I’m 19. I attend pricey private college in Westchester, New York. I use cocaine when my father mails it to me from California. I drop a lot of acid. I smoke a lot of weed. And cigarettes. I know what a diaphragm is. I use one. I also use condoms. I am someone who considers condoms half the battle. But I falter. Or I don’t. But I get pregnant.
Steve, my father, has always been very clear about what to do. You can’t have a baby. It’s not like his parenting particularly attracted me to the job anyway.
An abortion runs about $300.00 in 1996. It’s a weekend of not getting high in the city. It’s a cost perpetually built in to all my self-risk projects. The price of correction. I calculate consequences in terms of what I can pay. Not what I can afford.
I’ve got money, means, will, wherewithal, a hot bi boyfriend and a beautiful Lebanese girlfriend, a 19 year old uterus, and the choice to have it vacated of rapidly dividing cells all within my clutch. We ride from Bronxville to White Plains. Summer Bre and I are so ready to snap at any sign of misogynist withholding. We each have a white parent. We can pass medically. We can do this. It’s easy if you know how.
Liminal etiquette in this odd place. How to behave at all? What a question. Ape experience? Feign cool? How many abortions till you attain nonchalance? I want them to know I know this is my fault, I want them to acknowledge my taking responsibility without bellowing at me. The way my father bellows at the dinner table. “Take all you want, but eat all you take.”
The staff are professional, nice because money, not because me.
I’ve had a few pelvics at this point in my life from a few different providers, so the preamble doesn’t surprise me. The nurse tech introduces the ultrasound wand and I feel her rotating inside me, getting the lay of the land. She’s also palpating a tender area on my right, above that ovary, more than I’d like. I yelp.
She calls in the doctor doctor.
“Bageling.”
I am actually so hungry, and wildly hope they will insist I eat before they can perform any kind of procedure on me. But no.
They can’t find the fetus. My fallopian tube looks suspect.
“So it’s ectopic?”
They look unhappy I know the word and the implication, and I muse for neither the first nor last time how criminally low the bar for self-awareness is set and girdered and locked like a crate against the sky for women. Upshot: maybe? Planned Parenthood lacks the highly sensitive diagnostic equipment necessary to determine whether they possess the adequate surgical equipment to perform the procedure they advertise being able to perform. Planned Parenthood was is and remains the best medical option for women in this country; I chafe at their insufficiency in this light. They are the vital service, and they come up short. It’s grim. They refer me to Queens.
I’m processed almost immediately because “ectopic” is an urgent word. I’m examined roughly, regularly, shallowly. But I’m not visited by a doctor for about ten hours. Because “gunshot” is an urgent event. Event trumps word.
So it’s a long day in a hospital gown on a gurney in a hallway. The ER is very crowded. I’m one of a few people in the between of admission and evaluation. They keep hooking me up to an IV, which is distracting. Summer and Nathan, my girlfriend and boyfriend, buy magazines: Harper’s Bazaar, Hustler, The New Yorker. I’m really hungry. Nathan’s mouth smells like the Corn Nuts Summer loves that I can’t stand. I haven’t called my parents yet.
We haven’t. We are 19. We are white. We wait.
Eventually, the On-Call Gyno appears. She’s in her 40’s, lean like a marathoner or lifelong anorexic. Ropy with elective pain. Jewish, say the curls and the maternally patrician profile and stony moue of disapproval. She yanks back my flannel blanket to inspect her surgical canvas. “Tsk.” My very bare pubic shave is growing out. “I don’t understand why grown women want to look like little girls.” She sighs, scowls, and snaps the blanket back down.
Great! Awesome! Can’t wait for you to thrust aspirating needles into my unenlightened Barbie-bimbo-pervert womb, lady!
Some more robust wand imaging and several consultations later, it’s decided that it can’t be decided.
I am definitely pregnant. And I’m definitely distended. Whether this pregnancy is uterine or ectopic, they can’t say.
Solution: perform both procedures. A D & C for the uterus, and a round of IV tamoxifen for the ectopic.
Tamoxifen is chemotherapy.
Tamoxifen will affect my future fertility, adversely.
Tamoxifen will affect my cancer risk, adversely.
Tamoxifen will give me osteoporosis.
But it will certainly kill any rapidly dividing cells, if I accept a drip of it into my veins for twelve hours after my cervix is clipped open and my uterus melon balled clean. As we all know, the risk of an untreated ectopic pregnancy is spontaneous, hemmhoragic death. “It’s a very dangerous situation, you know.”
“If that’s what it is. Maybe I just came in very early.”
What do I want to do?
Both procedures hurt.
It’s a long night. I stay on the cancer ward. Summer drives my car home to feed my cat, Leonard. Nathan stays in a chair next to me. People die quietly, and ask to loudly, all down the hallway. Whatever it takes. This is the price. This is fair.
I don’t tell my parents until I am back in my apartment the next afternoon. That I did not have to is my only solace.
Although my dad does overnight me a package.
That's a lot for a 19 year old to handle 😔