Ten days post-op

Healing from a major surgery has been both easier and harder than I thought it would be.

Ten days ago, I had a total hysterectomy—removal of my uterus, cervix, and fallopian tubes; everything but the ovaries. Because of the specifics of my case, this procedure had to be performed via open abdominal surgery rather than the preferred method, laparoscopically, which is far less invasive and much easier to recover from.

This is my first experience ever with surgery. I’d never even been under general anesthesia before this (yes, I still have my wisdom teeth.) I keep reminding myself how lucky I am, that my health has been this good into middle age. It feels startling and sort of whimsical, sort of cast in a sparkling pink light, to identify one area of life in which I have had unusually good fortune, because my luck has been so consistently rotten everywhere else. And if you want to be lucky anywhere, really, it’s in the health department. Without your health, all the rest of the ways in which a person can be fabulously blessed by chance and circumstance don’t mean very much.

And that’s another way in which I feel lucky: to realize that the small portion of favor I have enjoyed, this narrow band of sunlight, falls in the one place you really want it. There is nothing like a major surgery—or, I imagine, a major or chronic illness—to make you get all introspective and honest. Such proximity to your physical self forces a confrontation with this funny, finite meatsuit we all have to wear. You become so very aware that the material is subject to wear and tear. Eventually, even the luckiest models start to break down. And what do you want to do while you’re still you? What do you want to accomplish? What will be the purpose and the legacy of this thing you’re doing now, this existence?

The experience of healing from such a major surgery has been both easier and harder than I thought it would be. The things I’d spent time wondering about and even fearing (like pain, for example) haven’t seemed so bad in the moment, maybe because I expected them. And then, each day as I feel noticeably better than I did the day before, I look back at what I endured just 24 hours ago and I ask myself how the hell I got through it.

The things I didn’t even know enough to wonder about have ambushed me and have been the hardest parts of this experience. The patience I require for myself, for my body as well as my mind, feels, from moment to moment, far beyond my capacity. And yet, looking back over the past ten days, I have witnessed myself finding and nurturing and practicing an extraordinary patience, a capacity for forbearance that I truly didn’t know I possessed.

I have tried and failed all my life to cultivate this quality in myself, but I am not by nature a patient person. From the time I was a tiny child, I was determined to bend the world to my will. Ambition has always burned like the furnace of my brain. I have always had such a clear idea of where I’m going, and I’m always not there yet, and it’s my natural impatience that has driven me back onto the path again and again, after decades of rotten luck. Patience is not my default state. This is hard for me, and also, I’m doing it. It’s remarkable to know that I can.

Spay and neuter your pets.

I don’t know how to explain this hyper-driven aspect of my personality, other than to say that Carl Jung would say I’m a soul possessed by her animus. Jung said that a woman whose animus is the dominant aspect of her personality risks losing her femininity. My response to that was always a sarcastic “Oh, no! Not my femininity!” I have ridden this masculine psychopomp all my life, literally as far back as I can remember, and except for the rejection I typically receive from normie society for being so distinctly unfeminine, I have enjoyed the journey. I see no reason to fear for my femininity. Especially not now that I have no uterus.

My mom came up from Seattle to help with the first few days of my at-home recovery. It was good to have her here. We talked a lot, because there isn’t much else to do when you’re bed-bound and unable to even get into a comfortable position (there is no comfortable position.) The conversation eventually touched on everything, except for the few things we genuinely never talk about for good and sensible reasons.

We talked about my first-grade teacher. How she figured out that I had an unusual capacity for language, that I was already reading fluently at a college level, though I was only seven. Mrs. Dawson invited us over for dinner. She lived in a little condo in downtown Edmonds, up on the third floor, and my mom and I sat at her dinner table and she said, “Libbie has a very special talent for language. This is the kind of talent that parents sometimes have a hard time seeing, because it’s not like talent in sports or music.” If I wanted to write stories, Mrs. Dawson said, I should be encouraged to write. And I should be allowed to read anything I was interested in, without restriction on age range or subject (though I’m sure it was implied that restrictions for age-appropriate content were okay.)

“There’s nothing she can’t handle,” Mrs. Dawson said of me. I believed it.

“She was a good teacher,” my mother said. “She let you be Mike.”

This is another way in which I was unusually lucky. So many people in my life allowed me to be Mike, my animus in his flesh. In the 1980s, the only word for kids like me was “tomboy,” and you only got that socially-acceptable epithet if you’d been assigned female at birth. The boys who were all anima were labeled far less flattering things and had much harder lives because of it. But thanks to misogyny, it was considered okay for a girl to “aspire” to masculinity… prior to puberty, anyway, when you would suddenly become obligated to appease the male gaze or else. Anyway, no one batted an eye at my insistence that I should be called Mike rather than my very feminine given name (which I did legally change later in life, by the way, because such a frilly name had always felt like it belonged to someone else, the pretty girl I’d been expected to be.) My refusal to wear girls’ clothing was accepted, too. All these little layers of luck peeling themselves apart and revealing themselves to me, the hidden core of my matryoshka fortune. You don’t see these things until you’re forced to sit and think about your life because you can’t do anything else.

If I’d been born in a later era, I probably would think of myself as non-binary. But because I was born in the old, dead world, instead I think of myself for whom labels have no meaning. I’m fine with it if other people call me a woman and use she/her pronouns. The rest of the world sees my body and assumes I’m a woman, which means I get treated like a woman, which isn’t great compared to how perceived-men are treated. So I might as well wear the label society gives me, since they’re going to treat me this way anyhow.

But I would be lying if I said that I don’t delight in being one of the disruptors who wears the gendered label. No, I’m not anything like most people who call themselves “woman,” am I? Yet I’m a woman anyway. Deal with it, suckers. Internally, I have always experienced myself to be positioned somewhere outside of these ideas, “male” and “female,” “man” and “woman,” “masculine” and “feminine.” None of the above, because all those words are arbitrarily defined by our culture and are therefore ultimately meaningless.

Yet, as true as that has always been for me, one of the things I wondered and worried about quite a bit before this surgery was how a hysterectomy might affect me emotionally. I read experiencers’ stories of post-hysterectomy emotions so I could know what to potentially expect. I know it’s pretty common for people who’ve had hysterectomies to go through a period of grief afterwards, even if (like me) they never wanted to be parents. The mere fact that the door is closed for good, that now there’s definitely no chance to experience pregnancy (or another pregnancy), can hit people hard, and I can understand why. For others, the grief is more culturally rooted. Even now, a quarter of a way through the twenty-first century, women are still seen first and foremost as reproductive vessels. In the eyes of way too many people, we are less individuals than we are baby-making machines. Still! And to lose one’s ability to make babies is, for many people, the equivalent of losing their status within society.

I knew that either of these feelings might seize me unexpectedly. I wanted to be prepared.

It wasn’t until my seventh day post-op that I felt sure I had no more reason to worry about that. I was showering—gingerly and slowly, which is how I do everything lately—and a sudden wave of joy rolled through me. It was the first moment of feeling good I’d experienced since the surgery. Without these particular organs, I actually felt more like myself than I have since I was a child.

I put my hands low on my abdomen and felt a void in my flesh, a warm space of soft emptiness where my uterus used to be. The psychopomp settled more cozily inside. He’s got more room to stretch his legs now, and we have things to do just as soon as I’m healed enough to do them.