Dilitation and Curratage
by Tsan Abrahamson
Copyright 2002. All rights reserved.
“FUCK YOU. Fuck you and your needles and herbs and massage and your fucking Chinese herbal medicine diet. Fuck you and your fucking self-righteous attitude.” I don’t actually say any of this, but I feel it streaming through my head like a bullet train. I just sit there, tears pooling up and rolling down, becoming heaving sobs, and then quiet sniffles. Dr. Wu, my acupuncturist, is standing in front of me. She waits until she can be heard again.
“You see how much healthier you are now than you were?” She says as I am sitting there, just arrived from the doctor’s office. “You know, we have prepared your body to have a baby – look at your tongue, how good and pink it looks. You have followed our system and look how far you’ve come,” she says defending a perceived but in fact quite imaginary attack on the Chinese herbal medicine regimen I had been on for 5 months. “We have taken you farther than you have ever come before, and this miscarriage was meant to be.” I want to smack her.
“Now,” she says, motioning me to lie flat on the table, “I need you to smile while I am administering the needles. Smile to your heart. Thank your heart for all it’s done. It is important that you smile.” It is at this point, that the resistible urge to scream is at its peak. The needles and herbs all sound like a bunch of granola bullshit now, though only hours ago, I thought they were my saving grace. As I lie on my back, the tears begin again, and they roll into my ears. My husband takes a tissue and dabs in gently in the ear cavity to soak up the water before she sticks the needles there. I don’t want to smile.
Perhaps an hour earlier, I had gotten the news. Again. For the third time. The reproductive endocrinologist said only “this is not good.” The heart had stopped, the baby had stopped growing. It was dead. Again. Fucking again.
The initial shock phase: I blink, I stop cold, I can’t believe it is happening. Everyone stops. The doctor, the technician. There is a very unpregnant awkward silence that, if not broken, will suffocate everyone in the room, because we are all holding our breath. Finally, the doctor gently tells me that I did everything right and it was probably a chromosomal defect. He mentions that a D&C is one way of clearing out the pregnancy, or I can wait and possibly “pass” the fetus. “I’m so sorry,” he says, as he rises from his stool and squeezes my shoulder. “Perhaps in a week or so, we can talk about what you want to do.” He leaves. My husband holds me. Today, as we leave, no one asks us to settle our bill.
We head directly to the acupuncturist. I have already raised this baby in my mind. He was at Bowdoin, because, well, Yale and Harvard would have been the obvious choices. He broke his left leg in the 9th grade at the downhill competition in Utah. We comforted him with mint hot chocolate and promised him a new computer. He never kept his room clean and we once found a bottle of Jaegermeister in his room and had to have the “talk.” Now he is dead, without me having given him his new skis. As we drive down California Street, I wonder what I am going to do with the new Coach diaper bag sitting in my bedroom.
We make our way up the rickety stairs to see Dr. Wu. We believe – quite wrongly – that she will be comforting. That she will tell us things that give us great hope, and that she will offer her condolences. We believe she will emanate a great wisdom and warmth that western doctors cannot conjure. We want our $500.00 a week to count for something. It doesn’t. Instead, we endure the discomfort of being in a place where my miscarriage is seen as a statistical failure to their pregnancy success rate, and we leave.
My husband is holding up well, as he leads me to the car and home. Someone says fleetingly to him as we leave the clinic, “Oh, and I’m sorry for you, too,” but that’s all the comfort he gets. I know he is hurting and I know I should try to comfort him, too, the way he is comforting me, but I can’t do it. I am completely self-absorbed except for that moment or two it takes me to realize his own pain and further to realize I can do nothing for him. Eventually – somewhere between Golden Gate Park and the Bay Bridge – I reach over and tell him that it all must be very hard on him and I’m sorry he has to go through this. That’s all I can manage.
By the time we get home, he has called my office to tell them I will not be in, notified my parents and his that there will be no grandchild, and left word at work that he will be out the next few days. Each time, he begins with “We got some bad news today,” and each time I feel the air rush out of my lungs. We open the door and I only want to lay down with my dogs and sleep. No, I want to restart the day and relive the appointment the way I wanted it to happen. I have already fantasized that it’s all a bad dream, and now I want to sleep. There will be more appointments to make in the next few hours: The D&C, the “follow-up,” the “new fertility schedule,” but now I want to sleep.
I fade in and out, answer questions posed to me by Dan, and dream that I am dead. It’s not a pleasant sleep and my dog, Nurit, is very aware that something is wrong. She tries to get on the bed, but Dan shoos her off because of her bladder control problem. When I am finally awake enough to ask for some water, Dan has scheduled the D&C.
