Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
A Well-Behaved Uterus Rarely Makes History
I’ve become surprisingly chill about waking up in a pool of my own blood.
Yes, whatever, I know menstrual fluid isn’t technically blood, but come on. It’s close enough.
Plus, if anyone else could see me, they’d definitely assume I’d been mauled by a velociraptor.
In the vagina.
“Not today. Not again. Please, not again.”
I reached to turn on the light beside my bed and my belly clenched against the pain. Not that I had any doubts, but I aggressively flipped the covers back.
It was all-out carnage.
I winced. “No, no, no.”
My pulse banged against the inside of my throat, in my palms, my forehead. The clammy feeling on my cheeks spread across and under my nose.
To be clear, I was perfectly chill about the blood. It was the period that made me panic.
Lots of people dislike their period or think it’s painful or annoying.
I don’t dislike my period. I loathe it. Like, I seethe with all-consuming fury when I think about it.
I’m saying my period is the single literal worst part of my life, and if I could carve out my own guts with a melon baller and survive, I’d be in the car with my very last dollar on my way to Target right now.
I grabbed my phone—it was 3:24 a.m. on that fine Tuesday. I opened my period-tracker app to confirm . . . I wasn’t supposed to start until Thursday.
I let my face fall into my hands and pressed my fingers against my closed eyelids, but tears leaked out anyway. I was supposed to have two more days—just a little more time. Maybe it was just really bad spotting. Maybe it wasn’t the full-on period yet. But based on the fact that it looked like I’d been in an accident at the ketchup factory, I guessed it was.
Across from my bed, on the wall, my pinboard collected shadows along every clipped edge of every saved picture and printer-paper fortune: photos of women in scrubs and surgical caps, an ad for a line of stethoscopes “for women” (in soft pastels that I publicly hated but secretly loved), the promotional photo of the grounds of Gleeson University, and several handwritten mantras inspiring me to become the best gynecologist in the world.
I had to be the best, because I had to find an answer.
I had to figure out what was wrong with me.
I’d been chasing an actual diagnosis for years, but unfortunately for me, the medical community was all too willing to say my condition was just a girl being dramatic.
I rolled out of bed—instantly too woozy to stand.
I moaned through pursed lips. “This is not good,” I whined to myself.
Nausea swirled in my stomach just as I raised my hand to twist the bathroom doorknob. I barely made it to the toilet before everything I’d ever eaten in my lifetime came screaming up my throat.
“Ah. How I love being roused by the sound of your vomiting in the wee hours of the morning,” Regan said as she pulled open the door on her side of our shared bathroom.
“Sorry, baby sister,” I whimpered into the bowl.
She squatted in the doorframe beside me and pulled my hair from my face. Her hands made quick work of a fat, messy braid with my dirty-blond hair. “I know, I know,” she said. “Hang on.”
Regan wet a washcloth as I flushed. I curled up in a ball on the floor just as she wrung it out and unceremoniously plopped it across my face before digging some over-the-counter meds from the cabinet.
“Thanks,” I said, trying half-heartedly to sit up. “I’m sor—”
“Nope, nope, nope. Lie down and—I say this with love—shut up.” She smiled down at me.
There were only a few extra seconds of silence. “But I am sorry—”
“Staahhhhp,” she said. Her eyes were stern now. I surrendered.
Since I first started my period, my life had been flooded with apologies for being a burden, for needing help, for missing out, for messing up plans.
I lay there on the bathroom floor with my head on Regan’s lap, willing the pain to get better—not worse. She’d given me two ibuprofens that I washed down with a swig of anti-nausea medicine (that would probably keep me locked up for two days), but the nausea didn’t fade. The lightheadedness didn’t fade. And the pain? It grew by the minute.
I wanted to avoid a full-on panic attack, but when I couldn’t figure out if I was actually panicking about school or about pain, that just freaked me out more. My breathing got quicker and I felt my cheeks get cold and my chin start to quiver. “I don’t believe this,” I said to myself, eyes stinging. “Why can’t Elvira just keep a schedule?”
“She came early, huh? What is it? Two days? What the hell is her problem?”
