Category: Pinned Posts

Statistical Nightmare

On By BekkiIn Pinned PostsLeave a comment

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.

That which yields is not always weak

On By BekkiIn Pinned PostsLeave a comment

I spent ten years in an abusive relationship with my ex-husband.

It’s taken me three and a half years to be able to write that sentence.

***

The first incident I really remember happened when we’d only been dating a year or two, shortly after I moved into his place. I’d gotten in the habit of folding his PJ pants and putting them on the bathroom counter, so they’d be ready for him after he got home from work and showered. I didn’t do it one day – I don’t remember why. I forgot, or I was busy, or I didn’t see them on the floor.

He pushed me over the side of the bed and spanked me. Hard. Hard enough that it hurt, a lot, much more than was fun. When I asked what was going on, he said he was punishing me for not folding his pajama pants.

***

Abuse is rarely obvious. It starts slowly, creeping up on you, until your sense of “normal” is so far from okay that you don’t have any idea how much is wrong.

You probably read the bit above and said to yourself, how on earth could she not see that as abuse?

Easy.

We’d been playing around with a bit of spanking in the bedroom. It was something I’d said I’d be interested in trying. So when it happened, I thought that I hadn’t been clear enough about what I wanted or that I wasn’t enjoying what was going on.

I tried telling him I didn’t like being “punished.” That it hadn’t been fun or exciting for me when he did that. I couldn’t quite articulate what about it I didn’t like, though, just that I didn’t like it. I don’t remember exactly what he said, just that he didn’t listen to me and said something along the lines of, I said I was masochist, so I should like getting punished.

I walked away from the experience feeling like it had somehow been my fault. But also, I don’t think I ever folded his PJ pants again.

***

Abusers are masters at making you doubt yourself. Again and again, my ex-husband refused to listen to me. He told me what I thought and what I felt. He did it so often, and so forcefully, that there didn’t seem to be any point in speaking up for myself.

There were words I had to excise from my vocabulary because he didn’t like when I used them. “Worry” was one. I wasn’t ever allowed to worry about things – I could only feel concern. “Hate” was another. If I used these words, he would tell me that I was wrong. I wasn’t worried about something, I was concerned. I didn’t hate a thing, I disliked it.

***

By the time I was done with law school, there were people I wasn’t allowed to see, either. He never said it in so many words. Instead, he told me he didn’t like hanging out with certain of my friends. He couldn’t ever give me a good reason why, but it didn’t seem worth arguing about. I thought the transition from “my friends” to “our friends” was a normal part of the relationship escalator. It seemed to be how everyone else did it. I attributed the fact that it became harder and harder for me to make friends to my job at a law firm, since I was working crazy hours and didn’t have much time for anything else.

***

Abusers isolate. They make you feel that they are the only source of comfort, the only one you can turn to. They get upset when you go elsewhere for your emotional needs.

A few years, after Harvey Weinstein, after #metoo, after my Facebook feed became flooded with my friends’ stories of sexual assault and rape, I wrote about my own rape.

My ex-husband was furious. Not at the man who raped me. At me. For daring to tell my story to my friends, to the Internet, to total strangers – but not to him. Even though he knew about it, even though he’d watched me struggling with rape triggers for months.

***

I got out. I met someone who slowly and gently and kindly told me, over and over, that it was not normal. And by that point, I’d had enough to grab that lifeline and hang on.

***

I’m still not out.

Yesterday evening, at custody exchange, when I asked him to use my preferred name and not my given name, he said “I’ll call you whatever I want.” And then called the police to force me to give him a document to which he is legally entitled but does not need – and which I had said I would give to him at the next custody exchange.

***

I have been silent about it for three and a half years. I rarely tell my friends how bad it was. I haven’t said anything to his friends or family. I didn’t want it to get back to him, because that would make the abuse worse.

***

But. I watch woman after woman come forward with their own stories.

And I have learned these past three and a half years that there is nothing I can say or do that will make any difference at all in the way he treats me.

So I am saying it. My ex-husband is abusive. What he has done is not ok. It was not my fault. And my voice is worth being heard.

brightly, brightly, and with beauty

On By BekkiIn Pinned Posts, This is FeminismLeave a comment

The Eastern seaboard is blanketed in an early snow. California is burning. It looks foggy outside, that hazy, sentimental kind of mist usually reserved for Christmas morning. The sunsets have been spectacular. You could almost be forgiven for thinking the apocalypse is beautiful.

It feels like I’ve come—not full circle, but full circuit. Not an intersection or a repeat of where I was, but a full revolution along the spiral path. A year ago, California was burning and my marriage was falling apart. Now, California is burning and I am beginning to put myself back together. Continue reading “brightly, brightly, and with beauty” →

Sacred spaces

On By BekkiIn Pinned Posts2 Comments

Churches make me nervous. I never feel like I belong in them. Still. I measure my decisions with the likelihood of future regret. This, I know, I will regret not doing.

***

There’s a small courtyard between the office building and the church, inside the church gate. There are always a few drifter sitting on the benches or the steps leading up to the side door of the sanctuary. The office is in the back. I take a deep breath, push the door open, walk in.

The girl in the office has short fuchsia hair and a permanent scowl.

“Is your labyrinth open?” I ask.

She looks me up and down, taking in the business casual. “There’s a Muslim congregation worshipping,” she says. “If they’re finished, you can go in.” I’ve no idea why you’d want to, lingers, unspoken.

The main doors to the sanctuary stand open. A few men are clustered outside, telling each other goodbye. I drift up the steps, hesitating at the inner doors. A few more men sit on the pews in the sanctuary proper. Someone stands at the edge of the dais, rolling up a large mat.

I don’t see what I have come here for, but there’s nowhere else it could be. I consider turning around, going back to the office. I don’t belong here. This is not my church.

Still. Setting my hand on the brass handle, I close my eyes and open the door.

The men inside talk back and forth, neither ignoring not acknowledging me. I make my way up the aisle, eyes on the floor in front of me.

Pass-a-grille ids white paint on concrete pavers. Grace Cathedral is metal set into stone. This is a hardwood floor, polyurethane shiny, the path laid down on top like a vinyl sticker. Behind me, the men continue to talk. I’m not sure if they’re speaking English. I’m not sure if they’re entirely with it. I step into the labyrinth.

***

Breathe in, breathe out, I tell myself. Focus on your breath. Focus on your feet.

I’m here because there are decisions I don’t know how to make. Things that don’t lend themselves to a neat table of pro and con.

One foot and then the other. It’s an easy path to walk, wide enough to contain me, narrow enough to keep my focus. Breathe in, breathe out. Some of the men leave, some stay. The conversation is softer now. Nobody pays any attention to me.

I’m not expecting answers. I’m not expecting anything, really. Still. I walk more slowly as I wind closer to the center. What do you want most? I ask myself, thinking I am asking a question about my job, about where I live, about how I want my marriage to be.

The voice that answers doesn’t care about any of these things. I want to write, it says, as I find the center of the labyrinth. One hour or one thousand words, I promise myself.

I am light, I am breath, I am air. I no longer feel like an outsider in this space.
***

I know I will fail. I know some days it will be too much. I hope that when I am tired and telling myself there’s no point, I will remember the way I feel right now, the surety certainty solidity.

***

I walk out the same way I came in, following the path laid onto the floor, the subtle curves, the long sweeps. The men have left, all but one who sits reading a paper in the middle of an otherwise empty pew.

I walk out the same way I came in, eyes on the floor in front of me, feet infinitely lighter.