My partner had emergency surgery yesterday. Today, he and his nesting partner are heading to their vacation house. Saying I’m not happy about this decision is like saying the ocean is a little bit wet. Even so, he is an adult, an autonomous being who gets to make decisions I don’t agree with.

***

I told him I wanted to give him a hug before he left. “Ok,” he said, “but you need to get here quickly.” His nesting partner was itching to get on the road.

“I’m scared,” I told him. “I’m scared you’re going to end up in an ER again, 3 hours away from me.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “The doctor cleared me to go.”

“Yeah,” I said. “The doctors let me go a bunch of times, too.”

He wrapped his arms around me. “I think maybe you’re a little bit traumatized,” he said.

***

We see the world through the lens of our experiences.

***

I learned at an early age to be cautious around all things medical. My younger brother had asthma, the kind that lots of kids don’t live through. The year we moved to Massachusetts was the same year I went trick or treating at Children’s Hospital in Boston while he was hospitalized with an asthma attack.

My family rarely went anywhere “fun” for vacation. Mostly we went to see my grandparents in Oklahoma. We never went to Cancun, or the Caribbean, or to any of the other places the families in our suburban town went for breaks. I’m sure part of this was the financials. But my parents told me, much later, that they’d been terrified of going on vacation somewhere that might not have the kind of medical care my brother needed.

I will note here that when I told my mother they’d let my partner out a few hours after surgery, she was astounded that they weren’t holding him overnight.

***

My metamour and I balance each other out. She is enthusiastically optimistic; I am not. Before I left last night, I told her to call me if something happened, even if it was 2 am. She said she would, but that she was sure everything would be just fine. It was. On the other hand, when he’d told me Thursday that he was going to the ER, I knew in my bones that he’d be having surgery in the next 24 hours.

***

I haven’t written about what happened last spring. I started to, but it’s still too big, too raw.

The short version is this: according to my OB, I’m a statistical nightmare.

The less short version is that for three ER visits in a row, at almost every point in the decision tree, Kaiser made the wrong call.

I’d had a LEEP done about 3 weeks earlier – a minor, barely-even-surgical procedure to take some abnormal cells off my cervix. The doctor told me to take it easy for the next 2-3 weeks and sent me home.

I started bleeding the Saturday before Mother’s Day, profusely enough that I got an ambulance ride to the ER. The ER doc did a perfunctory exam, ignoring me when I said what he was doing hurt. The OB on call diagnosed me with a heavy period and sent me home. Never mind that I have the IUD that mostly prevents bleeding. Never mind that even my postpartum periods weren’t ever that bad.

I started bleeding again Monday night. The ER doc recognized me, and maybe paid a little more attention this time, because after staring at my cervix for a bit, he looked at the nurse and said, “arterial bleed.” The OB on call decided to try cauterizing it with silver nitrate – closing the offending blood vessel by inducing a chemical burn – because she didn’t want to sedate me to suture it. (For the discerning reader: she burned me in the exact same place where I’d been saying ouch when the doctor poked me on Saturday night.) Then she sent me home, even though I was still bleeding a little bit, saying that was normal.

I’d been home maybe an hour when the bleeding got bad again. On the upside, by this point all the triage nurses in the ER knew me, so I was out of the waiting room in less than 15 minutes. The ER doc – still the same one – took one look at me and told me I was going into surgery. The on call OB – the third OB, and the only one of the three OBs I’d seen who seemed to take the bleeding seriously – was the one who demanded that the OR take me ASAP. Even then, it was 11 am by the time they took me in.

As with my partner, they discharged me as soon as I’d come out of the anesthesia enough to pee and walk on my own. They took my blood pressure, but didn’t check my hemoglobin levels – despite the fact that by the time I went into the OR, I’d been hemorrhaging on and off for three and a half days.

I ended up back in the ER the next day, after passing out at my partner’s feet in the bathroom (much less romantic than in the movies), after my heart started racing uncontrollably every time I stood up. They ran the bloodwork. I’d lost over half the blood in my body. They gave me 2 units of blood, iron and calcium pills, and instructions to take the rest of the week off work.

It took me almost 3 months to get back to normal functioning. I have (mostly) stopped panicking when I see that first drop of period blood. I still have nightmares every now and then where I am bleeding uncontrollably.

My partner saying I am a little bit traumatized by this is like calling the ocean a little bit wet.

***

I told my metamour “thank you” as I was leaving this morning. She gave me an odd look, like she wasn’t entirely sure what I was thanking her for. Maybe it was because it wasn’t a big deal to her to wait a few extra minutes so I could get a hug. Or maybe it was because, just as I can’t conceive of a world in which medical emergencies don’t go horribly wrong, she can’t conceive of a world in which everything is not, at the end of the day, just fine.

***

We see the world through the lens of our experiences, but that doesn’t mean they have to define us.

“I can probably see you Monday afternoon,” my partner said this morning.

“I can’t answer that right now,” I said. “I’m too scared, and that’s making me all prickly and defensive.”

“I don’t have a lot of capacity to hold your feelings right now,” he replied.

“I don’t want you to,” I told him. “I can manage my own feelings. I just want you to hug me.”

So he did. And I told him I loved him. And that I would be incredibly angry if he went to the ER again. And that he was by no means ever to attempt to beat my record of 4 visits in 5 days.

He laughed, and he hugged me, and then he got in the car to go.

***

I don’t like the decision he made. But it’s his decision to make, not mine, and it’s probably going to be just fine.