Streams of consciousness

When my doctor sliced a hole deep inside me, a lot more changed than just my sex life.

By Abby Frucht

Read more: Health, Surgery, Life

Aug. 28, 2006 | Except that it costs me my whole deductible, I enjoy my hysterectomy. I find hospitals stimulating. I like the funk of anesthesia, and I'm amused by the bright blue nun, like on the wine bottle label, who stops by at pre-op to pray. I'm proud of the tumor they get out of me, and I love that my friends bring me lavender oil and that my sons serve me dinner when I come home to heal. Though I'm a reader and a writer, I prefer CNN, the way my dull, pelvic pain and the world's sharper sufferings coalesce in a haze of morphine and pills. We'll cancel each other out, I imagine. If I'm hurting inside, then what's happening outside will distract me. And when bad things happen outside, then what's happening inside will protect me. At 4 o'clock every day, I'll walk the dog around the block, gauging my agility along the uneven sidewalks. I'll cook my healthful meals and write my weird, peculiar stories and pick the kids up after school, keeping things neat and appealing, functional. If, as the doctor orders, I lift no sack of groceries and vacuum no floor, I'll be back at the YMCA in no time, doing my crazed aerobics, my skinny-legged jumping jacks.

But then ... then ... the strangest thing.
I remember giving birth, my water breaking on a hospital waiting room chair.
Rather, my body remembers.
Really, no, the couch remembers. The battered loveseat with its mattress-ticking cover, remembers.
Water breaks in it.
My body awash, as if floating there, coolly regarding the too-white ceiling.
I pay no heed to the burgeoning war on television, no heed to the loveseat, no heed to the fog rising out of the cushions.
It won't happen again.
"You won't pee your pants again," Wolf Blitzer instructs.
"No," agrees Christiane Amanpour, "she won't."
I do.

Two days later, I haven't yet told my boyfriend I'm peeing my pants, and even when my boys are at their dad's, I don't ask him over. Alone I lay a towel across the mattress, and in the middle of the night, I spread a dry towel next to the soaked-through one. Come morning, I scoop a third towel between my legs to catch the deluge of pee on my rush to the toilet.

There's no sense rushing, no sense in toilets at all. There's only this upended pitcher that I struggle to maintain is ordinary -- a woman driving to the mall on a folded towel, intent on buying a new winter coat to share space with the doctor on the credit card bills. See her marching through the mall, wearing her cowboy boots with the quilted lining. She makes her way to Wilson's Leather, drops her purse at the mirror. The coats are like animal skins, this season. She likes the inside-out sheep, the outside-in lamb. But her corduroy pants with their knuckly crotch provide inadequate camouflage. There's a drenching of urine, the very heat of it weighing the pants far down. Maybe her frantic exchanging of hangers, the way she tugs at the toggles, flings off the skins, rounds up another five -- maybe this is camouflage.

The girls at the counter wrinkle their noses, stifle their horror. I imagine them making their casual way to a bathroom, relieving themselves. I imagine them wiping, drying themselves. Every woman I see, I think of this.

Women in developing countries suffer far more vesicovaginal fistulas than in developed ones, usually a result of childbearing rather than hysterectomy, and if they don't find the aid available to them (visit WorldwideFistulaFund.org if you're able to help) they are rarely as lucky as I would be. Many are flung away by family and society, outcasts forever, suffering constant infection and dripping urine, or feces, wherever they roam. Here, repairs are easy to come by, though because of the tenderness of the damaged flesh, you need to wait some time to be successfully stitched back up again. In my case, five months would pass between the day my shamefaced doctor, wearing one of his Disney bandannas -- Dumbo for surgery, Daffy for making hospital rounds -- finally owned up to having scraped a hole between my bladder and vagina, and the day Chuck drove me 300 miles to the Mayo Clinic for repair.

I don't actually need to tell Chuck I'm peeing my pants; instead I sit beside him on his new leather couch in his carpeted TV room. Chuck is the sanest person I know, and laid-back enough that my weeklong avoidance of spending the night raises no alarms. I don't jump up when I flood his couch, and when the leathery runnels make their way to Chuck's half, forming bleak, steamy ponds that drip onto the carpet, he doesn't jump up, either. He simply meets my eyes. Clearly, he suspected. Maybe he's smelled it on me, has seen my agitation, my furtive changing of clothes.

"I'd say it's time to buy diapers," he gently advises.

"But what if there's nothing they can do about it?" I ask, flapping my hands at my jeans and bursting into tears for the very first time. "What if I'm like this forever?"

But I soon calm down. There's a story I remember, about some people who hired a cook and asked her to serve the honeydew melons, a fruit she'd neither seen nor eaten before. When 15 minutes went by, she emerged from the kitchen bearing a deep bowl of pulp and seeds, and a silvery ladle. Chuck understands that because I'm a writer, I might align myself with that bowl of juices, sweet but wasted, the seeds floating in goo, and that the image might make me feel better. I'm not a woman pissing through her vagina when I remember that bowl. Instead I'm a sodden, spongy fruit, a dropped peach with torn skin. I almost find her funny and beautiful then -- the woman buying diapers at Kmart next day, shyly proclaiming to the checkout line that the diapers are for grandma. "If there's nothing they can do about it, we'll live with it, Hon," Chuck answers. Then he draws me a bath, brings me thick towels, puts my jeans in his laundry, and fetches me a T-shirt that reaches my knees.

Next page: I was bestial, dripping and wounded and filled with scary, raw emotion