Bringing in Finn (6 page)

“I had an MRI test last weekend,” I blurted. “I haven't had a period since I stopped taking the birth control pill. It's been three years. We're going to see a reproductive endocrinologist.”

“You're trying,” my mother said, “to get pregnant?”

“We haven't officially,” I said. “We've been doing the getting-ready-to part.”

“Oh, Sara! I'm so happy!” my mother gushed.

“I might have something called empty sella,” I said. “We might need some help.” I braced myself for a criticism, a condemnation.

“Science has made incredible advancements in this area,” my mother said. “There's a lot of good help out there these days.”

I watched her face. She looked earnest. No judgment. Just “there's a lot of help out there.”

I started to laugh. The protectiveness around my heart loosened a bit, like fingers unfolding from a fist. The blood rushed in, strange but welcome.

“Being pregnant was the most thrilling thing I've ever done,” my mother said. “Having children is the most wonderful experience in the world.”

O
n the Monday after my MRI, I called Dr. Colaum's office and made an appointment for a consultation, explaining that I'd been referred by Dr. Bizan. I took a Friday-morning appointment three weeks later, figuring that would give the hospital ample time to deliver the MRI results. I called Dr. Bizan's office to let them know I'd completed the MRI and made the RE appointment.

“We'll call you when your results arrive,” a nurse at the office said. “Dr. Bizan will need to meet with you in person to review your MRI. If you don't hear from us in a week, call. This office gets crazy.”

I called the next Monday and again the following, reminding the receptionist of my upcoming appointment with Dr. Colaum.

“I don't know if Dr. Bizan will be able to see you,” the nurse said. “She's booked solid.”

“Well, what do you suggest?” I asked, feeling edgy and frustrated.

“Don't tell anyone I told you this,” she said, dropping her voice, “but come in tomorrow before her first appointment—eight o'clock AM—and I'll try to corral Dr. B. for you.”

I arrived at the office at seven forty-five, but Dr. Bizan had been called away to deliver a baby. I asked the nurse if she could give me
the results so I could take them to Dr. Colaum, but when she checked my file she found that the results had still not arrived. She advised me to call the next morning. I called the next morning, then every morning that week. No one could confirm if my MRI results had arrived or when I could get in to see Dr. Bizan.

On the Friday morning of my appointment with Dr. Colaum, I went to Dr. Bizan's office again before it opened. I sipped tea from a paper cup and watched the elevator as if on a stakeout. The building's foyer was as dilapidated as Dr. Bizan's waiting room. The elevator was small, with steel metal doors; more than three people inside would be cramped. The receptionist was the first to arrive and let me into the office. She told me to take a seat on a chair in the hallway, circumventing the waiting room. Twenty minutes later, a nurse grabbed my arm and hurried me down the hall. She said Dr. Bizan could see me for three minutes before her first appointment.

I half-ran down the hallway to room 3. Dr. Bizan was on her cell phone and motioned for me to take a seat in a chair opposite her.

She hung up and turned toward me. “I know we only have a moment, but I'm so happy we could meet this morning.”

“Me too,” I said. I told her that I was going to Dr. Colaum's office after our meeting.

“Well, your test results never did make it over here.” Dr. Bizan paused; I fought an urge to scream. “But I was able to call someone I know at St. Joseph and have him give them to me over the phone this morning.”

I unclenched my hands, which I had balled into fists.

“The MRI came back positive for empty sella,” Dr. Bizan said, her eyes resting on my face. “This explains why you have not been having periods,” she continued. “And it gives Dr. Colaum some direction in terms of treating you.”

Dr. Bizan paused again. I nodded to indicate that I was following her, encouraging her to go on. “As I may have mentioned, there are two kinds of empty sella: primary and secondary. Yours is secondary. It is not a threat to your overall health but is important to know in terms of fertility.”

I nodded, happy for that reassurance. “I have to meet my next patient now, but I can answer a couple questions if you make them quick.”

