Chapter 17
CAN I BE UN-brOKEN?
SIMONE
The walls are the color of skim milk, shot through with veins of commercial beige.
The waiting room is an aquarium of dead air and paper gowns.
Every surface is antiseptic, the linoleum shining a little too bright under the cheap fluorescents.
There’s a bowl of off-brand mints by the window, sweating inside their crinkly wrappers, and a water cooler that burbles like a threat.
The only sound is the nervous flick of magazine pages and the occasional cough from behind the clipboard fortress at the check-in desk.
Andie is next to me, slumped in the corner chair, her legs sprawling.
She’s playing Candy Crush at max volume, which in any other context would be infuriating, but here is oddly comforting—a bit of dumb noise to fill the spaces that would otherwise be occupied by dread.
Her hair is up in a scrunchie, her nails bitten down to nervous half-moons, but her posture is loose, like she’s been here a hundred times and knows the drill.
Me, I’m gripping the arm of my chair so hard my knuckles look like bones bleaching in the sun.
The plastic digs into my palm, deep enough to leave a mark, but I can’t seem to let go.
Every five seconds I glance at the door marked EXAM ROOMS, half convinced that someone’s going to walk out and hand me a folded slip of paper that says “DEFECTIVE” in all caps.
There’s a kid across from us, maybe four years old, clutching a gummy dinosaur in one hand and a juice box in the other.
His mom looks strung out, not in a drugs way but in the way of someone who has been up for three nights straight worrying about test results.
The kid stares at me, eyes shiny and bored, then bites the dinosaur’s head clean off.
I want to laugh, but all my humor is stuck somewhere behind my gallbladder.
The clock on the wall says 10:07. My appointment was for 9:45, but nobody in the history of medicine has ever been called on time, except maybe by a dentist, and this is most definitely not a dentist.
The smell of bleach is everywhere. I can taste it on the back of my tongue, mixed with the ghost of lemon air freshener and whatever chemical they use to keep the vinyl seats from melting into human flesh.
The scent snaps me back to the hospital, to the years before my dad died, when I’d spend hours in the hallway outside the oncology wing, breathing that same fake-lemon horror and watching nurses hustle IV poles down the linoleum like chariots.
I’m sweating through my shirt, even though it’s freezing. Every muscle is a violin string, pulled tight and vibrating with fear.
Andie looks up from her phone and nudges me with her knee.
“It’s going to be fine,” she whispers. Her eyes are wide and bright, clear even under the haze of bad sleep and finals week, and I want so badly to believe her.
But the truth is, I haven’t let anyone touch me down there for ages, and the idea of someone rooting around in my disaster of a uterus is about as appealing as a public execution.
A nurse opens the door, white shoes squeaking. “Ms. McCall?” she says, not a question but a summons.
I freeze. Andie grabs my hand and squeezes, hard. “Go,” she mouths, and I do, knees wobbly, arms folded around my middle as if I can keep all my guts from falling out.
The nurse is brisk and professional, her face carefully blank. “Last name and date of birth?” she asks, even though I just filled it out on three different forms at the front desk.
I tell her.
“Great, right this way.” She leads me past a series of identical exam rooms, each one staged like a parody of itself—poster of the female reproductive system, tray of speculums gleaming like cutlery, a little plastic bin for “biohazard” in the corner.
My mouth goes dry as we pass a scale, the kind that always adds ten pounds just for the fuck of it.
We stop at the last door. “Take everything off from the waist down. Dr. Patel will be with you in a few minutes.” The nurse hands me a sheet of blue paper that’s supposed to pass for a modesty drape and then closes the door behind her, leaving me alone with the echo of her footsteps.
The room is colder than the waiting area.
I can hear the faint hum of machinery—maybe a centrifuge, maybe just the air handler—and it’s all I can do not to hurl myself out the window and run for the parking lot.
The exam table is padded but not soft, with a strip of crinkly tissue paper running down the center like a landing strip.
There are stirrups at the end, shiny and menacing.
I undress slowly, folding my jeans and underwear into a neat pile on the chair, then wrapping the blue sheet around my hips like a towel at the world’s worst spa. My thighs stick to the vinyl when I sit down, and I can’t stop shivering.
