When Tubes Burst and Change Everything

I pulled the car up to Flint City Hall and sat slumped over the steering wheel. A passer-by asked if he could help and I whispered to him to go inside and find my husband. I couldn’t move, couldn’t walk, and knew that in a minute or two I’d pass out.

This was 1970. Three years before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in the U.S. Nonetheless, ER doctors knew that a woman with an ectopic pregnancy in a fallopian tube had to have emergency surgery lest she die from internal bleeding when the tube burst.

Mine had already burst.

At the ER, the nurse took my watch and my wedding ring. She gave me a paper ID bracelet while I was being wheeled down the hall. Not five minutes had passed since I’d come in the door. They weren’t waiting for anything. I didn’t think I was dying but I wasn’t sure. My husband had my wedding ring just in case.

When I woke up, the doctor told me that I wouldn’t mind the scar because it was below where my bikini would hit. I’d never had a bikini, but he wouldn’t have known that. I never wanted to be that exposed, that bare.

I spent several days in the hospital. That was the practice then. Now they’d wheel a person to their car straight from surgery. In the room with me was a woman who’d been in a car accident. She wasn’t terribly injured but she’d lost her mind. She couldn’t remember what had happened or who she was and so she rocked back and forth, shrieked things I couldn’t understand, and sometimes tried to get up to leave. The nurse would coax her back.

When the woman’s husband came to visit, he’d help her into the rocking chair and then kneel in front of her saying her name over and over again. This calmed her down.

They sent me home after five days. My roommate was still rocking but seemed to be more relaxed and I wondered when she could go home. I forgot to mention she had little children – three or four of them. Sometimes later, out and about in town, I’d think I saw her, but I couldn’t really remember what she looked like. There was so much going on with my own body. And life.

Like what would it mean for me to only have one fallopian tube? The doctor explained that even though ovaries take turns ovulating every month, the one fallopian tube would eventually sway from side to side, in other words, filling in for the absent one. It seemed aquatic to me, like a strand of kelp undulating in the current.

Every month I waited to feel the kelp move. And then finally I got pregnant again and had a healthy baby in 1973. The intervening time was nerve wracking because even though my doctor said it would probably all work out, I never believed him. I felt doomed and wrong and extremely imperfect for a long time. Maybe always. That is my surgery story.