In the Body of the World (4 page)

SCAN
UTERUS = HYSTERIA

There are bags and tubes coming out of every orifice of a body I soon realize is my own. I can do nothing but push my oxycodone magic button. This is a drug addict’s dream. Only the hint of pain, the thought of pain, the “could be” pain, and I hit my button. The nurses, with their Rochester, Minnesota, accent, ask me, “What is your pain, Eve? Can you tell me, from one to ten?” In the beginning I just say 8. It feels like a good number and everyone will feel fine with me hitting the button. I am sure it is an exaggeration. But I don’t know. Maybe my pain is 8. It all depends on 10. Is 10 wailing, screaming out, bent-over near-dead pain? Then 8 must be close to that. It isn’t really 8 then, but the tubes and the bags account for something, if only just being totally freaked out. Maybe I am 6. The oxycodone keeps me floating, so really there is very little pain. Maybe the memory of the pain is now stored away, like winter
clothes, together with the memory of the surgery that was wiped out by the amnesia drugs and, they say, will never come back. It would be awfully scary to be at some fancy dinner party or having sex when suddenly the vivid consuming flash of your stomach being sliced wide open like a fish or pig returns. Did I tell you they cut right through my belly button? Did I tell you I was always afraid of my belly button, afraid even to touch it? It gave me the serious creeps. When I would wash it or clean it with Q-tips, I would always have to hold my breath. Slicing through my umbilicus, the only evidence I was once connected to my mother, the place where her blood and my blood were one. And did I tell you she got very sick right after they cut through my belly button? Right after they removed my uterus, my ovaries, my cervix, fallopian tubes, lymph nodes, lymph channels, the top part of my vagina, and the tissue in the pelvic cavity that surrounds the cervix and all my mother parts. No, that comes later.

What is most pressing now is, Why cancer in my uterus? Uterus: a hollow muscular organ in the pelvic cavity of female mammals, in which the embryo is nourished and develops before birth.

I try to imagine my uterus accommodating this tumor the way it might have once held a baby. I almost had two of them. Babies. Is there a point to a uterus if
you do not make a baby? Was the tumor a way of growing something? Was I growing a trauma baby?

I remember years ago—when I was going through a period when I seemed to be sick all the time—a shrink friend saying to me in that knowing and slightly patronizing sorry-for-me way, “You somatize, Eve.”
Somatize
. It was one of those words like individuate. I had to look it up.
Somatize
: how the body defends itself against too much stress, manifesting psychological distress as physical symptoms in the stomach or nerves or uterus or vagina. I read that women who had suffered physical, emotional, and sexual abuse tended to somatize more.

It turns out that somatization is related to hysteria, which stems from the Greek cognate of uterus,
(hysteria). Uterus = hysteria. They always called me hysterical in my family. Extreme feeling. Sarah Bernhardt. Intense. But what is extreme? Again, it depends on 10? I mean, what would be the appropriate level of emotional response to someone beating you daily or calling you jackass or stupid or molesting you. What would be the nonhysterical response to living in a world where so many are eating dirt and swimming in the sewage system in Port-au-Prince to unclog the drains and find plastic bottles to sell? What would be the appropriate nonhysterical response to people blindfolding
other people and walking them around naked on leashes or watching waving people being abandoned on rooftops in a flood? What would be the proper way to experience these things?
Hysteria
—a word to make women feel insane for knowing what they know. A word that has so many implications—hysterical, out of control, insane, can’t take her seriously, raving. Hysteria is caused by suffering from a huge trauma where there is an underlying conflict. What was my conflict? Loving my mother and father, betraying my mother when my father molested me, wanting my father all to myself even if it hurt my mother? Witnessing and hearing the most horrific stories in the world inflicted on women’s bodies and being unable to stop it in spite of every effort? Wanting to fall in love and being totally unable to trust, hungering for connection and always finding it claustrophobic. What doesn’t cause or produce conflicted feelings? What isn’t traumatizing?

So, does removing my uterus mean they have removed my hysteria? I don’t feel any less hysterical. Actually, the tubes and bags and needles are making me feel quite upset and I wonder if there is such a thing as rape cancer. Do I have rape cancer? Do we get it if we have been molested or traumatized or raped? Are there rape cancer cells that get formed at the moment of violation and then get released into the bloodstream at another moment of trauma later in life? How many
women with vaginal and uterine and ovarian cancer have been raped or beaten or traumatized? Does anyone know? Would Mayo do a study? Is there a way to cure rape cancer? Does each future trauma release more rape cancer cells? Is trauma cancer? Is this kind of obsessing the reason I am sick?

Am I hysterical? Alert! 8 8 8, maybe even 9. I hit the oxycodone button.

SCAN
FALLING, OR CONGO STIGMATA

There are no accidents. Or maybe everything is an accident. My friend Paul says to me, “It’s like you’ve got Congo Stigmata.” Well, actually, almost everyone said it in one way or another. “It doesn’t surprise me, Eve, of course. All those stories of rape over all these years. The women have entered you.” And at first I pushed this away because it’s not really a great advertisement for activism. Come care about others, listen to their stories and their pain, and you can contract it too. Then immediately after the surgery, the doctors told me that they had discovered something inside me that they had rarely seen before. Cells of endometrial (uterine) cancer had created a tumor between the vagina and the bowel and had “fistulated” the rectum. Essentially, the cancer had done exactly what rape had done to so many thousands of women in the Congo. I ended up having the same surgery as many of them.
Dr. Handsome, my colon doctor, e-mailed Dr. Deb the day after the surgery and said he had been unable to sleep because he was so in awe of the mystery of what they had found. He said, “These findings are not medical, they are not science. They are spiritual.”