“Trying to make a name for herself, I guess,” I said.
I couldn’t stand that Regan felt it was necessary to track my own period along with hers. It was embarrassing. I nodded.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You’re going to be fine. Give the ibuprofen a few more minutes to kick in before you totally freak out.”
“It’s too late for that. The freakout is currently underway. And ibuprofen can suck it,” I snapped. “It does nothing.”
“Then why do you keep taking it?” she asked.
I pushed a moan through my lips as I rolled onto my back like roadkill. “Maybe this will be the time it works,” I answered. My thinking started circling the drain again. “If I can’t go to school today, I won’t meet Dr. Steele.”
Regan nodded in this way that implied she was waiting for me to keep going, but I didn’t. “Sure . . . and you’ll also get kicked out of the premed mentorship program altogether, and they’ll give your spot to someone else, and they’ll dock your grade because this forum is part of the advanced track, so your GPA will fall in the crapper.
“This is helpful?” I asked as my heart reacted to every new word she said. “I know. Yes. I know that all the rest of it is tangled up in today too. I know. But Steele.” Desperation made my chest heave as my lungs struggled to take in air. “If I could just meet him, talk to him. I know in my gut that he would believe me. I know he could help me figure out what’s wrong with me.” The lack of oxygen had made my lips start tingling.
“You have to breathe,” Regan said, pinching my lips together with her fingers, which brought sensation slowly back to the rest of my face.
I tried to pull my lips apart, but she gripped tighter.
“Oww cad I breev if yur odinng by libs togeddr?”
“Through your nose.”
I rolled my eyes and sniffed a little whiff of air.
“You’re stubborn as hell,” Regan said, letting go of my mouth. “Come on.”
She began inhaling the way I should have been. She guided me to follow along, in and out. Slow and steady. It took a few minutes for the sparks in my vision to recede to the outer edges until they faded from my periphery entirely.
Believe it or not, this early pain was nothing—a 7 or 7.5. The real pain was coming, and the accompanying dread made every part of my body and mind seem to freeze. Every time I felt the first hint of calm, that fear whispered to me, You’re not strong enough to handle this pain.
Regan helped me get up and sit on the toilet. She fished a super-mega pad from under the sink and handed it over.
“Thank you. You’re such a good sister,” I said softly.
“Are you kidding me? I’m the best sister alive,” she said, winking. “I’m gonna go pull your dirty sheets and put on your shark sheets. I’ll be back.”
She turned on the water in the shower to let it get warm and then stepped into the dark of my bedroom while I sat on the toilet, slumped over so that my shoulder rested on the countertop. A few seconds later, a fresh set of underwear smacked me in the face.
Sometime after four, I was settled back in bed, desperately hoping my heating pad would work a miracle.
I squeezed my lips together and breathed heavily through my nose. I stayed like that for over a minute, thinking about how it felt like my life had been racing toward this junction for years.
My period was heavy right from the start, and my cramps were tough (but survivable) from day one. Literally day one, which was Valentine’s Day, when I got my first period and bled through my light pink shorts during the sixth-grade sweetheart party. (I’ll never forgive myself for opting out of my red pants that day.) But over time, things got worse and worse, and as slowly as freezing water, my ability to handle that pain seemed to weaken. Or at least that’s what I believed was happening. I’d go to school and hide in the bathroom, biting my fist to keep from making sounds while my body raged. I became less and less able to deal with the pain. Eventually, Regan made the surprising suggestion that I wasn’t getting weaker, but my period was getting stronger.
That made way more sense.
Mom and I asked Dr. Pauly (my first OBGYN, and the same doctor who’d delivered me and Regan) about it, and when we left that appointment, Mom and I had both been convinced that Regan was wrong: Periods hurt, and I just wasn’t used to that. It takes time to build up an understanding of how much pain is normal. I mean, I was in middle school. What could I possibly know that a doctor didn’t?
It was a few months later that Mom found me at the bottom of the stairs with a broken wrist. I’d passed out and fallen from about halfway up. My period pain had shut my body down.
When I told her that my broken wrist didn’t hurt half as bad as my uterus, we were finally convinced.
