The Last Tampon

I’m sitting in my new doctor’s office while he reviews the results of another bunch of blood tests. We know I’m anemic; eating red meat and taking iron daily isn’t working, and I’m tired of assuming it’s just something I have and have to put up with.

He flips through the file and asks me how old I am. I think this should probably be right in front of him, but god knows what my previous (idiot) doctor bothered to write down.

“Thirty-seven.”

He nods, and starts to read over something in the file folder. “You have how many children?”

“Three.”

“And is that the size you want your family to be, did you want to have any more children?”

I realize that he is looking at the lab report from my pelvic ultrasound.

“Doctor, where are we going with this?”

Where we were going with this was some abnormalities (“almost certainly benign”) in my reproductive system, one ovary and my uterus: and more tests. Just be sure, you know. Blood tests to rule out ovarian cancer, a biopsy (ouch) to rule out uterine cancer, even more ultrasounds because the lab didn’t bother to check whether I was at the right point in my menstrual cycle to make sure they could really see everything.

The very kindly OB explained that he’d recommend less invasive measures to deal with the bleeding, although they’re less effective; they’d eventually like to take a look at the ovarian cysts if they don’t go away on their own; oh, and the ultrasound revealed a couple of small fibroids, nothing to worry about at this point and certainly not cancerous, there’s not even a guarantee that there would be more of them.

Well. Fibroids. I knew this was probably coming, because both my mother and grandmother had severe fibroids and had to have their transmissions yanked, so to speak, in by the time they were forty-five. I just wasn’t expecting to see the beginning of it so soon. That made the choice of procedures a no-brainer; I didn’t want to wait and go through checkups for years and years, watching fibrous tissue spread through my pelvis like barnacles clogging a ship, and five or ten years from now, going under the knife for the exact same thing, only worse.

I’m checking into the hospital tomorrow morning and coming out not merely “done having children” or “aging out of fertility” but completely sterile, unable to get pregnant, much less carry a child to term. It’s my choice and I’m fine with it, but I have to say that of all the you’re-getting-old crap I’ve been dealing with, I wasn’t expecting surgical sterility before I turned forty.

And this morning, my period started. One last hurrah. I wonder if I should put my tampon stash aside for when my daughters need them.