave of hysteria hit. I just kept thinking
“FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! THIS IS GOING TO HURT AND THE NOISE WILL RING IN MY EARS! AND IT WILL HURT AND IT WILL SUCK! AND HOW THE FUCK CAN I GET OUT OF THIS!!”
Panic, panic, panic.
This is the same reaction I had when I broke my arm and they tried to set it. My wrist was backwards and my ulna was twisted around my radius but I was so scared of the pain of setting it that I tried to convince the doctor to leave it.
So I’m shaking and crying and wanting to run away and there under the sheet is this thing that will put my life back together but also cause me serious pain.
And then a black male doctor walks in the room and is all business willing to put up with none of my tearful bullshit.
Oh mah gawd. A wonderful woman from the free state of North Carolina sent me a box of delicious caramel chocolates (drizzled with sea salt!) as a post-abortion care package!!
So good! You should go and support her cause she supports ladies who rep abortion.
She’s like Willy Wonka and I’m like Charlie Bucket. But with titties.
I’m all melty from delight.
Shucks: Places, People! Curtain in 5!!
I keep trying to blog about the actual “procedure”. But I’m just getting too emotional about it. In small part its due to the fact that the final room they put you in, alone, before you get the hose was terrifying. Its in there that I totally lost my shit and started hysterically crying and shaking because I was so afraid of the pain and complications. (I’m very sensitive about my vag. My sophmore year of college was spent inside of GYNO clincs because I had a never ending bladder infection, that got all yeasty, then a bacterial infection, then my vagina essentially turned into Fullujah. I was so fucking depressed because I didn’t like my lady-flower constantly poked and proded at. I would randomly burst into tears during pelvic exams. So. yeah. Boo.)
But I’m really trigger shy right now mostly because of a little post-partum depression I’m feeling about this project. Once I write about it then its over, this blog will soon end (as much as I would like it to keep going I’m having a hard time thinking of worthy things to blog about outside of my uterus) , and so will be this small, dramatic, bonding experience.
I used to do a theater growing up (shocking, I know) and it feels like I’m coming up on closing night. What starts off as a very atomized role — memorizing your lines, sitting backstage, working on your character, making out with the egotistical stud of the class, going home after a performance by yourself — becomes a totally communal, cathartic experience. You forge extremely deep bonds with people who, at that moment in time, are the only ones who know every single line in Hamlet. Who all hate the kick-ball-changes in the opening of A Chorus Line. And who all cringe at the same shitty line readings and all swoon when the class starlets coos and writhes on stage. No one else gets it except them.
Through weeks of performances you get exhausted and loathe the people you’re with day in day out. You snap at them. You talk endless amounts of shit. Then all of sudden at curtain call on closing night every one is in tears. No one wants it to be over. People hug and kiss and cry backstage the whole time and then when you finally bow you feel like you could explode from exhaustion and elation.
I’m not ready to wipe off my stage make up yet. Bare with me. I’ll get there soon. :)
Really? Fucking pull it together, brain! Creating psychosomatic symptoms
Not sure when this happened but the day after the abortion I woke up with a really nasty giant bruise on my upper thigh.
No idea how it got there.
Then two nights ago, I dreamt that I was lying on my back and I felt an awful pain all through my thigh.
I lowered my pants and found the whole inside of my fleshy thigh was DARK, DARK black and blue with splotches of neon (pink, green, yellow). It almost looked like gangrene. It went from my knee all the way to my bikini line. It looked like some one had smacked me with a piece of fly wood. And it looked infected.
I pressed on it and it was an extremely tender pain. Not sharp like a wound, but like a fresh, deep bruise. It made my heart freeze. I woke up.
I keep thinking about the visual and I my thigh keeps cramping and throbbing. Of course NOTHING is wrong with my physically. I’m just having a particularly heavy period and I have to use a pad (nothing goes in the vag for two weeks!). A pad just emphasizes how overtly menstrual you are.
The dream is obvious. I have anxiety about doing unseen damage to my body or other physical reprucussions.
I am feeling terrific. I have energy, and appetite, and my baby chub is going away. But everytime that visual flashes I feel my chest constrict and my thigh pulse with pain.
