excerpt from “On the Subject of Bearing and ‘Other Options'” by L. I. Henley

I am sleeping when the pain starts, dreaming of full hospitals and empty classrooms, a dark tunnel, dates on a computer screen, a diminishing roster of students, dead links, a riot of wildflowers—yellow to orange to code red—a superbloom of fires. My body jerks. My eyes open in the dark, and I am sucking air. The pain in my lower right pelvis is—I want to say—unbearable. But here I am, bearing it, clenching my teeth, sweating, crying and shouting and feeling around for my partner in the king-size bed, roughing up the comforter, shaking down bulky pillows, calling his name, wanting to wrench him awake as if he could—what? We’ve been here before. But, oh yeah, we keep separate rooms now because of his snoring, my tossing, our constant disruption of the other. I yell out the three syllables of his name once, twice.

I’m not exploding. I’m not exploding. I’m not.

The dogs wake and begin to growl. Maynard, the little terrier, barks. The bedroom door opens. Everyone runs in. They find me crunched up in a ball, gripping the bedsheets in both fists. Jonathan doesn’t have to ask me what’s going on. He knows. He climbs onto the bed and wraps his arms around my crustacean-shaped body.

“Just breathe, baby,” he says. He demonstrates for me, counting as he goes. “Breath in and hold: one, two, three. Exhale . . . two, three.”

I am not breathing, not yet, not like that. I am breathing through my skin, through my ears. Absorbing just enough oxygen to stay alive. Jonathan tries to soothe me, but the pain, like a skillful, determined little fucker of a mountain goat, climbs to even higher peaks. The goat reaches the clouds, looks down at me waving for it to stop, blinks, and keeps going. I scream expletives, and the goat goes stellar.

“Fuuuck,” I groan.

“Good, let it out—exhale . . . two, three.”

Our epileptic boxer-mix, Beatrix, paces and pants. Maynard curls up on the floor, nose to navel, and bites his penis. I am saying all manner of things I don’t mean, not to Jonathan, but to the ceiling, whatever exists beyond it.

“I want to fucking die!”

He holds me closer. “This will pass. It always does. Just breathe.”

And eventually, with the help of a 500 mg dose of expired ibuprofen, it does pass, or at least settles enough for me to conk out. I wake again in the morning with Jonathan and Maynard on the bed, Beatrix snoring triumphantly on the floor, my heating pad having long shut itself off. On the nightstand is a thermometer, a damp washcloth, a glass of water, and my little dish of morning pills. I swallow the pills and think about what a night at the understaffed hospital in Joshua Tree would have been like: me crying into my N95 mask as we lean against a wall, all ten ICU beds full, the midnight ultrasound boring the tech to tears: More globs of ookie innards slobbing it up in a bath of dark—whoopee. “Did my right ovary grow back?” I would ask and watch the tech roll her bloodshot eyes back into her tired head.

It seems entirely credible that my right ovary, surgically removed in 2012, could have grown back over the last ten years. I’ve seen enough medical mystery shows to know. Plus, this ovary was a real badass bitch—her methods of cruelty were medieval. If anyone could respawn from a pool of acidic ooze, it would be her. For years she’d been generating endometriomas—blood-filled cysts—that would grow to the size of plums and burst, filling my pelvis with a toxic soup. Burst, regrow, burst. The bursting felt like how people describe the death throes of an appendix, except my pain went on all day, every day, for months.

Waiting in pre-op back then, as Carole King sang “It’s Too Late” over the radio, I tried to think of any good times we’d had together but found few. Before they put me under, I started giving away my innards like old knickknacks: You like the ovary? Take the appendix too, and the uterus goes great with all that. I don’t need this left fallopian tube—take it. The female surgeon on crutches shook her head. She was certain my appendix was fine and that at twenty-eight, I should keep the uterus until I was done with grad school, in case I wanted to make a kid. She’d gone snowboarding with her teenage son two days ago and broke her foot in three places and what a great time they’d had together and, sigh—she didn’t want me to miss out. I was prescribed a low-dose birth control, and it worked to keep larger cysts from forming. The pain was manageable for a long time.

