“Greene? Olivia Greene?” A loud voice cut through the thickness of anticipation in the
air.

I winced, not because it was time, but because the nurse had used my full name, a name only my mom still called me. As the nurse announced it I briefly felt as though I was a teenager being called to wash dishes or explain a grade on my report card. But my mom was miles away now, not there to micromanage me as I made a big decision for myself.

“Good luck, Liv” my friend Kat patted my knee reassuringly.

“Thanks. I’ll be fine,” I muttered.

I wanted so badly to appreciate her kindness in this gesture. I felt undeserving of it. I approached this appointment like another task I had to do that day, no more significant than sitting through a lecture or half-reading an article. I didn’t understand why Kat wished me luck with pity, or why she had insisted on driving me home afterwards.

I worried that the people around us in the waiting room would hear the sympathy in her voice and think I was about to receive a life-changing diagnosis or an unwanted test result instead of a little piece of plastic stuck inside me. But they remained hunched over their phones, their feet impatiently tapping. Nothing interested them less than the announcement of a name that wasn’t theirs.

The nurse ran a pearly pink fingernail over my name on her matching clipboard, ready to call for me again. I stood and smiled at her to spare the rest of the waiting room from the disruption of my name again. I followed her pink scrubs down a hallway that felt much longer than it was, dodging other pairs of patients and nurses on either side. Now, the usual routine. She ushered me up onto a scale. She wrapped up my left arm and squeezed it with a machine until I couldn’t feel my fingers. Then, she handed me a little plastic cup with a twist-off lid and pointed
towards the bathroom.

This part made me want to laugh. I thought about how every elaborate gender-reveal party and baby’s first photoshoot started with someone squatting over a stick or cup between them and the toilet, trying not to get anything on their fingers. I tried to picture my mom like this, but she would never be caught dead in the undignified position I was in. I imagined that she just simply knew I was on the way, and ordered my dad around to find a new crib and paint the spare bedroom in our house. Maybe if I had less confidence that my result would turn out negative, I would approach the sacred act of collecting my own piss with more maturity. But the thought of myself as a mother seemed so ridiculous that this test seemed as routine and precautionary as the squeeze on my arm to check my blood pressure.

After all, I was here at this appointment to sever that final tie between myself and the possibility of pregnancy completely.

Out of the bathroom, I handed the nurse my cup, unsure of the proper level of discretion for this exchange. After following her around a bit more, I was in a dull, square-shaped room. My eyes glanced over to a white cloth and thin blue gown folded precisely on a gray bed.

Nurse Pink pointed her clipboard towards the blue gown. “Take off everything from the waist down and put that on. Your doctor will be with you shortly.” And she was gone, probably off to beckon another impatient soul from the waiting room that felt miles away from me now.

I guess this was it now. I kicked off my shoes and unbuckled my belt and clumsily struggled to figure out how to properly tie the giant blue gown and then I just sat there on the bed. I was sure it was the most unsexy way a person could possibly have their pants off.

I was relieved no one had to see me like this, but I wished I wasn’t alone. If Kat was in here with me she’d probably show me something funny on her phone to distract me or fill the room with the sound of a song that was stuck in her head. But she was sitting patiently in the waiting room outside and I was all by myself in this dull, droning room with only my own company to enjoy.

I looked around as I waited. Surely this couldn’t be the scene for such a monumental procedure, as everyone had made it out to be. I thought of what people had said to me about my choice to get an IUD, and how much their input contrasted with the dull room I was in.

“God, mine hurt for a while afterwards. Well, not too long. Just, like, six months,” was the piece of wisdom from Kat.

“Are you sure you want that?” My mom asked over the phone.

“Hormonal IUD pain for 2 weeks and crying. Is this normal??!?” A Reddit user.

“You’re so brave. If cishet men could get IUDs, I’m sure they wouldn’t hurt a bit,” remarked my boss, a cheerful white lady who probably owns a pink pussy hat.

If this was some brave feminist act of resistance, it certainly didn’t feel like it as I was sitting there half-exposed under the fluorescent lights. And if I was in for weeks and months of intense pain, I’d rather just get it over with already. Each minute stretched on forever. The truth is, I was scared. Of course I didn’t want to be in pain. Of course I didn’t want a stranger poking around between my legs. The entity down there felt so strange and forbidden to me. I looked down and realized I had left my underwear on. Maybe this was a last-ditch effort to conceal it just a bit until I couldn’t anymore. If I told myself it was nothing or that it wouldn’t hurt that bad,
maybe my pain receptors would get the hint and it would somehow come true.

