Two Percent Chance of Extreme Agony
Lily Lechler
The first hint something is wrong is the episodes in which I wake up writhing unable to speak. The second is when the bleeding won’t stop. I still wait three months to tell anyone. Insurance companies are cruel and fickle things.
When you get an IUD, they read you your vaginal Miranda Rights. One is a two percent chance of expulsion. An IUD expulsion sounds like the device ejects itself, a fighter pilot hitting the parachute button. This is inaccurate. It’s actually the device deciding to wander. It can twist, scrape, perforate. It can embed, stab, rip. It can do all this and a plethora of other violent words. None of them are things I want happening inside me, inside my womb. All I want in my uterus is inaction and silence. The most violent word the IUD can decide to be? “Ineffective.”
The speculum is cold, and shoved abruptly inside. It spreads me open like a a coin purse about to be rooted around in. I have not been sedated. The nurse looks at me and softly says that I can curse, scream, cry, wail, pass out, everything but please don’t kick them in the face. She assures me childbirth is worse. My doctor nods and rubs her round belly absentmindedly. Then she sits between my legs.
Glorified pliers plunge into me. Both the IUD and my silent screams are wrenched from my body. I smell copper and latex and tears. I push against the stirrups of the table. My body twists searching for escape. The lengths I go to not have kids.
Just as the pain subsides enough for me to open my eyes, my doctor returns. I didn’t know she left. In her palm is a little T-shaped piece of metal with a string. It looks like a minimalist charm of a fallopian tube. It looks small, and cruel, and I cannot leave without it.
We take the plunge inside me. The screams aren’t silent this time. I can’t stop the convulsing, or the cursing, or the screams for my mother. I focus on not kicking my pregnant gynecologist. My body does not want to be alive.
It’s done. I can feel it between my hips, an intrusion in the deepest part of me. Pain pulses into my vision.
My doctor stands up. She’s saying something. All I catch through the pulsing haze is that two percent has gone up to 20.
Lily Lechler grew up for most of her childhood in NYC, before moving to Louisiana as a teenager. Her work often deals with emotional vulnerability, sexuality, and mental illness, specifically Bipolar Disorder. She is currently writing and working in New Orleans. @Lilylechler