The next day, I remove my earrings and wedding bands and don sweats for my hospital adventure. I know the drill at the hospital and when I am finally escorted to the pre-op area, the nurses all recognize me. They know why I am there, and they are unsure if they should greet me with big or tempered smiles. I get a little of each. A redneck-looking orderly with a mustache attached to his sideburns stops in his tracks. “I thought I told you I never wanted to see you in here again,” he says, with a sad look on his face. He touches my arm and shakes his head. I lose it.
I am screaming in my head again. Evidently, I am still not over the fact that my Chinese doctor had less sympathy for me than some orderly who’d rather be watching the country music channel than talking to me. I am hurling perfectly crafted verbal daggers at her – I am a genius in that moment. I could be on the writing staff for “West Wing” I am so good. I’ll show her.
I am going to go off her stupid fertility diet and her stupid herbs and I’m going to get pregnant anyway. And when I’m good and round and about to drop, I’m going to march into her lobby and eat a donut or a slice of pizza or some other forbidden food. I’m going to dance a little pizza-jig right there in her waiting room. My fantasy is interrupted by the nurse.
“Would you like Versed or Fentonil?” the nurse asks as she’s preparing my I.V. (she has looked at my chart and knows that the last time I was in the nurse destroyed 3 veins before she got the I.V. in correctly and mercifully, she opts for the “intern’s friend,” – a wrist vein near the thumb area).
“Fentonil is the one that’s like heroin, right?” I ask.
“Right, “ she says. “I like to think of it as a big margarita, no salt, no triple sec, but, yeah, it’s like heroin.”
“That’s the one I want,” I reply. “A lot. Give me a lot of it.” I remember in that moment that I have some pot in the kitchen cabinet and regret that I am not now completely wasted. I want to be wasted, because I don’t want to hurt anymore and in that moment I am sister to every drug addict who took one more hit because she couldn’t bear to look at her life for another second.
I hate myself for being so pitiful. I hate myself for having so much anger. I just want it to stop. I don’t want to feel guilty for not going to another baby shower. I don’t want to seethe with some feeling halfway between anger, jealousy and sadness whenever I see a pregnant woman. I don’t want to hate those friends of mine who have put their mouths before their brains by saying things like, “I’m sorry you have such bad genes” or “you just need to relax” or even “I just think what you’re doing is so unnatural. You should just adopt.” I think that I will commit sepaku if someone else says that everything happens for a goddamn reason.
I just want to sleep forever or be so out of it on Fentonil that everything has to be done for me. I know it will only last an hour or so, but I will pretend it’s forever. And when I wake up, things will be OK.
I feel the cold of the medicine as it enters the I.V. and I hear the nurse tell me to put my legs in the stirrups, which I do. I am holding my underpants in my hand because I have forgotten to take them off in the dressing room like I was supposed to do. The nurse remarks that I must have paid a lot for them because they are made by Patagonia. I am busy counting the seconds until I feel something going through me, and so I don’t pay attention to her mindless prattle.
“You doing OK?” The doctor is here and he touches me on the shoulder. “I’m so sorry about this. Just three days ago things were perfect. I was so happy for you.”
“It’s OK,” I mutter.
“Well, I’m not giving up hope on you. We are going to get you this baby,” he says cheerfully. “Can you feel the Fentonil?”
Just then, the drug hits like a warm velvet hammer, my head gets heavy and I don’t care anymore what anyone is saying. I hear the nurse tell Dr. Wharton that I am a good patient and he tells her I never complain. Somewhere off in the distance, I feel some pressure. I twitch and I feel the nurse’s hands press down on my shoulders.
“It’s OK, we’re almost done,” she says.
A few minutes later, the Dr. tells me that it’s all done, that it went well, and that there’s no reason for me to wait to try again. He will test the fetus and he will test my blood and he will test Dan’s blood and maybe we’ll find something. In the meantime, I should take care of myself, maybe go get a massage.
The nurse lets my husband into the recovery room. He is engrossed in a short story in the New Yorker and thinks I am too sleepy to talk, so I let him read. I close my eyes and lay back and listen to the monitors that I’m attached to and the sounds around me. Someone there has just had an abortion.
I am drifting along on the last sliver of Fentonil and awake and aware enough to know that reality is flooding back. They will be asking me to make decisions soon. First, the little ones right there in the recovery room, like whether I want cranberry juice or herbal tea, and whether or not I can pee. Then, there will be bigger decisions, like whether I want to try again, whether I want to submit to chromosomal testing, whether I want to adopt or use donor eggs or donor sperm.
But I am drifting now, still a little numb. I am watching a social worker look at a pile of files the top one of which is mine. She flips open the file and at the top it reads “Black woman – cannot conceive.” It is her dream come true. She smiles and tosses the file in a garbage can.
