The Gynecologist

By: Victoria Zackheim:

I was about to teach my first course at the San Miguel Writers’ Conference in Mexico, when I suffered a medical emergency. Not to go into details, but it appeared I was having my period. Knowing this was impossible, I was faced with the likelihood that I was dying.

Writing prompt: Write about a time you were terrified about a health issue.

I gathered my wits. (When you think you’re dying, wits can be catapulted into the ether and must be gathered, in order for logic and reason to prevail.) I did an Internet search, eliminating articles about miscarriage or complicated pregnancies. Other than IVF, you have to have sex to get pregnant. Never mind.

I scrolled, I read, and there it was: post-menopausal bleeding in older women, a possible sign of Stage 4 cervical cancer.

I went to the lobby and sought out the conference coordinator who had struck me as a practical, no-nonsense type. She lived in town; she would know what to do. I found her and pulled her aside. “I might need a doctor.”

She looked at me. I figured she was thinking, “Oh, damn, she’s part of our main event tomorrow and a Literary Death Match contestant.” But what she said was, “We can arrange that.”

“I might also need a hospital.”

Her face softened. “There’s a very good one nearby. What’s happening?”

I explained, she looked alarmed, which I appreciated, and then she called over a woman standing nearby. Before I could dissuade her from sharing something so personal, she was describing my situation. Without a word, the woman whipped out her cell phone and wrote down the name and telephone number of a local doctor. “She’s at the new hospital,” she told me. “Everything you need will be there.”

I thanked them and returned to my room, where I logged into another health-related website to determine how much time I had left. According to the article, not much. Still, I was reluctant to call this doctor. Denial? Perhaps, but also concerns about ending up in a hospital thousands of miles from home.

I sent a message to my Physician’s Assistant in San Francisco. She responded that she had put in an order for a gynecologist and told me not to worry. Which is kind of like telling someone to think of anything but elephants, which is a sure-fire way to have Dumbo on your mind for days.

By nighttime, everything seemed to have returned to normal, which confirmed that I should do nothing until I was home.

I won the Literary Death Match. My Women’s Voices event went beautifully (thanks to the four gifted writers who shared the stage with me) and we raised a lot of money for a local literacy project. I taught several courses and sat on a few panels, everything smooth as could be. It was a great performance: no one knew I’d be dead in weeks.

A few days after I returned to California, I was in an examination room, undressed except for a cotton gown, and shaking hands with the doctor. He was Indian, slim, perhaps in his sixties, quite attractive. His voice was soft, reassuring, and he listened. (One “there-there” and a pat on my arm and I would’ve been dressed and gone in a flash.) I told him I was concerned it was cervical cancer.

“Let’s have a look,” he said.

Into the stirrups.

Now, if you’re a woman, there is almost no chance you haven’t been in the stirrups. If you’re a man, imagine being on an examination table, flat on your back, naked from the waist down, your feet in the stirrups (yes, like on a horse) and your legs spread wide. No, wider. Good.

The doctor rolled his stool to the end of the table. I saw the top of his head between my legs. He took out the speculum and inserted it. He was very gentle. He raised his head. “Well, I can assure you that you do not have cervical cancer!”

The first wave of relief washed over me.

“That’s because you have no cervix.”

Silly me. In all the emotional upheaval, it slipped my mind that the hysterectomy from forty years earlier included the removal of my cervix.

His head disappeared once again. He probed.

“Anything?” I asked.

“Yes,” he informed me, peeking over my pudendum. “Very delicate tissue, a breaking down of vaginal cells. Not uncommon in older women.”

Ouch.

He pulled the gown over my exposed parts and rolled a bit away from the table. There was a sweet look in his face, a hint of a smile. Something was coming, I knew it.

“Have you, in the last week or so, had sex?”

I told him, “Regrettably, no.”

He nodded. There was more. “And have you, in the past week or so, introduced any foreign object into your vagina?”

Foreign object?

These are moments when your brain decides if you’re a mature adult… or not. My brain failed me. “Like, maybe, a cucumber or a Chinese eggplant?”

I’ve never had a man—or anyone, for that matter—look at me in quite that way. Puzzled. Uncertain. Between my legs. Amused.

Writing prompt: Describe a time when you used humor to cover what you were really feeling: terror.

He informed me that he would send cell samples to the lab and it could take up to five days for the results.

I dressed and drove home, feeling quite confident that death’s door was not as open as I had feared.

He called the next day. No cancer, no problem, nothing. Just… age.

I was, of course, relieved. I emailed the few people who knew about my scare. We did an email celebration dance.

The fear is gone. I’ll live forever. But I must admit that when I go to the market and see those long, purple-pink Chinese eggplants, I smile.

Writing prompt: Write about the time you got tired of being given writing prompts.

A quick thank-you to Amanda Clay, for inviting me to post here, and for her unwavering support.

Victoria Zackheim is the author of the novel, The Bone Weaver, and creator/editor of seven anthologies, including the international bestselling The Other Woman, that she adapted to theater and has been performed in several dozen theaters across the United States. She wrote the documentary Where Birds Never Sang: The Story of Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen Concentration Camps, which aired nationwide on PBS. Zackheim is a playwright and screenwriter, with two plays and a feature film now in development. She teaches creative nonfiction in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program and is a frequent conference speaker and writing instructor in the US and abroad. She lives in Northern California.

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