There Will Be Blood

This one goes out to all my fellow bleeders

This one is going to be very TMI, if for you any talk about periods or heavy bleeding is Too Much. Personally, it’s more like NEI! Never Enough Information! Not that I ever really had a choice. Starting very early on, I was a Super Plus kind of girl. I took it as a badge of honor, the same way I took getting boobs. This is what it means to be a real woman. Note to everyone younger than me: no it doesn’t. This is what it means to probably have something fucked up happening in your uterus, and you should go see some doctors.

My periods were bad but fine during high school. My doctor put me on the pill, which helped. Things were fine (heavy, but fine, that’s the whole point of writing this, really, is how so many of us think it’s all fine because we are tough motherfuckers and/or because we’re told that this is just part of the deal.) I went off the pill when I was thirty-ish and ready to have some babies. After an early miscarriage and a year of cartoonishly monsoon periods, I finally found a doctor who told me what the fuck was happening. The fuck = a uterus full of fibroids. It might be my recollection through the haze of heavy painkillers talking, but what I remember is my doctor describing my uterus as being colonized by a sea of tiny monsters, little blood goblins. I had two surgeries to remove the goblins, and then I had two beautiful human children, and I never went back on the pill.

(Cue ominous music.)

Picture a ball rolling down the hill, only the ball is made out of blood. Maybe I should start writing body horror! Did you see The Substance? I thought it was crazy and ridiculous but more than that, I thought YES! Women’s bodies are fucking GOOPY! And I mean that very much in the opposite of the Gwyneth Paltrow kind of GOOP. Who can wear that many pairs of white pants?? Not me.

A few years after my second child was born, the bleeding was bad. I went to the doctor and asked them to check for fibroids, and lo and behold, there they were. Small, they said. We left them alone. A year later, the same thing. Bigger! But who cares, basically. Rinse and repeat. Last year, I posted something on Facebook (Facebook!!!!!) asking for a new rec, and someone recommended a whole dang Fibroid Center at NYU.

Here’s how to tell you’re a woman: having a doctor listening to you describe your symptoms, doing serious tests, and throughly walking you through your various treatment options makes you want to cry out of gratitude. The biggest goblin currently living in my uterus is 7 cm, the size of a grapefruit, or a 23 week pregnancy. At least it was a few months ago—this baby seems to have a need for speed and has been growing rapidly in the last couple of years, so who knows. Might be a cantaloupe by now! And of course there are all of its friends, its pesky minions, the lil guys who dream of becoming a grapefruit one day. I think there are seven. A baseball team! (Note: are there seven people on a baseball team? I don’t like baseball.) A cabal of ill repute.

I’m having surgery on Monday to get evict the lot of them. Why am I telling you all this? Maybe it’s the sudden flood of perimenopause content in my feeds, the awareness of how little women are told, how little women are studied, how easy it is to go to your annual gyn appointment and leave feeling like nothing actually happened. It takes fucking persistence to get properly diagnosed with anything. I am hopeful that my surgery will make my life much, much better for many years to come. Fibroids grow back, isn’t that charming?? They are the bodies globular weeds, insistent and irritating.

TBH grapefruits are fucking enormous. Wish me luck! And if you have a nagging question about your health, go see as many doctors as you can, truly, until you’re satisfied with the care that you’re getting. This has been my bloody PSA. Thanks for reading.