Copyright 2002. All rights reserved.
“FUCK YOU. Fuck you and your needles and herbs and massage and your fucking Chinese herbal medicine diet. Fuck you and your fucking self-righteous attitude.” I don’t actually say any of this, but I feel it streaming through my head like a bullet train. I just sit there, tears pooling up and rolling down, becoming heaving sobs, and then quiet sniffles. Dr. Wu, my acupuncturist, is standing in front of me. She waits until she can be heard again.
“You see how much healthier you are now than you were?” She says as I am sitting there, just arrived from the doctor’s office. “You know, we have prepared your body to have a baby – look at your tongue, how good and pink it looks. You have followed our system and look how far you’ve come,” she says defending a perceived but in fact quite imaginary attack on the Chinese herbal medicine regimen I had been on for 5 months. “We have taken you farther than you have ever come before, and this miscarriage was meant to be.” I want to smack her.
“Now,” she says, motioning me to lie flat on the table, “I need you to smile while I am administering the needles. Smile to your heart. Thank your heart for all it’s done. It is important that you smile.” It is at this point, that the resistible urge to scream is at its peak. The needles and herbs all sound like a bunch of granola bullshit now, though only hours ago, I thought they were my saving grace. As I lie on my back, the tears begin again, and they roll into my ears. My husband takes a tissue and dabs in gently in the ear cavity to soak up the water before she sticks the needles there. I don’t want to smile.
Perhaps an hour earlier, I had gotten the news. Again. For the third time. The reproductive endocrinologist said only “this is not good.” The heart had stopped, the baby had stopped growing. It was dead. Again. Fucking again.
The initial shock phase: I blink, I stop cold, I can’t believe it is happening. Everyone stops. The doctor, the technician. There is a very unpregnant awkward silence that, if not broken, will suffocate everyone in the room, because we are all holding our breath. Finally, the doctor gently tells me that I did everything right and it was probably a chromosomal defect. He mentions that a D&C is one way of clearing out the pregnancy, or I can wait and possibly “pass” the fetus. “I’m so sorry,” he says, as he rises from his stool and squeezes my shoulder. “Perhaps in a week or so, we can talk about what you want to do.” He leaves. My husband holds me. Today, as we leave, no one asks us to settle our bill.
We head directly to the acupuncturist. I have already raised this baby in my mind. He was at Bowdoin, because, well, Yale and Harvard would have been the obvious choices. He broke his left leg in the 9th grade at the downhill competition in Utah. We comforted him with mint hot chocolate and promised him a new computer. He never kept his room clean and we once found a bottle of Jaegermeister in his room and had to have the “talk.” Now he is dead, without me having given him his new skis. As we drive down California Street, I wonder what I am going to do with the new Coach diaper bag sitting in my bedroom.
We make our way up the rickety stairs to see Dr. Wu. We believe – quite wrongly – that she will be comforting. That she will tell us things that give us great hope, and that she will offer her condolences. We believe she will emanate a great wisdom and warmth that western doctors cannot conjure. We want our $500.00 a week to count for something. It doesn’t. Instead, we endure the discomfort of being in a place where my miscarriage is seen as a statistical failure to their pregnancy success rate, and we leave.
My husband is holding up well, as he leads me to the car and home. Someone says fleetingly to him as we leave the clinic, “Oh, and I’m sorry for you, too,” but that’s all the comfort he gets. I know he is hurting and I know I should try to comfort him, too, the way he is comforting me, but I can’t do it. I am completely self-absorbed except for that moment or two it takes me to realize his own pain and further to realize I can do nothing for him. Eventually – somewhere between Golden Gate Park and the Bay Bridge – I reach over and tell him that it all must be very hard on him and I’m sorry he has to go through this. That’s all I can manage.
By the time we get home, he has called my office to tell them I will not be in, notified my parents and his that there will be no grandchild, and left word at work that he will be out the next few days. Each time, he begins with “We got some bad news today,” and each time I feel the air rush out of my lungs. We open the door and I only want to lay down with my dogs and sleep. No, I want to restart the day and relive the appointment the way I wanted it to happen. I have already fantasized that it’s all a bad dream, and now I want to sleep. There will be more appointments to make in the next few hours: The D&C, the “follow-up,” the “new fertility schedule,” but now I want to sleep.
I fade in and out, answer questions posed to me by Dan, and dream that I am dead. It’s not a pleasant sleep and my dog, Nurit, is very aware that something is wrong. She tries to get on the bed, but Dan shoos her off because of her bladder control problem. When I am finally awake enough to ask for some water, Dan has scheduled the D&C.
