Probe

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so, I publish an essay from an emerging writer. This week’s essay is from Eden Lee. Eden is a writer and medical intuitive. She received her B.A. in Comparative Literature. Her work explores ancestral shame and the intersection of misogyny and medical violence. This essay was edited by Meg Pillow.

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“For what they have said so far… stems from the power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility meant to invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of a woman as a ‘dark continent’ to penetrate and to ‘pacify.’”

-Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”

I: Exit

The women in my family learned early to love selectively. Like picking the perfect fruit at the supermarket and leaving the rotted, the discolored, and the soft. So when Emily dropped from my grandmother’s womb, heavy as failure, my grandmother sent her to a psych ward and locked her away in the storage room of her memory. Emily was the bruise to be cut from the apple, the excess deemed spoiled, like the tumor they removed from my great aunt’s lungs.

I was born on June 12th, the same day as Emily but one generation later. My grandmother had long ceased to say her name. Had long referred to her two, not three, healthy daughters. Since my grandma is superstitious, she was worried on the day of my delivery. Her worry doubled its weight when the labor lasted over 24 hours, and again when I got tangled in the umbilical cord and began to suffocate, and again when they slit my mother’s stomach to perform a C-section delivery, and again when they pulled me out covered in my first shit, which I had taken in the womb. But after they’d cleaned me up and put me in her arms, remarking on what a beautiful baby I was, my grandma sighed, and the tumor of failure that had been encroaching on her heart’s borders retreated back into Emily’s corner. 

Thank god, she’s perfect, she said.

My guess is Emily had a wail primal as birth, and as she kept growing, she kept wailing. My guess is no doctor or mother could keep her quiet. No “hush” could mute that grieving cry.

II: Entry

I almost skipped school on dissection day. My partner, Adam, was there half an hour early.

Because Adam was very small for seventh grade, and very smart, the other boys would sometimes ask him if he was gay and if his penis was even visible. Adam was not gay, and when he watched the boys with already-deep voices trap in their arms the girls with already-big tits, I could see him seethe hot through his skin. 

But on dissection day, Adam could not believe his luck. Science was his best subject. Here, finally, was something he could do well to a body, a body with skin and eyes and organs and even a uterus, albeit cold-blooded and soaked in formaldehyde.

Ours was splayed out on the tray with its limbs pinned to posts. Like a snow angel, I thought.

Like BDSM, Adam said, which I didn’t understand at the time. They tie girls to the bed like that in porn. One hand or foot to each corner.

He lifted the skin between its hindlegs with forceps and made the first incision with a scalpel. Nauseated by the tangle of intestines Adam had exposed and by the way he smiled hungrily when he found the ovaries before anyone else did, I let him do all the work. 

The other boys began to crowd around our table, silent with respect, to watch Adam deconstruct his frog. He pulled out the heart with a pair of tweezers and held it up to the light. It looked like gummy candy. He waved it at a girl to make her squeal, which he had clearly wanted to do for a long time, and the boys laughed with him, which he had also wanted for a long time. I excused myself and went to the girls’ bathroom to retch into the sink. When I came back, the boys were still there, clapping Adam on the back. 

My man, they said. Adam my SON. Adam glowed. 

He finished middle school with confidence. Last I heard of him, he was studying to be a doctor in California.

III: Clarification

How bad is the pain? asks the doctor. He shows me a laminated chart with a row of yellow smiley faces, only one of which actually smiles. The rightmost face has slits for eyes and a mouth wide open, and it’s turned down at the corners. I point to the second-to-last face, with the squiggle mouth half open and the eyebrow lines arched upwards. 

You don’t look like that to me, sweetie, the doctor says.

IV: Eruption

We are taught to fear red early. Color of anger, hunger, and lust: things all good women avoid. Color of stoplights, warning signs. Color of an open wound. 

So, at age eight, when I came home from school and found a bucket of period blood in the toilet sitting as calm and still as a pond, I screamed. My mother had forgotten to flush the toilet. I thought she had been hurt. And I wasn’t wrong––my mother has a history of painful, irregular periods. The vengeful kind, the kind that comes out the same shade of red a bull sees. She resents her periods the way she resents the ringing telephone or her second sister.

My own uterus followed suit starting at the age of 15, when my first period came heavy and accompanied by a 102-degree fever and the worst pain I’d ever felt. I spent the night in my parents’ bed, in a fetal position, wishing I were unconscious. After a few more days of bleeding, my period disappeared, like an ashamed child after a tantrum, for a year.

V: Clarification

When did the pain start? asks the doctor.

I say, It made a home in my belly when I was a child. Always hungry and kicking and sucking at

my gut. I could not lie down. I slept near vertical and waited for it every night. It would come out of me and lie at my side, always wanting to feed, so I stayed up and nursed it like a good mother and lay with it like a good lover.

I don’t understand, replies the doctor. Can you speak more clearly, please.