It was just my luck that the door swung open as I was flinging my underwear on top of my crumpled-up jeans. I turned to lock eyes with Dr. Lyle, a petite woman in a white coat who quickly ducked her head back behind the door.

“Oh, I’m sorry! I’ll wait to give you some dignity.”

Thanks, but we were well past that point.

She traipsed back in after an awkward few seconds. Her hands were full of unfamiliar objects in properly sterilized packaging, which she set up in an orderly fashion on a metal tray before perching on a wheeled chair in front of me.

“So,” she smiled at me with a sweet and strange excitement. “How are you feeling? Nervous?”

“Not too much.” I didn’t want to break her smile or face any more pity if I told her I was.
“It’s going to hurt, but it will be worth it. You’ll love your IUD,” she assured.

Love it? I pictured myself waking up every morning, happily rubbing my torso and thanking my IUD for being there with me through thick and thin. I thought of myself years from now, lying in the arms of “the one” and telling them I’m sorry but can’t do this anymore, I love another. I tried not to chuckle at Dr. Lyle, but in all the absurdity of the moment her strange reassurance started to sound comforting. At least loving a little piece of plastic in my torso couldn’t hurt me as much as loving another person. Emotionally, at least.

Her grandiose statement didn’t phase her half as much as she went on to gleefully describe the device and how it works with big, scientific words that I couldn’t comprehend. I nodded along as she told me what to expect in the procedure. She picked up her strange looking tools one by one, miming the ways they’d twist and poke around in my body. A metal clamp, shiny scissors the length of my forearm, a myriad of swabs in various shapes and textures.

My eyes widened more with the introduction of each tool. Maybe this was as serious as
everyone was making it out to be.

“...so that’s about it. You’ll do great!”

The cheerful confidence in her voice was almost enough to make me believe her, even if all I had to do was lay down and try not to utter any embarrassing noise of pain. She tossed the white cloth over my legs and before I knew it, my feet were clinging to the stirrups and the bed was rising up.

I clenched my jaw, attempting to brace myself until it was over. I reached out for my mother’s hand to squeeze, as she had done when I got my required shots before going to college. Of course, no hand was there to squeeze back.

I tried not to look down at my legs, but the way this delicate woman handled her tools with such grace was entrancing to me. She’d switch from weapon to weapon and disappear under the cloth. This sheet was for protection, I’m sure, but it felt redundant considering she was already operating so thoroughly on the most private part of me. The more Dr. Lyle prodded, the more I reluctantly accepted how uncomfortable this really was. Every feeling of nervousness or pain that I had tried to suppress all day rose up to the surface just as steadily as I had risen in the hospital bed seconds earlier.

I couldn’t stop a tear from rolling down the side of my face. I wasn’t sure if it was from the sporadic bursts of pain from the doctor’s prods or a natural reaction to my incredibly vulnerable position. I ran over the hem of the sheet with the tips of my fingers. The metaphor couldn’t have been more on-the-nose. The big white cloth over my vagina represented how I always felt about it. Like it was something I couldn’t talk about, something I didn’t quite understand, something that felt separate from me.

Here this woman was, looking around like an explorer of the deep sea. I wondered if she could see what it’s been through, like how the eyes are the window to the soul, or however the saying goes.

She inserted something particularly cold, I think it was called a speculum. I wondered if she could trace my vagina’s history, if she could mark on a calendar the day I first discovered I could feel something down there, something strange and exciting and horrifying. Maybe she could hear the laughter and the vulgar conversations with my friends who had also made the same discovery on themselves.

I wondered if she saw how much shame this feeling brought me, as a teenager sitting in Sunday school while my teacher rolled out an outdated, boxy TV and played VHS tape about sex and marriage in God’s image. A generic looking deacon droned on about chastity, how man should marry woman, how sex was strictly for procreation. I hated what I was hearing but I glued my eyes to the screen. I feared I would set fire if I so much as looked at the kind girl next to me with the big eyes and soft-looking hair. According to the video, the way I felt towards boys was bad enough. I couldn’t imagine how everyone in this room would look at me if they knew I felt this way about girls, too.

The speculum locked in place with a click and I flinched. I wondered if my doctor could see my “first time.” He was sweet and a little strange. We’d go on walks and kiss and sit criss-cross applesauce and he’d laugh at all my jokes. It seemed so right when it happened. We talked and giggled and stumbled our way through it. It felt good, I remember. But what I remember more was how it felt when he broke my heart, when told me he’d rather just be friends. Then we’d say nothing more than hi how are you when we passed in the hall, like what happened had never happened. Lesson learned. Bringing sex into my life would bring pleasure but also a lot of pain.