But here we are.

There’s coffee and the dogs’ routine and then we settle into scanning headlines on our phones. We hold up rashy red-and-purple bar graphs and blistering, hemorrhagic maps for the other to gape at. We make predictions about how long we’re going to be teaching from home and make exaggerated finger quotes when we say “teaching.” We check in with our parents via text: “How’s it going? Feeling ok?” “Yes, we got the box of rubber gloves—thank you.” “Fire still headed your way?” “I don’t know about putting bleach on apples; maybe just peel them?” We toast gluten-free bread and take turns staring out the smudged sliding-glass window into the desert studded with yellow flowers, waiting for the dots in the text window to temporarily relieve us of our concern.

“I have to make an appointment,” I say. “I can’t put it off any longer.” Punctuating a constant dull ache in my pelvis are murder-twinges, crackly pops of static that travel between hip bones. The resurfaced pain is just part of my “new normal.”

Jonathan looks up from his phone. “I know,” he says, with the somber acceptance of someone who’s been told it’s time to put his seventeen-year-old cat down. Apart from some early-morning double-masked, high-intensity grocery shopping, we haven’t left the house since mid-March. The thought of sitting in a waiting room among the coughing, sniffling masses feels unthinkable, but so does continuing to rent out my pelvis to reproductive parts that abuse me.

“And I’m going to ask for a hysterectomy again. I’m going to demand it.” The air of decisiveness I conjure doesn’t fool either of us. “It’s just got to happen.”

“I support that.” Pause. Our toast pops up. We butter our pieces lavishly, subconsciously thinking any breakfast could be our last. We let the conversation hang until—“But how do you feel about having major surgery during a pandemic?”

“Not great, but—”

“As an immune-compromised person.”

“Right, I know . . . and it’s not just me I have to think about, it’s that I could bring it home to you.”

“Don’t worry about me. It’s you I’m concerned about.”

“But by the time I actually get scheduled . . . I mean, this pandemic’s not going to last forever?”

“Uh.”

“I can’t not have surgery out of fear?”

I’m relieved when Jonathan gets a text from his father in Auburn, and we can change the subject. Then another text, then another. Seven separate dings to say that his neighbor’s brother has COVID. The neighbors might have it too. He and the neighbors ran into each other at the mailbox yesterday. The new delivery person had switched their mail, and they ended up touching each other’s to exchange them.

“We feel like sitting ducks,” the text says. “Will keep you posted.”

The attendance for my remedial English course was declining before the sudden switch online, but now I’ve lost nearly all my students in the dark tunnel between campus and the online portal. Many of them don’t have reliable internet. But the truth of the matter is that their hearts weren’t in it on campus either—there were evictions and lost jobs and abusive partners and probation officers and sick kids before the pandemic. Why worry about composing a compare-and-contrast essay when you’ve lost your job and there are three kids jumping around your head, all of them needing help with their long division? Who wants to wash windows while the sun explodes?

Entering my online Canvas course-management page is like walking into a digital ghost town in an Old West video game. The bar is empty, the saloon doors are creaking in the breeze, a rat darts between overturned tables. There are some scribbled notes on the bulletin board left behind by the panicked townsfolk: “To who ever find this, please just grade what ever I turned in—I can’t do anymore” and “Where’s the link to video? From two weeks ago? Help?”

Eventually my announcements begin to say things like, “Turn in what you have” and “Midterm exam canceled: just catch up on missed assignments.” And then before I know it, I’m just posting reminders of where to get COVID tests, recipes for DIY hand sanitizer, locations of food banks, tips for washing your groceries. When the assignments stop coming in altogether, I post: “Stay safe,” and it feels like the last ghostly message from mission control into the vacuum of space.

“So, your left ovary is quite large. And the uterus is a bit thicker than last time.”

