The Portobello: How I survived a hysterectomy

I hadn’t written in almost a year. I could not finish my book. I could not launch my company. I could not even decide what the business of my company was. They had taken out my mammary ducts, my uterus, my cervix that was slung so low that there was not even a question of slinging that thing back up like a hammock for my internal genetic lady bits. The doc said it was too heavy anyway. Fucking story of my life. I had a vision that my sweet happy girl of a cervix was more of a Portobello mushroom than a dainty little crimini. Nothing in my self had ever been a dainty little anything, so why did I want to have a dainty little crimini cervix? Hell, even a Penny Bun? Or, ooohhh, a Shiitake, or a Porcini? They taste better and have a little fluttery zip to them around the edges—and lack the density of a Portobello. Add a little maitake (Hen of the Woods) for labia minora, surrounded by a smooth chanterelle… yum. Now there would be something to dine on at the Y!

None of those other cute little button mushrooms on the inside would have mattered anyway; she was covered with dysplasia. She had to go. See ya, Cervix. My fallopian tubes had to go, too, they said, but then they left them in because they couldn’t reach them. Um, couldn’t they get some tongs or something to extend the laser or the roast beef electric knife or whatever tool they used for these things? And by the way, it’s not like I’m six feet tall. My torso is long, but not that long. The space between the entrance to the castle there and where I imagine some ovaries to be isn’t more than 8 or 10 inches. (I mean, who knows? Maybe it’s six.) What’s the problem?

They had already taken my right mammary ducts. They hadn’t yet taken the left, but they sure did find a mess of that last stage of pre-cancer on what had been my super shiny-pretty cervix only a year before. They showed it to me. It just looked like a glistening clear sticker on the end of a penis. Not exactly a mess, but what do I know?

When the urogynecologist investigated a week or so after she invaded and excavated Rome all in one trip there—tacking things up here and there now that there was no vault, installing mesh here and there in what I imagined to be a kitty swing for my bladder, and pushing the drunk guy on the bus who kept falling into my well-mannered girl just trying to read her book in her tight little vagina back into place with the rectocele—she sat back with her headlamp, pulling off her mint green silicone gloves with a snap and declared, “It’s all good! I put 100 six-month sutures in there, so nothing’s going anywhere! Everything’s grrreat!” She sounded like Tony the Tiger. Tony the Tiger on an Austrian hike up the mountains with the Von Trapp family. I wished she had worn lederhosen.

When I had gone in for the emergency examination with her six weeks before, it had been Halloween and I had considered trimming things up down there around that spartanly-furred red pussy, and drawing in some eyes of Simba to go as The Lion King. RAHHHRRR! That made me laugh when she checked things out that day. On this follow-up day, I thought about one-fucking-hundred stitches in my puss and said, “Is there a sign over the top that says, ‘Work will set you free’?” because I was losing my identity as a woman—and a vibrant, sexual, mother-Goddess-Madonna-whore woman at that—a little more every time I went in to see a new fucking doctor. This one enjoyed rock, mountain, ice and big walls climbing, biking, literature and opera. Oh, and she was Jewish. Fuck me in the head. I am so inappropriate, on the PC scale. Even though I trekked to Europe when I was pregnant with my first child BY MYSELF in order to bear fucking witness to Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Buchenwald, people don’t know that I am being ironic and that I am painfully attached to the plights of every persecuted people on Earth, even though I am not one, with the exception of being a Woman. More fucking circles.

When asked how I was feeling, I joked that I was practically a tranny now, and was reprimanded by my daughters, who told me I could not use that word, and I also certainly could not justify it by telling them (and reminding myself) that I had been a fag hag back when it really counted. They shrieked, “Mom! You CANNOT say ‘f’-‘a’-‘g’!” Being up to speed with current sexual politics must include the abandonment of previously okay words and phrases--and being AWARE of the politics of the trends. That is, in fact, why we don’t use the term “fag” at all now. It cannot be appropriated, even if you were avante garde in the 80s and adorned yourself with gay men, as they adorned themselves with you. Dan Savage stopped it 10 years ago… Get with the times, Amy. Especially now that you only hang out with 60-year-old lesbians. Mommy complex much?