My breath grew shaky as I feared that she could see... that. If she could smell the vodka on my breath and the PBRs on the breath of the guy I’d just met at a party, who’d quickly found a way to get me alone. It was a bad night that could’ve gone even worse had he not been afraid of a little monthly blood. No. I don’t want her to see that. I wished she’d stop looking.

She didn’t. She kept going, inserting a ruler of sorts as I tried to suppress every squirm. Could she see, now, the possibility of a new life forming in this very site which experienced all of this? I regretfully hoped she couldn’t. That’s why I was here.

But my flood of memories was interrupted as Dr. Lyle’s head peeked up from under the protective cloth with a furrowed brow.

“Let me just clean up here. It’s OK that your vagina has bacteria. It is a body part, after all.” Dr. Lyle pushed up her glasses with a gentle smile, as though this was as normal for her as putting a stethoscope to a patient’s chest. She switched out her metal clamps for a swab that looked like it had a fuzzy white caterpillar on the end.

“I’m just gonna wipe it off. Your IUD is going in now. Just bear with me, you’re doing great!”

These sentences, which were so vulgar to me, were said with such calm frankness. I realized she had studied for years and years to be an expert on bodies, not minds. She didn’t see my vagina’s greatest hits as I felt her finally insert that fateful, painful piece of plastic inside me. She saw a labia majora and minora, a urethra, a cervix. Just like a diagram in a textbook with labels that I had to memorize for health class in middle school. It is a body part, after all. And she was right . It wasn’t this unknowable entity that I had no power over. It’s a part of my body as much as my lungs are, or my heart or my brain or my feet that I walk on everyday.

So it seemed fitting that the part of myself that caused me the most pain and shame and laughter and tenderness currently felt like it was trying to punch its way out of me through my stomach. I realized now, too, that this procedure wasn’t some brave statement or an embarrassing cause of pain that I had to hide and overcome. It was simply a medical procedure, and it really fucking hurt. Maybe letting myself feel the pain was the most liberating thing I could do.

Just as suddenly, I felt devoid of the strange and intrusive sensations. I squinted an eye open to notice that all of the tools were placed back in order on the metal tray. Dr. Lloyd slipped off her blue gloves and removed the white cloth and shut my legs back together. She swung the stirrups back into their place under the bed and I was being slowly transported back down to earth. I stared at an eyeball diagram on the wall as she cleaned up and explained to me the aftercare, the next steps, how long it should hurt for.

“...and here’s when your IUD expires.” She handed me a small card with a date scribbled on it in blue Sharpie. “2030! God, that doesn’t even sound like a real year.”

“Yeah, wow.”

I stared at the date. I wondered what kind of person I would be by then, if I would ever face a moment where I was lucky to have my IUD, or if there would ever be a time within those seven years that I would see a stroller being pushed down the street and regret it. Another part of me felt guilty knowing, truthfully, that the latter might never be the case.

“You did great today, Olivia.” She smiled warmly at me for the final time. “Just sit tight and don’t get up for ten minutes or so. You can leave whenever you’re feeling well enough.”

And off she went, leaving me wondering what her next appointment might be. I thought about how I might occupy the ten minutes that stretched ahead of me. My reproductive organs felt like they were being squeezed by a tight, unflinching fist. I knew the pain was unavoidable now, but in a final act of stubborn determination I stood up. I found myself unable to stop thinking about my mom. I was so lucky she respected my choice to not have children for now but I also felt lucky she made the opposite choice twenty years ago. I wanted to thank her and tell her about the procedure and that it went smoothly and I feel fine and Olivia is OK, in case she was worried. I wanted to remind myself that the concept of motherhood didn’t have to be completely lost in my life now.

I stood up, one foot first, then the other. I took a few steps over to the pile of my clothes on the floor and began to bend down and grab my phone from my pants pocket. The unflinching fist below my stomach launched its final strike, like instant karma for breaking doctor’s orders. I felt like smiling. This pain would be temporary, but it was a part of me now, and I was grateful for it. So I laid back down and I let it hurt for a while.

-Olivia Greene

Olivia Greene is a rising senior at Occidental College, where she majors in Media Arts and Culture with other academic interests in writing and gender studies. Olivia has a passion for uplifting and supporting survivors of sexual violence, whether it be through institutional work on her college's campus or through her art and writing. Her personal essays and fictional short films often focus on young women with themes of queerness, healing, and female solidarity told through a sardonic tone.