The same gynecologic surgeon who scooped out my cyst-laden ovary nearly ten years ago is talking to me via Zoom. She’s got a wrist brace this time—a climbing accident with her grandson. She doesn’t look older than fifty, but she’s lapped me considerably in the progeny department.

“Why is the left one so big? Do you know?”

“It’s probably making up for the other one’s absence. Nothing to worry about.”

She asks me how it’s going so far on the MenopauseInducer5000, and I shake my head no. When I went in for my ultrasound two weeks ago, the nurse practitioner gave me a thirty-day supply of a medication that would essentially put me into menopause. My periods would stop completely. I’d be fifty years old overnight. The NP recommended yogurt and sardines for the extra calcium. I knew as soon as I reached for the brown paper sack that I’d be throwing it under my bathroom sink with the bleach and toilet scrubber.

“You didn’t start it? Okay—but it will literally stop your periods, stop the pain. So, what about the low-dose birth control?”

“Oh, yeah, remember I stopped taking that two years ago when I was having all that breakthrough bleeding?”

She bites her pen a moment and then taps it on her desk, begins writing. Luckily it was her nondominant wrist she broke while descending El Capitan with her physically gifted grandson. She doesn’t look up when she asks me, “So where are you at with the whole . . . kid thing?”

For a moment I wonder if she is referencing something in the news—some controversial issue with kids—do they stay home from school all year or not? Is the toll of missing school greater than . . . but no.

“Oh, I mean. I’m thirty-six and underemployed. I have one ovary. My Hashimoto’s antibodies are through the roof.”

“Uh-huh.”

“My uterus has that—what’s it called—adenomyosis?—it’s extra thick, right? And Jonathan’s vas—” The screen glitches. I might be frozen to her, my eyes caught in a squint. Freeze—unfreeze—like a playground game.

“Hmmm.”

She’s looking at me now, munching on her pen cap like a rabbit with a carrot. I think I must be delaying her lunch with my daftness. Her face goes pixelated, snaps back, goes blurry again.

“I’m in constant pain. I’m having a period every two weeks.”

“But a pregnancy would change all of that—the symptoms.”

\I am tempted to argue with her about how one even gets pregnant in my condition, but I cut to it instead: “No. What I want is a hysterectomy. I want it all out.”

She laughs. She laughs. And waves the thought away as though I told her I was getting into AcroYoga as a career.

“That won’t help much,” she says. “Endometriosis grows everywhere. It’s microscopic.”

“It won’t help at all?”

The blurry shape says something, but I miss it.

“Can you say that again?”

“What? Errr . . . 70 percent, I said. If you’re lucky.”

“My pain will be 70 percent less?”

“If you’re lucky. For some people the hysterectomy doesn’t help at all.”

The signal improves, and I can see her now, see her furrowed brow and devastated pen cap. I tell her that 70 percent is pretty good, and she looks disappointed in me, like we’re talking about a math exam I took. I notice all the framed diplomas hanging on her wall. I want to tell her that I am a state-school nobody, that I teach remedial night courses in my rural hometown, that Cs get degrees, that I slept through algebra. Seventy percent might be an F at Brown, but for me it’s a life raft.

I ask her if she can give me what I’m asking for, and she hesitates, looks down at the brace on her wrist as if wistfully recalling the smell of the pine trees as she fell three stories.

“I want you to pump the brakes. I want you to consider that . . . you’re still of reproductive age. That thirty-six is still very young.”

A few weeks later, the yellow snakeweed and the rabbitbrush have given way to the safety-vest orange of mariposa and poppy, globe mallow and paintbrush. An invasive stringlike parasite that looks like ribbons of orange plastic wraps around creosote and winter fat. The flower colors change like flags: yellow means caution, orange means impending threat. But I am one-foot-then-the-other forward into the fire-licked terrain. I find a surgeon in Palm Desert who uses robotics to perform all kinds of complicated gynecological surgeries. He’s performed thousands of hysterectomies this way, and I am disappointed when I see his photo and he doesn’t have surgical tools as fingers.

. . .