Womb by Leah Hazard

Author:Leah Hazard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-12-08T00:00:00+00:00

Health

IN SICKNESS AND WELLNESS

I am always begging my body not to be so broken

but my body just laughs because it knows who started

this war.

—FORTESA LATIFI, “CHRONIC ILLNESS”

I am suspended six feet in midair, naked from the waist down with my legs spread and stirruped. The chair I am in has, according to the nurse who is now frantically punching buttons on a control panel, been “playing up” all week, and now it is on its absolute worst, most mischievous behavior. From my vantage point up here near the ceiling tiles, I can just about see the dark roots coming through at the top of the nurse’s peroxide-blond head. I can see a cart with its drawers jammed full of cellophane packs: sterile speculums, swabs, needles, and syringes, all of the tools that may be needed to probe the secret pockets of my body. I can see the doctor, too, as she squirts a packet of lube onto the ultrasound wand that will soon be inside me; she glances up to my legs dangling above her, then at the increasingly apologetic nurse, her face slack with infinite boredom as her gloved hand rubs the lube up and down the wand. I watch it all from my perch up here in the air. I try to remember where I’ve seen the doctor’s expression before, and then it comes to me—it’s the weary resignation of the sex workers in Amsterdam’s red-light district, pacing their windows in bikinis and pleather hot pants. This is another day in the slip and suck of women’s bodies, and we’re all just living in it, trying to do our best.

I crack a joke about being left high and dry; I am gracious; I try to defuse the situation, although I am the one with the least reason to apologize. In the other part of my life—the part where I am the one standing between other women’s legs, cheering them on, willing their bodies to perform in the best, healthiest, most joyous way possible—I tell women not to keep saying sorry. You are wonderful, I say. You are beautiful and strong. Don’t apologize for your body. But today, my flawed body has brought us together—the nurse, the doctor, and I—my body that labors every month to deliver those age-old twins, pain and bleeding—and I am saying sorry for my body, sorry for the chair, sorry you have to do this and see me and touch me and give a name and a cure to my problems, sorry, sorry.

There is no cure, though, the doctor tells me twenty minutes later in her office, once I have been rescued from my perch and positioned and probed in another room with a better, more obedient chair. She taps her pen against the computer screen on her desk.

“This is an ultrasound image of your womb,” she says, tapping an area that looks like it’s been blasted by a fine spray of grayscale frost, “and this part of your uterus is calcified.”

Confused by the

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