Years ago when I was a journalist, I wrote a newspaper column about my children's struggle with head lice. The response from the local community was made up of a loud "How could you write about such a thing!" followed by many whispered confidences about epic battles with head lice. I quickly became a walking repository of head lice horror stories.
Something similar has been happening ever since I learned that I'm heading for a hysterectomy. Women I barely know have told me about fibroids the size of a golf ball, baseball, or grapefruit (yes, I realize that the next logical point on that continuum ought to be "softball," but they always go with "grapefruit") and, just to be different, a cyst the size of a hockey puck. I have heard horror stories about nicked ureters and life-threatening infections. Today as my surgeon was examining me I mentioned the name of a friend who had also been his patient. "Sure, I remember her!" he said. "She had a really big uterus too!"
You know, I've never really thought about the size of my friend's uterus, and I'm okay with that. My feeling about internal organs is that there's a good reason they're kept under wraps. Now, though, I've stumbled into some parallel universe in which it is considered appropriate to bandy about information about the relative sizes of various organs, excrescences, and unnatural growths. I've received all kinds of helpful brochures from the doctor's office, all written in that perky tone designed to make disease sound non-threatening, but nothing telling me how to cope with this flood of information. I realize that people are just trying to be helpful, but do I have to think about tumors and wombs 24 hours a day?
Next time someone starts sharing too much, I think I'll just tell her to put a sock in it...but what size sock? Golfball, baseball, or grapefruit?
1 comment:
My mother had one of those surgeries. You're resilient - you'll be a-ok.
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