Without my most tasteless jokes, I could not use humor to plow through this. The more inappropriate, the more freaked out I was feeling. I never asked “why?” because that fascist Landmark leader said there’s no access in why when I took the Integrity course 20 years ago, and while I am not a fan of anything that looks like a mind-fuck/cult, what they say is correct. ‘Why’ is a waste of time down a sad sap path of victim-ey navel gazing.

I sort of lost my way, for without humor, I had to be in my not knowing. My uncertainty. My lack of control. My grief. More grief. Fuck grief. Could it just be over? My surrender.

Anyway, there would be more. Whatever was wrong in my body that manifested in my right breast that Oncology and Infectious Disease could not figure out at the Cancer Care Alliance hopped a ferry for the better buffet on the left breast. That’s how I visualized it. Abnormal cells and granulomatous—gronyuhlommuhtous…how do you even say words you’ve only ever read?— formation and some anaerobic infection or another every time I went in, which was about once every six weeks beginning in November 2015. They all packed their bags like 7-foot teenaged basketball players after the diner on the right closed and went over to the left, and there they really tore it up. Like an all-you-can-eat, all-night disco party. ABBA was playing. Queen appeared. And a little Hall & Oates.

Infectious Disease at UW had no clue, and why would they? They’re a teaching hospital, for Chrissakes! Another squeaky-voiced “fellow” was “treating” me by asking me what Infectious Disease said at the Cancer Care Alliance.

“Isn’t it in the notes?” I asked her, my robe flapping open behind me just in case, you know, someone wanted to check out my holes. IN MY BREAST. Don’t be nasty.

“Oh, um, yeah… Let’s see here. Oh, yeah, there it is… Well, they don’t know. I wondered if you knew what they thought it was.”

Um. Really? That, I did laugh out loud about.

When her Attending came to see how our little visit was going almost 30 minutes later, he said, “Oh, good. They have you continuing on Clindamycin. Yeah. Just keep with that. And maybe we’ll up your dose.”

“My oncologist asked me to ask you if you thought a preventive dose of some other antibiotic might be better. Something that would address a dermatological issue, if that were the case.”

“No, not necessary. This is going to take its natural course.”

“What is the natural course for a problem no one can name?” I asked, apparently to no one.

I’d already been on a steady diet of clindamycin for 15 months, and I was pretty sure it only served to destroy my flora and create a new problem in my GI.

“Oh, take some Senna or other stool softeners,” he said without looking up from my file.

“Take these horsepills, and then take this little handful of other pills to solve the problems these pills are causing. We are actually apothecarians,” I joked. There used to be a round mound in the neighborhood who sold crack on the corner. When I confronted him about the crack, told me he wasn’t a dealer; no, he was an apothecarian.

But no one in oncology or infectious disease from Stanford to John Hopkins knew what my problem was. No one had seen anything like it. Nice.

I appreciated that I did not have cancer. I appreciated that my doctor at the Cancer Care Alliance continued to see me anyway, that she started to break when I would weep silently from pain and exhaustion and hopelessness when she would take out her scalpel to cut 5 cm down and 4 cm wide. Exhausted of ideas herself, she sent me to the wound care nurse, who prescribed silver felt instead of gauze, which was softer, which made me less tense when I had to pack and unpack that thing. She sent me home with a recipe for a Dakin's solution that I had to both concoct and flush with three times a day.

I deeply appreciated that she finally allowed that maybe putting something inside the wounds besides water might be the right call. While she had had seriously negative reactions to my announcement that I had been pouring hydrogen peroxide and cleaning with rubbing alcohol, she was willing to go with some Dakin’s and silver felt, and she relented on the colloidal silver drops since I was drawn to that and these were the three things that granted the only minor relief I’d had in two years.