VI: The Men

My mother always talked about how the men at work used to grab her and call her cunt when she walked by because she was a smart lady who worked hard. She told me how even though they called her cunt, she showed up to that office every day in her red lipstick and trenchcoat. Once she said They’re always trying to take things from me. I asked Who is they, Mama. She said Don’t you know by now.

VII: Anatomy

Accompanying me to the doctor was usually my dad’s job, not my mom’s. But during my first transvaginal ultrasound, she came instead. Even offered to sit in the room with me. I don’t remember if I refused or if they didn’t let her. But in the end, it was just me and the sonographer. I asked how it would feel, and she assured me the probe wouldn’t hurt, that it was “smaller than a dildo.” 

She splayed my legs with gynecological stirrups. I was reminded of dissection day six years before: the exposed belly and pinned limbs. The sonographer lubricated the probe and stuck it inside me. The whole scene felt pornographic; I let my mind float outside of my body like a camera, panning the stony-faced woman in a white coat, the medical equipment, the wide-eyed teenage girl in the middle. My muscles tightened around the probe. A moment later, the screen lit up gray.

The inside of my body looked unsatisfyingly amorphous. Nothing suggested an internal anatomy except for two dark blobs against the gray. I asked the sonographer, who seemed bored, what they were, and she told me they were ovaries. She answered my other questions in grunts until I stopped asking. The ovaries looked like two gaping holes.

VIII: Eruption

My uterus is misbehaving. A real problem child. I ruined a van and a bathroom during my sophomore year of college: on a class field trip, halfway through the three-hour drive, I realized I was leaking through my tampon. The seat beneath me felt wet and spongy. When we finally got to a rest stop, I hobbled into the convenience store, blood dribbling down my leg and onto the floor. The line for the bathroom was excruciatingly slow. When I finally busted into the bathroom and pulled down my pants, red exploded from me, landed on the toilet seat and the floor, stained the entire roll of toilet paper. I wish I could say this was hyperbole for the purpose of literary effect. I wish I could say I didn’t leave the bathroom looking like the site of a sacrifice or that I didn’t run out of the convenience store, humiliated, before they could see who’d left it like that.

For the next few months, I carried around a full box of tampons wherever I went in a plastic bag from 7-11. Oceanic and unstoppable, the red my uterus expelled in fits and starts stained every pair of pants I owned. Every day felt vengeful, like miscarriage. My body was a container failing to perform its function, sabotaged by an inflamed womb and a leaky hole in its bottom.

IX: Fruit

When the doctor thinks you have endometriosis, he enters your uterus with a metal probe to look for excess tissue growth. But sometimes the tissue is needle-thin, and sometimes it is too dark inside for a probe to penetrate, so when the probe fails, he slits your uterus with a tiny scalpel, and if he sees excess tissue, he cuts it off and sews you back together, and if the tissue grows back again, as it does, insatiable tumor, bad body, bad girl, always leaking––anyway, if the tissue grows back, he tries again, and if that doesn’t work, he removes your uterus like it’s a fruit gone rotten.

Let’s hope it never gets to that point, the doctor says, massaging lubricant onto the probe.

X: Entry

The second time the doctor sticks the metal probe into me (splayed, once again, on the exam table), I say Ouch , softly. The way I did with the last boy I fucked so that he would pull out. I’ve ended quite a few nights apologizing for being tight, so I am used to this. But the doctor does not pull out. I grit my teeth as he pushes the probe deeper inside me. I watch the screen light up against the white wall.

The drip of the faucet prods like a question.

XI: Clarification

Questions can bruise parts of your body you didn’t know existed. Does it hurt there? Now it does. Where in your abdomen do you feel pain? What is an abdomen? Is the abdomen like the pit of a peach, some core of you that you can never see or touch? The thing they want to find so badly they’d split you open for it? Is it good or bad, compliant or unruly, pure or impure? Should it be exposed or buried away?

When I worked at a hospital two summers ago, I was struck by how much time and money went into maintaining total sterility. And how, in spite of the hand sanitizer dispensers in front of every ward, the crisp white of the walls and sheets made crisper by fluorescent lights, and the constant attention of the cleaning staff, organic matter seemed to proliferate wherever anyone turned away. The smells of old people and saliva and cafeteria food were poorly masked by cleaning fluid. The neatness of the architecture, the numbered rooms, did little to prevent the organic chaos of the hospital’s ecosystem of patients, nurses, therapists, machines, and medics. Once I saw a roach crawl dangerously close to an elderly stroke victim’s wheelchair. I am sure cities of them live in the pipes, coming out at night to feed on the juice containers, trays, and bodily fluids fallen to the floors.

I remember when, years ago, I saw the refrigerated warehouse unit where a supermarket stored fruit. Piled up in boxes against white walls, you could see very clearly which peaches were spoiled. The bad ones made puddles of juice on the shelf floors.