It Will Come at Once
BY ANONYMOUS
The family of words that are related to the English word “menstruation” include mental, memory, meditation, mensurate, commensurate, meter, mother, mana, magnetic, mead, mania, man, and moon.
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A young woman can get her first period anywhere between 10 and 16 years of age. Delayed onset of menstruation is rare, but if a girl hasn’t started by the age of 16, she should see a gynecologist. In the United States, 97.5% of women have begun their menstrual cycles by the age of 16.
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I did not get my period until I was eighteen years old.
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The jelly was warm when they pressed it against my bulging bladder. They heat it up now, did you know that? The technician instructed me to drink four liters of water before the ultrasound so that the uterus would expand, so that the body would rise, bringing whatever toiled inside to the surface, visible in grainy black and white on the tiny screen.
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My gynecologist explained, as if reassuringly, that my body was capable of expelling itself, of ridding that sacred uterine lining. My body just didn’t want to.
The dead tissue shedded from my uterus was decaying from the inside, begging to come out. Forming and cysting within me, simultaneously alive and dead. *
The cause of polycystic ovary syndrome isn't well understood, but may involve a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
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The cysts would build, would grow, expand and take over. My gynecologist warned that if they did not induce in me a period, I could risk developing cancer.
My first period was induced. Induced. The word scared me. The way it was sharp in the mouth and hard in the mind. This body was not mine. *
Polycystic ovary syndrome is a hormonal disorder common among women of reproductive age. Women with PCOS may have infrequent or prolonged menstrual periods or excess male hormone levels. The ovaries may develop numerous small collections of fluid and fail to regularly release eggs.
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My gynecologist had warned that my first period would be heavy, and that it was. “The uterin lining,” she explained, “has been building up for potentially years. Once your period has been induced, it will all come out at once”.
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I wasn’t “the poster girl” my gyno explained. I wasn’t excessively hairy, or overweight. That’s why they hadn’t caught it, that’s why the cysts had grown, like those sponges I loved to put in water when I was a child and watch expand.
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Periods tend to be heavier, more painful, and longer in the colder months.
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Coming-of-age is not always poetic, it is not a blossoming of flowers or a changing of the seasons. Sometimes coming-of-age is the rush of blood through your body, the warm liquid trickling down your thigh. The realization that this body was not meant for you, that what was seen of it and what is to become of it is for the doctors and the men and the birth control pills in their shiny plastic capsules.
That first period was hell. I detached from the body that once moved with me, that was once mine. That body that once was did not require constant supervision and consideration, that body had moved on. *
I would have to take birth control indefinitely, to ensure my uterus would shed every month, that the cysts that had formed would not take over.
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In the eighteenth century in Saigon, no woman was employed in the opium industry because it was believed that if a menstruating woman were near, the opium would become ruined and bitter.
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The first time I had sex it hurt. There was no enjoyment, only an inexplicable vulnerability and pain. I was told to stay quiet, who told me this I cannot remember. I swallowed the pain. So this is what is in the songs and the myths and the minds, this pain?
When it was finally over I looked down at a white bed smeared with red blood. Shame. *
In hindsight there was no reason to apologize. My body was induced, what happened next was not my fault, was it?
But the shame engulfed me. I fled. For once, my body discharged blood without the help of lab-made chemicals, but this time, it was not what was expected of me. My body was not my own, spilling its contents, the warm red blood (always surprisingly vibrant), only when induced. *
For weeks afterwards I would sit on the floor of my shower, hot water dripping down my exposed body. I would shudder, my body shaking, reimagining the feeling of being trapped, of being silent in my own shame. My nakedness, alone in the dim light of the bathroom, felt foreign, as if someone had come and replaced what once was rightly mine. Some cruel punishment for a crime I did not intend to commit.
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Menstruating blood was often seen as sacred. Sacred means both “set apart” and “cursed.”
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What is wanted of the body is confusing. There, on the shower floor, I imagine myself inside the warm cavities of my uterus. I feel foreign in here. I feel animosity towards a body that has always done everything it is not supposed to.
Spilled when it was supposed to stay closed, clotted when it was supposed to release. |