“I’m waiting to get a mammogram and a pap smear 😱” I texted my husband—or at least I thought I texted my husband. In fact, I’d texted my husband, my son, and my stepdad in a group text I forgot existed. And that was the good part of the day. I’d already gotten a Covid test on Monday. The results were negative but I still felt off. I diagnose you with post-election-insane-world-fatigue-syndrome, a friend said. I guessed she was right. We all have it.The well-woman tests had been scheduled for July but then my had Dad died and I’d canceled everything and I’d been thinking about rescheduling for months but just didn’t have the heart. I’m not sure why I find it so compelling to resist proactive self-care. Like they say in recovery rooms, pain is a great motivator.
The tests themselves were fine— as fine as being poked and prodded and smashed can be when you’re considered high risk, myriad cancers running through family and friends you’ve watched endure and suffer and in some cases, die. I have deep gratitude for my gynecologist, for the way I no longer hyperventilate around her stirrups and probes.
It was when I got home and opened the email containing my medical records and saw numbers I’d specifically asked not to see that the day took its turn. I can no longer pretend I’m not divided in half. Half accepting cosmic earth mama, half crazed American White Girl. The tanker came when I asked my husband if he still found me hot, to build me back from the ground up.
Uh-huh, he said, not looking up from his phone. A smarter woman would have left it at that. I am not that woman. I couldn’t leave it, not any more than I could leave behind wine after uncorking the bottle. A hot poker in the original wound. Asphalt and salt rubbing against bone. An entire ocean behind a spigot waiting to be turned on. And after so much healing. After so many stitches suturing the wound.
This is the real test, I thought—the next day when sanity returned. How do I continue to care for my own ongoing wounds? The answers don’t lie in the hands or hearts of anyone else— that’s the medicine I must continue to learn how to give myself.