Note: This post has been sitting in the darkness of my drafts folder. I never finished it, but still felt like it deserves to be out there in the world… It’s part of the reason I didn’t continue the blog. If I wasn’t brave enough to post this how could I post about anything really? Still stuck on that thought. - 10/3/22

On May 9th we will move out of the house that has been our home for the last decade. I walked into this house in June of 2006, six months pregnant, having never birthed a child, never been woken repeatedly in the night for months on end, never nursed a sick kid while also sick myself, never loved someone the way I would come to love these funny little people, never owned a business or managed employees, never had a business partner, never had to balance work and kids with a husband. There was so much I hadn't done. I still had that youthful well-rested face, a Subaru, my two cats Jack and Sunny, and one last miracle giving ovary.

This old house makes me feel many, many things… some so sweet my body aches to think of them and some so bitter that I just wanted to be rid of this place. It’s not the house’s fault, the house is great, the house is perfect, but I wanted a change of memory. I want to tell this story in hopes that it will stay here in this house with it’s other ghosts so that I don't have to carry it with me. It's the one box I'll be unpacking before I go.

It was Quinnie’s 3rd birthday and I had just fully recovered from hernia surgery_ I could pick things up again, life was good. At about nine o’clock on a beautiful early summer evening, in the middle of a BBQ with friends, a subtle pain began to grow on my right side. It grew until I had to give in to it, and went inside to lay down on the living room floor. And then it grew more still until I knew I had to go to the ER. I kissed my babies (and left them with same friends) and Morgan and I headed to Saint Patrick’s Hospital, where about 8 years before I’d had surgery to remove my left torsed ovary. In the eight years since, I had been admitted 2 other times for ovarian cysts on my right side that had threatened to twist and luckily, for my children's sake, did not. But none of this was enough to convince the Doctor on call that I knew exactly what was going on: I was suffering from an ovarian cyst that had fully twisted and I needed surgery right away. She didn’t believe me. She didn't sugar coat it, she told me I was drug seeking and ironically pumped me with so much morphine and demerol that finally at 3 or 4 in the morning I fell into a drug induced sleep. I remember thinking somewhere in my mind in a far off disconnected way that I might not wake up and that was ok. When you are on morphine you can think things really clearly in your head but you can’t quite get those thoughts out. I felt like a trapped animal, trapped in my head and in that room, and was treated like one. An animal that needed to be sedated until she came to her senses. I did come to my senses at 7 am from my hospital room, to which I’d been brought for “pain management”. I woke up in the same excruciating pain that I’d passed out in and ordered the nurse to call my OB/GYN right away. My Dr. was by my side within 30 minutes. The ultrasounds from the night before had been misread (I could have told them that… oh wait I did). I was to have surgery, but now that it was daytime I had to wait until 2 pm for the next surgical opening. She would try to save the ovary … no promises.

The ovary couldn’t be saved. By the time they got in there it was completely necrotic, a grapefruit-sized mass of black dead tissue. They took the ovary and the fallopian tube, and then they reached in deeper and tore out all the babies I could have had, they ripped out my fountain of youth, they took the natural ebb and flow of my female body, and on their way out they tipped the balanced scale of my personal chemistry, put some staples in my uterus and stitched me up. It wasn't their fault, they were just the clean up crew.

If. Life is full of ifs… there’s even one in the word itself. If I’d had surgery right away would they have been able to save it … Would we have had one more baby? Would I have been a better mother to my two toddlers? Would I have been so tired and moody and anxious?

For years, I had a secret shame and it began the day I left the hospital clutching a bottle of estrodial… I did't feel like a real woman. It’s called Surgical Menopause. It’s called Female Castration. Both ugly, disgusting, shameful terms. It’s a headache like you’ve never felt before. It’s exhaustion. It’s lack of drive in every sense of the word. It's fear of aging too soon. It’s full-on grief for the way you used to naturally feel, that synthetic hormones can never replicate. It’s the shittiest shit and it turns out it costs a fucking fortune in pills, creams, sub-cutaneous pellets, and patches_ that you just can’t quite patch up. And to be honest I'm still pretty angry. Angry that people in the field of healthCARE so often care so little and are more prepared to assume you are lying or being dramatic, than to believe you. I will never forget the despair I felt when I realized the only doctor in the ER that night, who in my warped memory, never came closer than 5 feet from me and stood instead in the shadows of the darkened room, her face dismissive and pinched, seemed utterly determined not to help me.