Read Online As Good as Dead by Elizabeth Evans - Free Book Online
Authors: Elizabeth Evans
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over the kitchen garbage pail.
“Ready?” I asked Will.
“Are you? You don’t want to get settled in for a while?”
“Will!” I wanted to prevent him from saying another word. I was thirty-six. Ever since our move to Tucson, I had been preparing myself for a pregnancy. I had bicycled to the Himmel Park pool every day during open season; during colder months, I’d bicycled to the university rec center for weight lifting and running on the treadmill. Back in Iowa, while Martie stayed in bed, sleeping, I’d gotten up every morning to do squats and lunges and abs-strengthening exercises and Pilates DVDs. I’d cooked Martie and myself righteous meals crammed with greens and sweet potatoes and kidney beans. I’d taken vitamin pills that included folic acid, because I knew a folate deficiency could cause a developing fetus to develop spina bifida.
“Well, if you’re sure,” Will said.
As it hit the bottom of the metal garbage pail, the hard plastic birth control pill package had given out a satisfying gong.
However, I did not get pregnant.
In the back of my mind, I always had worried that something like this could happen. For years, in fact, I had taken care of my birth control and Pap smears in the relative anonymity of Planned Parenthood. Now I made an appointment with an ob-gyn listed in “Tucson’s Best Doctors.”
I liked that the office was located in a deep-eaved, old Craftsman-style bungalow painted a benevolent olive green. The examination room itself would have been a bedroom, once upon a time. I liked that the wallpaper (pale blue hydrangeas) looked a bit scuffed. Across the tops of big reference books on a wooden desk, there lounged various pink plastic parts of a female reproductive system that put me in mind, in a friendly way, of the pink lawn furniture and sports car that had been part of a grade school classmate’s Barbie doll collection. The doctor herself turned out to be all warmth and goodwill; also admirably without vanity (sensible sandals exposing bare feet, no makeup, graying curls a bit mashed on one side of her head). During the pelvic examination, she and her assistant and I carried on—making an allowance for the lamp and speculum and goo—an amazingly normal chat regarding which shops in Tucson carried the best secondhand furniture.
After I got back into my street clothes, the doctor returned to the room. She was tall enough to easily settle herself on a corner of her wooden desk. Wooden shutters covered the bottom half of the room’s double-hung windows and, nervous, I looked out over the shutters at the blue-blue desert sky and a tendril of cat’s claw vine that, now and then, waved into view.
The doctor cleared her throat. The frown on her face signaled concern, not disapproval. Still, my heart seized even before she said, “Has anyone ever told you that you have endometriosis?”
I shook my head.
She wiggled a finger in her ear, as if an itch, there, prevented her from continuing. “You do understand your records are confidential? I ask because your endometriosis looks like it’s a result of Asherman’s syndrome, but you didn’t indicate any previous intrauterine surgery in your history.”
Up until that moment, I’d told exactly two people in the world that I’d had an abortion: Esmé—I’d had no choice in her case—and Jacqueline C., a bighearted Tucsonan with whom I’d once shared what Alcoholics Anonymous called a personal inventory .
“Thank you,” the doctor said after I’d tearfully made her the third person. She pulled a paper towel from the dispenser over her sink and handed it to me. “It’s very important for me to know your history.” After she removed a few of the pink plastic reproductive organs from the top of her reference books, she pulled one of the books toward herself and flipped through the pages until she located a black-and-white photograph of what, when she turned the book my way, looked like a heap of crepe paper streamers.
“Ready?” I asked Will.
“Are you? You don’t want to get settled in for a while?”
“Will!” I wanted to prevent him from saying another word. I was thirty-six. Ever since our move to Tucson, I had been preparing myself for a pregnancy. I had bicycled to the Himmel Park pool every day during open season; during colder months, I’d bicycled to the university rec center for weight lifting and running on the treadmill. Back in Iowa, while Martie stayed in bed, sleeping, I’d gotten up every morning to do squats and lunges and abs-strengthening exercises and Pilates DVDs. I’d cooked Martie and myself righteous meals crammed with greens and sweet potatoes and kidney beans. I’d taken vitamin pills that included folic acid, because I knew a folate deficiency could cause a developing fetus to develop spina bifida.
“Well, if you’re sure,” Will said.
As it hit the bottom of the metal garbage pail, the hard plastic birth control pill package had given out a satisfying gong.
However, I did not get pregnant.
In the back of my mind, I always had worried that something like this could happen. For years, in fact, I had taken care of my birth control and Pap smears in the relative anonymity of Planned Parenthood. Now I made an appointment with an ob-gyn listed in “Tucson’s Best Doctors.”
I liked that the office was located in a deep-eaved, old Craftsman-style bungalow painted a benevolent olive green. The examination room itself would have been a bedroom, once upon a time. I liked that the wallpaper (pale blue hydrangeas) looked a bit scuffed. Across the tops of big reference books on a wooden desk, there lounged various pink plastic parts of a female reproductive system that put me in mind, in a friendly way, of the pink lawn furniture and sports car that had been part of a grade school classmate’s Barbie doll collection. The doctor herself turned out to be all warmth and goodwill; also admirably without vanity (sensible sandals exposing bare feet, no makeup, graying curls a bit mashed on one side of her head). During the pelvic examination, she and her assistant and I carried on—making an allowance for the lamp and speculum and goo—an amazingly normal chat regarding which shops in Tucson carried the best secondhand furniture.
After I got back into my street clothes, the doctor returned to the room. She was tall enough to easily settle herself on a corner of her wooden desk. Wooden shutters covered the bottom half of the room’s double-hung windows and, nervous, I looked out over the shutters at the blue-blue desert sky and a tendril of cat’s claw vine that, now and then, waved into view.
The doctor cleared her throat. The frown on her face signaled concern, not disapproval. Still, my heart seized even before she said, “Has anyone ever told you that you have endometriosis?”
I shook my head.
She wiggled a finger in her ear, as if an itch, there, prevented her from continuing. “You do understand your records are confidential? I ask because your endometriosis looks like it’s a result of Asherman’s syndrome, but you didn’t indicate any previous intrauterine surgery in your history.”
Up until that moment, I’d told exactly two people in the world that I’d had an abortion: Esmé—I’d had no choice in her case—and Jacqueline C., a bighearted Tucsonan with whom I’d once shared what Alcoholics Anonymous called a personal inventory .
“Thank you,” the doctor said after I’d tearfully made her the third person. She pulled a paper towel from the dispenser over her sink and handed it to me. “It’s very important for me to know your history.” After she removed a few of the pink plastic reproductive organs from the top of her reference books, she pulled one of the books toward herself and flipped through the pages until she located a black-and-white photograph of what, when she turned the book my way, looked like a heap of crepe paper streamers.
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