I have always been drawn to holes. Black holes. Infinite holes. Impossible holes. Absences. Gaps, tears in membranes. Fistulas. Obstetric fistulas occur because of extended difficult labor. Necessary blood is unable to flow to the tissues of the vagina and the bladder. As a result, the tissues die and a hole forms through which urine or feces flow uncontrollably. In the Congo fistulas have been caused by rape, in particular gang rape, and rape with foreign objects like bottles or sticks. So many thousands of women in eastern Congo have suffered fistulas from rape that the injury is considered a crime of combat.

After three trips to the Congo, I needed to see a fistula. I asked to sit in on a reparative operation. I needed to know the shape of this hole, the size of this hole. I needed to know what a woman’s insides looked like when her most essential cellular tissue had been punctured by a stick or a penis or penises. Wearing a mask and gown, I peered into this woman’s vagina, as she lay on her
back, legs spread, her feet tied to steel stirrups with strips of blue-green rags made from old hospital uniforms. As always, I was awed by the vagina, so intricate, so simple, so delicate. There in the lining was an undeniable hole, a rip, a tear in the essential story. It was almost a perfect circle, the size of a quarter maybe, too big to prevent things from getting in or from falling out. I couldn’t help but think of the sky, of the membrane of the sky and the rip in the ozone. Humans had become hole makers. Bullet holes and drilled holes, hurt holes, greed holes, rape holes. Holes in membranes that function to protect the surface or bodily organ. Holes in the ozone layer that prevent the sun’s ultraviolet light from reaching the Earth’s surface. Holes that cause mutation of bacteria and viruses and an increase in skin cancers. Holes, gaps in our memory from trauma. Holes that destroy the integrity, the possibility of wholeness, of fullness. A hole that would determine the rest of this woman’s life, would prevent her from holding her pee or poop, would destroy sex or make it very difficult, would undermine her having a baby, would require many painful operations and still might not be fixed. As I stood there in mask and gown, I realized I had stopped breathing. This woman’s vagina was a map of the future, and I could feel myself falling, falling through the hole in the world, the hole
in myself, the hole that was made when my father invaded me and I lost my way. The hole that was made when the social membrane was torn by incest. Falling through the hole in this woman, I was falling. I have always been falling. But this time was different.

SCAN
LU

I open my eyes and my sister, Lu, is sitting by my bed. It is not a postsurgical hallucination. She is here. I close my eyes. I need time to take in her presence. I am not sure how I feel.

She is watching over me as if it were the most natural thing, as if we had never stopped talking and had been seeing each other regularly for years. She has simply resumed her place. I peek again.

It is Lu. I love my sister’s face. Her skin is so soft. She has the hugest breasts, which I used to touch and it would make her crazy. They were bowls of comfort. My sister is comfort. Except when she is not. She is by my bed. I am suspicious. Is it pity? I hate pity. Is she finally in control? She is up. I am down. Is it guilt? My illness, proximity to death, unfinished business? Does
she want to be here? Is it compulsion? Duty? Could it be care? I want it to be care. I don’t know my sister. She just came. She just flew here. I like that. I am not sure. She is bossy. She will take charge. I like that.

I reach out and gently touch her hand. She is startled. We are both startled, but she takes my hand. We are both tentative. She smiles. I smile. My sister.

SCAN
HERE’S WHAT’S GONE

Nine hours.

Rectum

sections of colon

uterus

ovaries

cervix

fallopian tubes

part of my vagina

seventy nodes

Here’s what’s new:

A rebuilt rectum made out of my colon

A stoma

A temporary ileostomy bag

A catheter in my bladder

My face, the size of two faces

A button I push

any time I begin to feel what

is missing.

SCAN
THE STOMA

I don’t remember, but they say the first thing I did when I woke up was ask to touch it. I can’t imagine being that brave or wanting to be that brave, but there were a lot of drugs involved. And I have a history of needing to know and see things. It’s not really bravery at all but more like terror of what’s happening in the dark: the grown man’s scented hand invading my six-year-old body, the selling of the Congolese mines in the back rooms of Kigali, the whispering posse of teenage girls organizing my public demise. It’s why I became a chronic eavesdropper and an unashamed journal invader. I had to know. It gave me mastery. I pulled the curtains back. I opened the door. I controlled the entry of pain. So it doesn’t surprise me that I needed to touch the red fleshy nipple made from my colon that was now magically outside my body. The stoma, a minimouth of sorts that was now directing my poop into the ileostomy bag. I was rubbing it and feeling
it, like some gooey species you find in a cave, and I could tell it was grossing my sister out. She never liked to touch it or see it. We were opposites. When it was terrible in our house, and it was often terrible, she would suddenly not be there. She could disappear even if she was still in the room. It never occurred to me until after the cancer that I wasn’t the brave one but the masochistic one. I mistook pain and hardship for a form of protection. My sister was afraid, so she acted afraid. I had never been brave enough to allow myself to be afraid. I had to outdo my father and beat him at his own game. Your hands choking my throat, your fist punching and bloodying my nose: These are nothing compared to what I can do to myself or what I can and will bring on myself.

Or maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe the terror was familiar—the adrenaline buzz, the body-clutching, almost-dying sensation as my head bounced off the wall. Maybe that familiarity is what I came to associate with connection, aliveness, love, and why I was always drawn to violent men: men who didn’t beat me, but who lived on the broken edge of explosion. Those men who could go there if pushed and I knew how to push because I needed to get a glimpse of that sugar love, needed to feel that snap zap hit of IhatehityouIhitneedyou. That’s how the milk originally came to me—in smacks—in loud white yelping gulps.