Megan Stielstra's Blog

Last December I told this story at the Museum of Contemporary Art. I was almost eight months pregnant, and the story’s about how when I was nineteen I saw a psychic who told me there was something wrong with my reproductive system. “Broken,” she said. I’d never told that to anyone, partly because I felt like a jackass for even going to some store-front charlatan and partly ‘cause I didn’t want to jinx myself: as soon as you say it aloud, it’s going to happen, right? Like when I said that my puppy was SO good, he only chewed HIS toys, and when I got home that night he’d eaten Christopher’s iPod.

Anyhow, I felt pretty damn powerful, standing in front of that crowd at the MCA with my big ol' stomach, a big SCREW YOU to the past decade of that woman’s words buzzing in the back of my head. “Obviously, she was mistaken,” I said, all sarcastic, Caleb kicking the hell out of me (this was before he showed up, before we met him and he became Caleb. Back then we called him The Ninja. Or Goose, as in “Talk to me, Goose,” from Top Gun, back when Tom Cruise was cool).

So imagine how hilarious it was to find out, a few weeks ago, that I have to have surgery to remove an ovarian cyst.

F’ing PSYCHIC.

ONE
When I was eighteen, I stayed in a tent on Martha’s Vineyard with some squatters. I was there for the weekend with a friend and I met one of them, Kevin, on the beach. It was so beautiful—the sand hot beneath my feet, my hair tasting like salt after swimming, the blue blue ocean blending with the blue sky so you didn’t know where one finished and the other began and, okay, fine, there may have been mushrooms involved and blah blah he invited me to stay with him, which to my naive mind meant, “at his apartment,” but, no, he and some friends had pitched their tents in the middle of the woods and had been there for two months. I should point out that A. I was young and green and starved for adventure and B. Kevin was very good-looking. Anyhow, I went back to their “camp,” and that night we all sat around the fire cooking green peppers on sticks. Like marshmallows. There were maybe ten of us—Kevin, his friends, and various people they’d found on the beach, and one of the guys, Eric, looked at me over the joint he was rolling and said, “I have a glass testicle.”

Can you imagine how I’d react NOW to such a line? While I'd like to say something very caustic, it'd probably be more like, "Oh my gosh are you HITTING on me!" because when you've got an infant it's easy to forget that strangers may find you attractive, plus these days I'm in bed by eight so I can't imagine even being somewhere where such a line would be delivered, at least not without Christopher with me, and were some guy to approach me we'd probably both start giggling uncontrollably. But back THEN? I wanted to be cooool, and there was a LOT of pot, and Kevin was VERY good-looking. “Really?” I said to Eric, and he started telling me how he lost the testicle in the first place which, now, fifteen years later, I wish I’d been paying attention ‘cause it was probably a BITCHIN’ story (regardless of whether or not it was true) but I was too busy trying to focus my vision on something stationary. And, of course, looking at Kevin. He was VERY good-looking. I do remember, at one point, watching Eric talk—he had red hair and a splotchy beard, was very dirty (not sex dirty, dirty dirty. He lived in the woods) and very animated, his hands dancing all over the place—and I thought: What if his glass testicle, like, breaks? And later: That would, like, SUCK! and then, hours later: Is just one testicle enough?

This is what I thought of when my doctor told me about this cyst. It’s pretty big, apparently, and while she thinks she can just go in there and remove it, there’s a chance it’s wrapped around my ovary and she’ll have to take that out, too.

Since we’ve had Caleb, everyone and their mother has asked me, “When are you having the next one?” and I’ve been all hahahahahaha—BITE ME because the first two months of this little boy’s life so thoroughly kicked my ass I didn’t know if I could handle a round two. But he’s THREE months old—those first two months were like five thousand years ago—and now? Now it's so good that sometimes I can’t breathe. He knows me, and he giggles and bounces and reaches for me, and you can see his little brain working in the crazy, scrunched up faces he makes, and I know that I would do this again and again, no matter how hard, just for those little faces.

So when my doctor said I might lose an ovary, my mind immediately went here: I won’t be able to have another kid. Which is ridiculous, I know. I’ve got TWO ovaries. TWO! And the medical odds of getting pregnant are just as good with one (per my doctor when I started freaking out in her office). I just need to be realistic about all of this.

But people. Realism has never been my strong suit.

TWO
I wasn’t going to blog about any of this, no way no how. Ovaries are on the list of THINGS THE INTERNET DOESN’T NEED TO KNOW, right up there with the color of my puke after that night in New Orleans. But then I read this entry on dooce, about how she gets flack for writing about her daughter, and the thing is, in those first two months of Caleb’s life, I went back through dooce’s archives and read everything she wrote about Leta’s birth and the immediate thereafter. Those stories helped me through some pretty intense moments by either making me laugh, showing me how great it was going to be if I could just hold out a little longer, or making me feel like I was part of this network of women in the thick of it, who know that while motherhood is the greatest of all joys, it’s also the greatest of all WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING HERE.

This is why I tell stories. This is why I read books—to learn about different lives so I can see how similar we really are. To connect with people. To, maybe, make one-ovaried women everywhere feel a part of a greater something (I’m hearing the Superfriends theme playing in the background right now. Anyone?).

THREE
My doctor drew a picture to explain what she’d be doing: here is your uterus. These are fallopian tubes. This is your right ovary (she drew a blob the size of a dime), this is your left (this blob was the size of an orange). I had Caleb in an ergobaby front pack during this discussion and he was fast asleep, his face squashed into my chest. In the past, I’ve been a fairly paranoid person (Christopher is reading this thinking, FAIRLY? Or else he’s thinking, Are you REALLY writing about your ovaries on the INTERNET? Or else, Way to go, baby, I’m making you a KILLER martini when I get home. Or two or five). In the past, I dealt not-so-well with the stress. Had I been looking at pencil sketches of my inflamed ovary BEFORE Caleb, it might’ve induced a heart attack is what I’m saying. But now, with this baby breathing into me, everything is calm. Everything is relaxed. I’ll get the cyst out next week, it’s all good, my kid is healthy and my husband is hot—life is pretty goddamn good.

And that psychic? She can go fuck herself.