July 14th, 2016 - Renée Vogt

2016

“Scooch on down.”

I’m twenty years old, home for the summer from college, and my mom stands next to me, her hand lightly resting on my knee that’s propped up in the air, my heels in the stirrups of the gynecological exam table.

“It’s fun to be here as a mom instead of a doctor,” she says. We’re in the small women’s health center that she co-owns with five other doctors. Her own exam rooms are right down the hall, decorated with paintings of flowers I made in art class in middle school.

“Is this going to hurt?” I ask Dr. Gillian, one of my mom’s business partners. The sunlight streams through the cracked blinds. The exam room is on the second floor, so the windows look out onto trees and distant parking lots. It’s after five pm, and all the patients and nurses have left for the day. The three of us are the only ones in the building, and I’m getting my first IUD.

“It’s uncomfortable,” Dr. Gillian says as she snaps on purple latex gloves. I’ll later wonder if medical schools coach gynecologists to say that instead of “oh yeah it hurts like a mother,” so their patients won’t grab their pants and head home. At twenty, I haven't yet heard from friends who will throw up or pass out from the pain of getting an IUD. I only feel the low-grade nervousness that appears at every doctor or dentist appointment.

I’m also embarrassed that I’m on my period, but Dr. Gillian said that wasn’t going to be a problem. There’s an additional pad below me though, the same kind used for training puppies.

After Dr. Gillian puts warmed lube on the speculum—I hope I don’t need to describe a speculum to you—my mom opens up a plastic package with a tool called a tenaculum that you might also see in a museum of medieval torture devices. Dr. Gillian pulls it out by the handles.

“Okay, now I’m just going to open your cervix.”

If you’ve never had this exam, imagine someone grabbing hold of your nasal septum with pliers and twisting. Now imagine they’re doing that to an organ six inches inside your body.

“Is it supposed to hurt this much?” I’m gasping from the pain.

“Yes,” my mom says simply.

2026

“Scooch on down,” Jess says. I’m twenty-nine years old, and my husband Anthony sits on a chair next to the exam table.

“Do you want to hold my hand?” Anthony asks, getting up.

“That’s okay.” I wave him off. “I feel like I’ve done this a million times.” In truth, I haven’t asked him there to support me as I get my second IUD removed, but because I want him to see me as a patient in a clinical environment—good practice, I hope, for prenatal appointments.

Jess, my nurse practitioner, her assistant, and I have gone back and forth about pre-authorization—my health insurance might not cover my IUD removal because if I didn’t get pre-approval—something I didn’t have to think about when I was twenty, when my IUD insertion was probably off the books, a favor from Dr. Gillian to my mom.

“Here’s the speculum,” Jess says. I don’t look, but I can hear from the rustling that her assistant is handing her the tenaculum now. “You’re going to feel some pressure.”

“Are you okay?” Anthony asks, his face full of concern, and I realize I’m grimacing from how uncomfortable it is.

“Yeah,” I say. “Getting it out is easier than getting it in.” I’d already gone through this procedure alone when I was twenty-five and getting my first IUD replaced with the second.

“Oops, lost your cervix,” Jess says.

Girl, how did you lose my cervix, I think.

“There it is,” she says. “Up and to the left.”

“Up and to the left,” I repeat to Anthony, craning over my shoulder to look at him. “Got that?”

“Here we go,” Jess says a moment later. She holds up my IUD—a white piece of plastic only two inches long and shaped like a T. I’m a little sentimental—this object was with me for so many life events: meeting my boyfriend Anthony’s parents for the first time, two new jobs, my wedding day, my move to Michigan, the day we moved into our first house.

“Wanna keep it?” the assistant jokes.

“Can I?” I ask. She laughs but puts it in a small plastic jar labeled BIOHAZARD.

“Aww,” Jess says. “Look at the cute little pieces of uterine tissue on it.”

Later that day, as I wash it off in our kitchen sink, I’ll ask Anthony what he thought about the appointment.

“It was more fun than I thought it’d be,” he’ll say—the first time in the history of pelvic exams that anyone has said that.

Then again, he wasn’t the one at the wrong end of the tenaculum.

For most of my ten years living with an IUD, I didn’t have periods. My last period that I remember was in June 2019. When I saw the dull brown-red on my pantiliner a week after my IUD was removed, my first thought was, What am I, thirteen? This is ridiculous.

The past few weeks, I’ve felt a closeness to my thirteen-year-old self. When I had to start using tampons again, I felt pulled by memory to my fish-themed childhood bathroom, holding back panicked tears, my mom coaching me to breathe out, my left hand holding a small mirror to see what all was going on down there—which didn’t really help—and my right hand holding my first tampon. They must have redesigned tampons since I was a kid though, because it’s much easier to put one in at thirty than it was at thirteen.

It’s the first time in seventeen years that I haven’t been on some sort of hormonal birth control, and it’s been an adjustment to living with a regular cycle. Ask me in another six months, and I’ll probably tell you I’m over it, get me back on hormonal birth control, forget about the desire for progeny.

For now though, the novelty of it makes me feel grounded. Blood every month signals things are working as expected. Even the bloating, mood swings, cravings remind me that I’m here, I’m living, I’m young, and that life is long. It’s more fun than I thought it’d be.

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Renée Vogt’s eclectic professional life has ranged from training rats in a biomedical research lab and ghostwriting a numerology blog to driving a forklift in a manufacturing plant and more. She holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Northwestern University, an MFA in creative writing from Alma College, and participated in AWP Writers-to-Writers Season 23. Vogt now lives in mid-Michigan with her husband and their cat.

Renée Vogt wants you to check out the great work done by Planned Parenthood. Learn more at plannedparenthoodaction.org.