I stare at the poster on the wall. It shows the cross-section of a uterus, the whole thing color-coded like a subway map: endometrium in fuchsia, myometrium in bubblegum pink, the fallopian tubes stretching out like tentacles.
There’s a cartoon baby in one corner, grinning and waving, as if it knows something I don’t.
I close my eyes and try to breathe, but every exhale just seems to wind me up tighter.
The door opens with a soft knock, and Dr. Patel glides in. She’s petite, maybe about forty-five, with a waterfall of black hair and a white coat that looks freshly ironed. Her voice is gentle, almost melodic. “Simone? I’m Dr. Patel. So nice to meet you.”
I nod, not trusting my voice.
She sits on the stool and wheels over, her movements slow and deliberate. “I hear you’re having some trouble with pain and irregular periods?”
I nod again, gripping the paper sheet with both hands. “Yeah. It’s because I have fibroids. I’ve known since I was sixteen. They said it was a mess in there.”
She smiles, soft and not at all patronizing. “Well, we’ll take a look and see what’s going on, okay? I know this can be scary, but I promise I’ll talk you through every step.”
She asks me to lie back, scoots the table to recline, and covers my knees with the sheet before lifting my feet into the stirrups. The metal is so cold it makes me gasp.
“Sorry,” she says. “We try to warm them, but it never quite works.”
I grit my teeth and try to focus on the ceiling, which is covered in stickers of cartoon clouds and hot air balloons. It’s meant for little kids, but somehow it helps.
Dr. Patel talks as she works, her hands gentle but confident. “I’m just going to do a quick exam,” she says. “You’ll feel some pressure.”
Pressure is an understatement. It’s like someone trying to inflate a basketball inside me, but I don’t flinch. I keep my eyes on the fake sky, counting every breath.
She hums as she examines, then pulls back. “You’re doing great,” she says. “Now I’m going to do a quick ultrasound, okay?”
I nod. She picks up a wand from the counter and wraps it in a plastic sheath, then coats it in clear, gloppy gel. The sight of it makes me want to puke, but she’s so fast and practiced that before I know it, she’s maneuvering it gently inside me.
The screen on the wall flickers to life, showing a blurry, grayscale world. Dr. Patel tilts the probe this way and that, clicking the mouse every so often.
“That’s your uterus,” she says, pointing. “And here—” she circles an area with the mouse, “—are the fibroids.”
I squint at the screen, trying to make sense of it. It looks like a storm cloud, with white specks floating in the gray.
“Are they bad?” I ask.
She clicks again, zooming in. “You have three, moderately-sized. There’s some distortion of the uterine cavity, but nothing we can’t work with. I’ve seen much worse.”
She withdraws the wand (mercifully fast), then helps me sit up. “Okay, you can get dressed. I’ll give you a moment, and then we’ll talk options.”
She leaves me with a box of tissues and a sense of vertigo, like the world just tilted sideways. I clean myself up and pull on my leggings, hands shaking so much I can barely manage the zipper.
When Dr. Patel returns, she’s holding a stack of pamphlets and a notepad. She sits across from me, crossing her legs at the ankle.
“There are a few ways to treat fibroids,” she says, drawing a little diagram on the pad. “Medication, minimally invasive surgery, or sometimes just monitoring, if the symptoms aren’t too bad.”
She slides the diagram over to me. It shows a normal uterus, then one with fibroids bulging out. “The main concern is fertility,” she says. “But with advances in surgery, we can often remove or shrink the fibroids without damaging the uterus.”
I stare at the paper, trying to make the words stick. “Really? So I could actually get pregnant?”
Dr. Patel looks me straight in the eye. “With the right treatment, yes. I won’t lie—there are no guarantees, and even after removing fibroids, some of my patients have had difficulty conceiving. But I also have patients with similar cases who have carried healthy pregnancies.”
The words land like a punch. For years, I’ve thought of my insides as a biological dumpster fire—something to be worked around, not with. The idea that I could someday grow a kid in there is so foreign, I can barely process it.
Dr. Patel sees the panic on my face and softens her tone. “I don’t want you to feel pressured. You’re young, and we can take this as fast or as slow as you like. If you want to talk to a counselor, or even just come back for another exam in a few months, that’s perfectly fine.”
I nod, then shake my head, then nod again. “I just…I didn’t think it was possible to get pregnant.”