I had questions but felt rushed; I had to leave in minutes to make my appointment with Dr. Colaum. I thanked Dr. Bizan for seeing me and started toward the door. As I reached for the knob, I thought of something that seemed important to ask.

“Is there a cause?” I asked, turning back to Dr. Bizan. “Something that causes empty sella?”

Dr. Bizan tilted her head to one side for a moment, thinking. “Primary empty sella is most often caused by obesity. Secondary empty sella,” she said, “can be caused by surgery or”—she dropped her eyes to my file—”by trauma.”

“Oh,” I said.

Dr. Bizan glanced at her phone. “I really do have to go,” she said apologetically.

I nodded and thanked her. “You will be in good hands with Dr. Colaum,” she said, shaking my hand. “Keep me posted on your progress.”

 

I took side
streets back to my house, driving fast. It was already 9:25 AM, and Bill and I had estimated the drive to Evanston would take at least forty minutes. I rounded the corner to our house, parked my car in the garage, and ran around to the front, where Bill was waiting in his car with the engine running.

“The MRI came back positive for empty sella,” I said, once we'd found the main street that would take us north to Evanston.

“Okay,” Bill said, keeping his eye on the cars in front of him. “It's good that we're meeting with the specialists today, then.”

“Dr. Bizan said I have secondary empty sella,” I answered, feeling unable to repeat what she had cited as the cause.

I leaned against the seat and squeezed my eyes shut tightly.

“What is it, hon?” Bill asked, glancing at me and then back out the windshield.

“She said secondary empty sella is caused by trauma,” I said, trying not to cry.

“That makes sense,” Bill said. “Your ovarian cyst was a real trauma.”

I nodded and let out a jagged breath. The surgery had been a horrific experience. I preferred not to think of it and rarely did anymore, usually only when filling out a form that asked, “Have you ever been hospitalized?” Then images of that day would streak to the surface in shards: the metallic taste of adrenaline in my mouth; the excruciating pain; the confusion on the doctors' faces as to what might be wrong, then the palpable shift in the room when they discovered the cyst and rushed me to surgery; being wheeled to the OR, my parents' worried faces bobbing up and down next to me as they ran to keep up with the gurney; an IV drip of Demerol in my arm; an oxygen tube inserted in my nose; a blue protector sheet going up like a laundry sheet—no time for any explanation about what was happening. Counting backward from ten, nine, eight, seven . . . and then blackness.

I woke up after surgery in a private room, still with no clear understanding of what had transpired. I folded myself into the bed, pulled a pillow around my ears, and tried to become as small as possible. The surgeon came by on his rounds and told me about the cyst, that it had ruptured, that it had been a messy ordeal, and that the surgery had lasted six hours. He told me that my ovary had been removed and then, kindly, before I even asked,
told me that what had just happened would not impact my ability to have children. That was when he told me that the human body was miraculous, that I would still have a period every month. That each ovary had more than enough eggs—hundreds of thousands, enough for many lifetimes.

 

I hadn't been
thinking of that trauma, however, since the moment of disclosure in Dr. Bizan's office. When she said the word, my mind offered another exhibit, exhibit A, the memory of which now swam toward me now like a great silvery fish, its belly scales flashing glints of light into the deep, dark water in which it swam.

For so long I had not even really remembered. There were signs: hysterical reactions to hearing about children abused in the news; having difficulty staying in my body during sex; leaving the theater in the middle of a film if there was a rape scene. “It's just a movie,” a boyfriend once said in college. “You act like it's happening to you.”

In England, with an ocean separating me from my birthplace, the memories emerged. In my first acupuncture session, I watched, in full color, my mind reveal those events that I'd known in some dungeon of my mind had transpired, but had not consciously remembered until twenty-seven needles had been stuck into body, opening pathways that now had stories to tell. The acupuncturist had been as surprised at the revelation as I was and hurriedly handed me a business card: Irena Dashani—the therapist I would work with for most of my time in the UK.