I’m disapointed in myself. I so desperately just wanted to just walk it off. Make a joke and show every one that “hey it wasn’t that big of deal!!” I think its because of the heaviness of my period and the fact that I have to take big anti-biotic pills everyday, that I haven’t had all the anxiety wash away yet.
I almost didn’t want to write this because I want all the readers to see me as strong. See a woman go through this without sending off some sappy anonymous postcard to post-secret. But I decided I should share it because I think it sheds more light on why women who are conflicted about an abortion can suffer so greatly after they go through one. There’s just too much mystique around this procedure and I think I would have almost not thought twice about it if wasn’t such a cultural lightining rod.
My heart breaks for women who go through this with the added burden of mourning or grieving. And I am angry at people who fight to make this whole process harder than it needs to be. Fuck you guys, y’all motherfuckers are making me burn through my ambien.
holy shit, this is amazing. Are those the ghosts of your unborn children in your hands?
BEST. PERIOD. EVER.HoLOLcaust!
Mandatory Abortion Counseling, A Lesson in Disappointment: “Have you considered adoption?”
So I’m on hour three.
I can’t step outside because THERE IS A PRIEST ON THE HIS KNEES PLAYING GUITAR AND A WHOLE CONGREGATION OF SCRAWNY WHITE FOLK READY TO POUNCE ON ME WITH PRAYER. CAPS. LOCK. FOR. EMPHASIS.
Women we’re essentially held hostage inside the clinic because of these righteous fucks. If you stepped out of the door you we’re approached by the foot soldiers of jesus. But! if there were men folk around you, they stayed away. So whenever I went out for air I tried to go by the nervous smoking boyfriends and husbands (it’s like a reverse maternity waiting room!)
I go in for counseling. A kindly, older, black lady asked me if I had any questions. I asked:
1. How long will it take for my nasuea and excrcuiating heart burn to go away?
2. Is today the worst day of the cramping and bleeding (as in, does it get easier or worse in a day)?
3. What exactly are they shooting me up with?
The stomach side effects usually lift by the next day (they did). The first day is the worst (it was). They are shooting you up with a sedative. NOT A PAINKILLER. “The sedative may make your nausea worse. You’re not that far along so its really not that necessary.”
Even though I paid for it. $525!!
Even though it was recommended to me.
I think she was saying this to be comforting but it just confused me. Was I only going to make myself sick from taking a powerful sedative? Could I still take the pill? She kept saying the doctor would explain it.
Then she asked me two questions that took me totally by surprise — AFTER we had already gotten up to end the session. She said, I need to ask you two things.
1. “Have you considered adoption?”
I said no, I wasn’t interested.
2. “Why aren’t you caring the pregnancy to term?”
Then all of a sudden I was struck with panic: what if I gave the wrong answer??? Would they not give it to me? The first thing that came into my mind was “because I don’t want it. I don’t want a baby.” But I thought maybe she would probe more and ask why and then we would have to “discuss” it. I said “Because I’m 23 and I barely know how to make rent” (not true. but sympathy inducing.) She broke a smile and said. “Ok. I just have to ask that question.”
That’s the problem. She HAS to. It’s fantastic that abortion is legal and accessible in this country, but it’s the pro-life (I decided I can use the term pro-life because I recognize that at one point in a pregnancy there is a heartbeat. But I don’t care. This world doesn’t need more kids. I don’t care if the thing inside me can blink, move its fingers, feel pain, play the piano, or speak fluent french. If its inside of me, its my life, that’s what I’m concerned with, NOT with a potential life. If we were concerned with “potential life” your boyfriend should be arrested for genocide everytime he cums on your back. ) agenda has permeated the entire process. The waiting period, the mandatory counseling, illegal third trimester abortions, etc.
This paternalism that has guided reproductive law hits you in the face when you try to excercise your right.
I find it insulting. I needed medical counseling, not emotional counseling. I don’t need the state stepping in to make sure “I feel ok”. If I was getting a bad tooth pulled out they wouldn’t send in a Orthadonic Interventionist to make to check in about how I feeling about the loss of a molar.
