She bled. This does not come as much of a surprise because she is a woman. Bleeding is our thing after all...at least for a few days out of each month of our childbearing years if everything works down there the way our 6th grade health books tells us it should.
Yes. She bled. As she always did. Yet...this time was different. This time she was prolific in her bleeding. Her blood flowed like the River Jordan: fast and furious. To the point where those units of blood and mucosal tissue that could not seem to keep up decided to bond together and make the very thing she heard her mama say that she hated most in the world: the clot.
Yep. The blood clot. Those monstrosities of matter that make a woman afraid to laugh, cough, walk or breathe. Because she knows that if she moves even a hair a crimson fashion malfunction can overcome her.
She was experiencing the worst of it all for the first time. It went on like this month after suffering month.
"This shit is the worst" she thought.
The worst part of being a woman. The part that made her understand why her mama and aunties let the doctors take their lady parts when it all got to be too much. Passing clots the size of grapefruits, while cramping like hell, working full-time, raising kids alone, and making pound cakes for the church...this rites of passage was for the birds.
And yet...she quickly accepted this draining annoyance as her new normal. She wanted to shut this portion of her womanhood off at times but not knowing how to do so she relented. She began to question whether motherhood was still a viable or even desirable option for her. She tried to imagine a new uterus-less future for herself.
"How the hell did I get here?"
But she didn't linger there.
"I guess this is the price we pay for our lusciousness...for whatever that's worth."
A uterus in question and new language acquired, words like: iron-deficiency, anemia, hemorrhage, fibroid, and myomectomy became part of her everyday. A new obsession with Google-enabled self diagnoses was born.
She really tried to make the best of it, but it still sucked...the life out of her every month. It does so today, in fact. The suckiest thing about it is that she feels all alone. The blogs and message boards tell her that Black girls suffer from this crap the most, but none of them tell her why. And she's too ashamed to ask her friends and peers if they too suffer from the uterine fibroid blues. Not knowing if it is only a trait her and her mama and her aunties and her girl cousins share, she shrugs and suffers in silence and says,
"I guess this is just how it be."
As she bleeds and bleeds and bleeds...
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