As part of my healing, I wanted to name what had taken place in that cold, cement-floored room in our basement and then later what had transpired at a friend's house with her stepfather. If I was going to go back to my family's house at all, I needed to say what had happened there. I thought if I acknowledged it, if my family could bear witness, I could let go, integrate the experience, move on.

The more I was dedicated to my self-discovery, though, the more distant I felt from my family and the more my hope that I would ever have the discussion with them diminished. An opportunity came a few years later, however, during a phone call with my father. He'd called after one of our hotel Christmas visits, saying he'd felt me slipping away like the horizon from a ship.

“I'm not okay with just watching you go,” he said. “What can we do?”

I surprised both him and myself by telling him what I had uncovered in England. I said I wanted to be able to talk about my past with him and my mother.

“I don't feel as if I can talk to Mom about this,” I said. A rule I'd adopted in the family and pledged allegiance to, though unspoken and without verification, had been not to bring up something that would upset her.

I heard silence on the line and the faint echo, the hollow sound sometimes present on international calls, reminding me we lived on separate continents.

“No,” he said. “I don't think it would be a good idea.”

But I told her anyway.

It happened during my next visit, five months later, when I was alone with my parents after returning my sister to medical school. The weather was already hot for May, and my father had cranked up the air conditioner. We drove on a monotonous stretch of highway, tall pine trees and oaks flanking both sides of the road.

“I want to share something—some things—that happened when I was growing up,” I said.

My father kept his eyes on he road. He already knew the basics of what I was about to say. To my knowledge, my parents never kept anything from each other, and yet I had no idea if my father had told my mother what I was about to relate.

When I was six, two older neighborhood boys came over to play in our basement and began a game of Simon Says that turned sexual. When I protested, they forced me to touch them. Afterward, they told me I'd done something very bad, that I wasn't a virgin anymore, and if my parents found out, I'd be sent away, or killed—just like Laurie, a girl on our street who had disappeared suddenly. (I found out later that she was not dead, as they had said, but had been sent to live with her mother in another state. But by then it was too late.)

And two years later, during a sleepover, Courtney, my best friend in the third grade, and I danced in our underwear for her father, who was drunk. I went to use the master bathroom, and he was waiting for me when I came out, naked aside from a yellow bath towel wrapped around his waist. He shut the door behind him. “I'm going to show you what grown-ups do,” he said, carrying me to the bed.

“He raped or molested me—I don't know which,” I said from the back seat of the car, an Oldsmobile sedan my father had taken over from my grandfather when he died. I remembered only snippets from that night: the yellow towel, his arms around me, warm breath on my face, the vastness of the bed. The next clear memory I have is of being back in Courtney's bedroom, she asleep and I pushing her dresser in front of the door and being unable to stop shaking.

For several minutes, neither of my parents spoke. My father's head faced forward, eyes fixed on the road. My mother, too, had remained looking straight ahead in the front seat during my report. I don't think I could have had the conversation had we all been looking at each other, or outside a moving vehicle. I was holding my breath. I watched the back of my mother's head for signs of combustion, but she was as alive as she'd been ten minutes ago before I'd started speaking, her hair puffy from the humidity, her neck that had the same slope as mine. I could hear the tires roll on the road, the whir
of the engine. The blowing sound of the air conditioner. When they finally spoke, they didn't say much. My mother said she wished it hadn't happened.

“How can you forgive something like that?” she asked, keeping her head locked forward, looking at the highway.

“They were probably abused, too,” I said, sharing one of the insights I had come to in my forgiveness work.

“Not them,” she said, still not moving her head. “Us.”

Having the conversation was what I had wanted. I saw no need for further forgiveness. The moment she'd spoken, I'd melted into the seat. I'd spoken of these events, and she hadn't died. Neither of us had.