When I woke up in the recovery room, I felt as though a runaway eighteen-wheeler had hit me in the stomach at record-breaking speed and each wheel had run over my weakened body in slow motion. I heard only the sound of monitors bleeping and nurses speaking while I regained consciousness. The blurry faces of strangers and the blank ceiling above me are all I could manage to keep my eyes open long enough to see. Each time I emerged from my anesthetically induced sleep, the nurses asked me repeatedly, “Rate your pain on a scale from one to ten.” I never answered short of one hundred, knowing that the higher the number I muttered, the greater the amount of morphine that would drip into my veins. When the nurses finally moved me up to my hospital room for good and I saw my parents, the first thing I said was, “They took it, didn’t they?” My mom replied quietly, “Sweetie,” and grabbed my hand. We both began to cry.
It all started when I received a bizarre phone call from my mother on August 26, 2004. I had arrived home to my empty house at about three in the afternoon, after a six-hour shift of lifeguarding at the YMCA. My cell phone rang as it usually did each day after work, with my mother on the other end calling about my day. But this day was different. My mother’s tone expressed alarm and she did not even ask how I was doing. I kept asking her, “What’s wrong?” only to finally hear back, “We have a message on the home phone from Dr. Vincent’s office asking for you to call her.” Considering that I had seen this doctor only weeks prior to inquire about going on hormones for medical reasons, I knew that the call must have been pertaining to the ultrasound she had ordered.
She claimed that her physical exam of me was “inconclusive.” Thinking nothing of it, I returned her call from the seat in my kitchen where I had still been sitting in my red uniform, only to hear, “Alison, I’ve been on vacation, so I didn’t get a chance to look at these films until this morning. We have found an incredibly large ovarian tumor that needs to be taken out immediately….” The words that followed did not register; they were as fuzzy in my mind as the words I regurgitated to my mother on the phone moments later from my curled up position on the floor. As the tears came tumbling down my cheeks from fear, confusion, and disbelief, I yelled into the receiver, “Just come home!”
The fuzziness remained for the weeks that followed. Questions would run incessantly through my head, with answers following just as continuously. The explanation for the solid potbelly that my family made jokes about (Immaculate Conception) finally made sense to all of us. Rationale now existed for my acid reflux disease, which had suddenly developed, as it often does in pregnant women. Justification was now found for my inability to lie on my stomach without feeling nauseated or feeling the need to urinate as if I had recently swallowed the Atlantic Ocean. However, there are some answers I will have to live without knowing. Why did the doctor miss this giant formation when she examined me herself? How could she wait until after vacation to check my films? And most daunting of all of these questions, what would have happened to me if I had never made an appointment to get hormones for my painful menses?
On September 15, 2004, I underwent emergency abdominal surgery in order to remove a tumor the size of a seven-month pregnancy from my left ovary. While I lay in the pre-operating room getting prepared for surgery, the surgeon held my hand and ensured that he would do everything in his medical power in order to keep my ovary intact since I was so young, sixteen to be exact. As I later learned, the surgeon removed the great mass with success, only to find fifteen golf-ball sized cysts hiding underneath, holding on to the same tiny ovary like leaches, and sucking the life from it. They had destroyed the ovary and it could no longer serve any useful purpose. If left inside me, it could only be a site for further problems – guaranteed miscarriages or more tumors. Sometimes you do not realize how much something means to you until you no longer have it.
From the moment I was wheeled out of my hospital room until this day, the surgery and its aftermath have most certainly changed me as a person. I was once one of your stereotypical teens who thought she was greater than life itself – untouchable. Nothing bad could happen to me no matter what I did to my body. Not wearing a seatbelt, staying up until odd hours of the night, lying on the couch for a day without a worry in the world were all second nature to me. My invincible, passive attitude was no longer acceptable when it came time for me to stand up straight for the first time after surgery and work through the most excruciating pain that not even morphine could touch. As clichéd as it may sound, I have come to realize that waking up each day is not a guarantee; you can never know what tomorrow will bring. It can often become easy to take the little things for granted—the ability to shower, walk, and go to the bathroom on your own. Life is fragile and must be lived to the fullest. I am aware that it is not visible to others that I no longer have my left ovary, or that I have a fading scar that extends across my abdomen, but I cannot help but feel like damaged goods. I often become paranoid, as if people can see through me and see my imperfections. Over time, this feeling has become a blessing for me, because I have a deeper appreciation for those who struggle with physical deformities that are apparent to people around them.
I could have written my personal narrative on the struggle to overcome the isolation and depression that accompanies eight weeks of bed rest during one’s junior year of high school. I could have written about the pain that one must fight through when vomiting up painkiller after painkiller because one’s body could tolerate only Tylenol—the same Tylenol one would take for a headache—to dull the pain resulting from being cut through the middle. My core was dissected; my sense of safety and comfort were shaken. At a young age, I learned what it meant to feel real pain and overcome a physical trauma. Even so, I did not write this paper in order to evoke empathy and pity. I wrote it with the hope that someone would understand how it feels to literally lose a part of one’s self, a half of one’s womanhood that can never be replaced.
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