The next day, I remove my earrings and wedding bands and don sweats for my hospital adventure. I know the drill at the hospital and when I am finally escorted to the pre-op area, the nurses all recognize me. They know why I am there, and they are unsure if they should greet me with big or tempered smiles. I get a little of each. A redneck-looking orderly with a mustache attached to his sideburns stops in his tracks. “I thought I told you I never wanted to see you in here again,” he says, with a sad look on his face. He touches my arm and shakes his head. I lose it.
I am screaming in my head again. Evidently, I am still not over the fact that my Chinese doctor had less sympathy for me than some orderly who’d rather be watching the country music channel than talking to me. I am hurling perfectly crafted verbal daggers at her – I am a genius in that moment. I could be on the writing staff for “West Wing” I am so good. I’ll show her.
I am going to go off her stupid fertility diet and her stupid herbs and I’m going to get pregnant anyway. And when I’m good and round and about to drop, I’m going to march into her lobby and eat a donut or a slice of pizza or some other forbidden food. I’m going to dance a little pizza-jig right there in her waiting room. My fantasy is interrupted by the nurse.
“Would you like Versed or Fentonil?” the nurse asks as she’s preparing my I.V. (she has looked at my chart and knows that the last time I was in the nurse destroyed 3 veins before she got the I.V. in correctly and mercifully, she opts for the “intern’s friend,” – a wrist vein near the thumb area).
“Fentonil is the one that’s like heroin, right?” I ask.
“Right, “ she says. “I like to think of it as a big margarita, no salt, no triple sec, but, yeah, it’s like heroin.”
“That’s the one I want,” I reply. “A lot. Give me a lot of it.” I remember in that moment that I have some pot in the kitchen cabinet and regret that I am not now completely wasted. I want to be wasted, because I don’t want to hurt anymore and in that moment I am sister to every drug addict who took one more hit because she couldn’t bear to look at her life for another second.
I hate myself for being so pitiful. I hate myself for having so much anger. I just want it to stop. I don’t want to feel guilty for not going to another baby shower. I don’t want to seethe with some feeling halfway between anger, jealousy and sadness whenever I see a pregnant woman. I don’t want to hate those friends of mine who have put their mouths before their brains by saying things like, “I’m sorry you have such bad genes” or “you just need to relax” or even “I just think what you’re doing is so unnatural. You should just adopt.” I think that I will commit sepaku if someone else says that everything happens for a goddamn reason.
I just want to sleep forever or be so out of it on Fentonil that everything has to be done for me. I know it will only last an hour or so, but I will pretend it’s forever. And when I wake up, things will be OK.
I feel the cold of the medicine as it enters the I.V. and I hear the nurse tell me to put my legs in the stirrups, which I do. I am holding my underpants in my hand because I have forgotten to take them off in the dressing room like I was supposed to do. The nurse remarks that I must have paid a lot for them because they are made by Patagonia. I am busy counting the seconds until I feel something going through me, and so I don’t pay attention to her mindless prattle.
“You doing OK?” The doctor is here and he touches me on the shoulder. “I’m so sorry about this. Just three days ago things were perfect. I was so happy for you.”
“It’s OK,” I mutter.
“Well, I’m not giving up hope on you. We are going to get you this baby,” he says cheerfully. “Can you feel the Fentonil?”
Just then, the drug hits like a warm velvet hammer, my head gets heavy and I don’t care anymore what anyone is saying. I hear the nurse tell Dr. Wharton that I am a good patient and he tells her I never complain. Somewhere off in the distance, I feel some pressure. I twitch and I feel the nurse’s hands press down on my shoulders.
“It’s OK, we’re almost done,” she says.
A few minutes later, the Dr. tells me that it’s all done, that it went well, and that there’s no reason for me to wait to try again. He will test the fetus and he will test my blood and he will test Dan’s blood and maybe we’ll find something. In the meantime, I should take care of myself, maybe go get a massage.
The nurse lets my husband into the recovery room. He is engrossed in a short story in the New Yorker and thinks I am too sleepy to talk, so I let him read. I close my eyes and lay back and listen to the monitors that I’m attached to and the sounds around me. Someone there has just had an abortion.
I am drifting along on the last sliver of Fentonil and awake and aware enough to know that reality is flooding back. They will be asking me to make decisions soon. First, the little ones right there in the recovery room, like whether I want cranberry juice or herbal tea, and whether or not I can pee. Then, there will be bigger decisions, like whether I want to try again, whether I want to submit to chromosomal testing, whether I want to adopt or use donor eggs or donor sperm.
But I am drifting now, still a little numb. I am watching a social worker look at a pile of files the top one of which is mine. She flips open the file and at the top it reads “Black woman – cannot conceive.” It is her dream come true. She smiles and tosses the file in a garbage can.
Copyright 2004 T. Abrahamson. All rights reserved 