And bless her for allowing, finally, that she did not know, and that maybe it was, in fact, an energetic problem and why not try crystals—nothing else had worked. The East West Bookstore might have a solution not made of bleach, a metaphor so creepy it also made me weep.

Energetic problems were being shown to me left and right in my body— physical manifestations through physical blocks that were hot and painful. The sooth I went to said ‘They’ were telling her that it wasn’t cancer before I ever even went to the Cancer Care Alliance, so I went back to her. They told her that I had unresolved grief and anger, and that my brother’s death was not my fault, nor did my desire to keep him alive the extra 15 years he survived after the suicide attempt when he was 15 that put his depression on my radar make me selfish. She said the right breast symbolized my issues with trust and safety, and that Joe was never the one, which to me meant that I had to own never fully committing to him and “us”, which meant, to me, that I knew he had not been the one and I tried to ignore my wisdom. The left, being closer to my heart, showed problems with self-worth and caring for everybody but me, that perhaps my anorexic union with Joe had been an anorexic heart refusing to take in love that was not nourishing.

My body knew these things intuitively. My private meditation practice and energetic work was focused primarily in opening the heart, solar plexus, and root chakras, but I was completely avoiding the sacral chakra, which ended up being some of the hardest and deepest work I have ever done and also opened a channel of creativity that involves stepping into my “gut brain,” or the alignment and opening of cognition, emotion, and visceral intuition. And I do not believe it is over. Habits built over a lifetime of external reinforcement do not bounce back overnight. They cannot be “healed” with cognition.

The infection kept coming back, over and over again. I would say now that it was because the mind still told me I was not good enough—not in this body, not in my work, not in my knowing, not in my anything. It sat in scarcity. It denied that “enough” is abundance. It sat in fear. It sat in isolation. It whispered this to the Heart, and the Heart reluctantly joined the bandwagon refrain, until it believed it mindlessly.

I continued to close in on myself, folding over and over into that origami “good enough” that boxed me into an un-knowing. It added a layer of misinterpretation of a phrase that kept coming to me over and over: Would you rather be right, or alone? Would you rather be healed and connected, or correct, self-righteous, angry, hostile, unforgiving, and alone? And are you going to hold a grudge? And are you going to also feel you are not worthy of feeling wronged, but still feel wronged and therefore, wrong in your attachment to both being wronged and being right? Are you going to live with this shame forever? Is this your life?

You can’t get right with everything individually. There will never be enough hours in the day if you think you have to fix every little thing about you that is not good enough. You are not “good enough.” You’re fucking perfect. You are right and good in what shows up in this moment. You will say this over and over until you believe it and wear it and forget you haven’t had to remind yourself of it in a week, or three weeks, or a year…until it is You. The You you always were, and the You that is Love, and does see Other, and is seen by Other, and is not looking for signs of affirmation, but has the knowing downloaded wholly. Your pendulum doesn’t have to keep swinging wide, looking for something external to buoy and bolster the limiting belief that this particular woman, without her man, is nothing. Neither is, “Woman! Without her, Man is nothing.” Those are wide swings of the pendulum.

You have to get right with self, so that you can become Self. You have to trust that the freefall in life is about like those freefalls my eggs do every month now—right into a chasm that will absorb the impact and the egg. Become One with all that is the Universe, that this life is one life, and that we are all, in fact, connected. That we have no beginning and have no end. That the freefall is not into certain death, simply certain un-knowing.

“Aaaaahhhhhh! Gooooooodddd byyyyyyyeeee! Thankkkkkksss for the riiiiide!” I imagine my eggs saying every month, after they’ve travelled down the 10-12 cm of fallopian tubes to nowhere, dropping into the abyss that is nebulous and red and cavernous.

Fuck criminis.