I have never really trusted my body, but at least I felt like I
knew it. That knowledge sometimes seemed like a collection of limitations, where I catalogued the things I couldn't reach, the dance moves I couldn't do, and the many yoga poses my body refused to hold. But there was something reliable about its many quirks and failings. I rarely thought about what was below my skin, but when I did, it was along the lines of a classroom anatomical model; the cutaway kind, where you can take the organs out and snap them back in again. Though the skin itself was idiosyncratic (a classy way of saying imperfect), I figured that the organs beneath were ideally shaped, all in their place, and practically made of plastic.
So it was disconcerting to find out last Monday that part of this system had gone rogue.
But let's start a few days before that, when you would find me on my back in a windowless basement room. An efficient Eastern European technician is in the middle of jimmying a rod back and forth in my vagina. I feel like a human joystick; the indignity of having to wear one of those stupid backless hospital robes compounded by the fact that I have to do so while an ultrasound wand is shoved up my hoo-ha. I am somewhat convinced that there will be a fire alarm, and I will have to waddle out into the street with the equipment in situ. This doesn't make any sense, of course, but that irrational fear is soon eclipsed when Magda the Impaler lets out an "hmmm."
A hmm when you're getting an ultrasound is never a comforting sound. Perhaps the technician can't get the ultrasound to work, or she's letting her mind wander towards dinner, but there's one word you start to think of when she grunts, and that word is cancer. "You're being irrational," you think, "it's far more likely just to be fibroids, or cysts, so stop being a drama queen- OH MY GOD, I did wait too long to write that novel."
But I won't hear that from Magda. Instead, the analysis will come from my family doctor a few days after, when I'm trying to shop for groceries on my lunch break. And the news is good! They don't think it's cancer at all. Trying to compare prices on tomato paste while fielding this call didn't seem so foolish when I heard that. But then the news turns good-ish, quickly. There's an it, and it's a cyst that's about 4-5cm in size. I foolishly tell myself that's really not that large--we're not talking 4-5 inches here--until I actually take out a ruler back at the office, and realize that 4-5cm is bigger than any mystery growth in my body has any right to be.
With the knowledge of my >4cm hop-on ("you're gonna get some hop-ons"), I've started to wonder what else my body could hide. For the first few days after that call, I had trouble sleeping. I would imagine the cyst industriously growing as I rested, and my body started to seem alien, like somebody had sewn a Lovecraftian horror into a people suit. Or perhaps I was just feeling alienated. This sac made me confront how little I really knew about my body, though I lived in it and operated it. My mind suddenly felt like a guest.
Since then, my conversations with other folks have assured me that large cysts or even multiple cysts are not uncommon. Some are even functional. I have another one of those invasive ultrasounds scheduled a few weeks from now, and I'm sure that after they'll either decide to excise my hop-on or leave it in peace. What should be comforting is that it's not what that I first thought when the technician went "hmm." My plans and goals, although a little fuzzy, still require the use of a body that's fairly healthy. I still have that, at least for now. I thought of a proverb when I left the medical imaging centre: "Man plans, God laughs." But more applicable to me then was a small edit: "Man plans, cells divide."
