Alas, I am empty. What a relief. Sin of all sins and the great emptiness of the Universe flows back through me.
***
I run for my life to find the location of this clinic. “Everywoman’s”, one of five in this province, half a block away from my basement rental suite, eviction date looming, but at the top of sterile sets of stairs that are endless and unfamiliar. I have never needed to go inside before. The disturbingly efficient, monotone voice on the phone told me that five or ten minutes of tardiness would be the end of me – I would have to have this thing inside me longer, and this thing makes me weaker by the day, demanding resources from a body that has none to spare. Chris struggles to follow my haphazard running, my haphazard thinking, and tears of frustration and fear pour from my eyes until we find ourselves at a door with a buzzer, and are asked to show government issued photo I.D. to a security camera. Chris tells these technological devices, the woman behind the curtain, that he didn’t know it was a crime to have an abortion. The woman asks me to hold my passport nearer to the camera before buzzing us in.
I am slightly less phased, as seven years ago, on the other side of this continent, there was bullet-proof glass and immediate payment in cash was demanded. When I entered the Morgentaler Clinic it was a skeleton of a vision I imagined from the now distant past. Twenty women sitting in institutional style chairs waiting for their number to be called. Everywoman’s waiting room is large and inviting – couches and wicker loungers, pro-choice literature litters the area, and one other couple sits on the opposite side of the room, quietly examining the laminated sheet describing the experience one can expect in the clinic and the medications offered to relieve any trauma that the medical procedure, described as a “therapeutic abortion” on the receipt which I am handed, may potentially cause. In this province the money I hand over, this time mediated by plastic, which gives me a sense of greater legitimacy for some reason, a sense that I am not doing something underworldly, will be refunded. I try not to stare at the attractive Asian couple as we wait. God knows what their fathers would think if they knew their children were sitting in this place. God knows what mine would think. But I am reassured by the fact that my partner in sin sits next to me as well this time, that we love each other, and that the laminated sheet promises that he will be able to be in the room during the procedure. I ask him several times if he is willing to do so, and each time the answer is yes, but somehow I forget, and he becomes increasingly discomforted each time I ask. “Are you deaf?” “No, baby, I’m just scared. I’m not thinking straight. I’m sorry.” Our pre-op exchange ends here, as I am called in to speak with a counselor before my “treatment” begins. I leave the comfort of the waiting room to find appearances, as usual, are deceiving. Why this always comes as a surprise will bother me for days, until the next time I suppose, the next time I sit on a couch in the waiting room of a clinic serving clients for some other “medical” need, and the circle completes itself once again.
The counselor’s office is also spacious and couch-filled but the relentless toothy smile on her face removes the element of comfort. I guess I can be tricked more easily by spaces than faces. A clipboard with a checklist. Yes, I am sure that I want to have an abortion. No, I am not being pressured by my partner to have an abortion. Yes, I have had an abortion before. Yes, I have tried several methods of “birth control”. No, I have not been satisfied with any of these methods. My biggest concern? The procedure itself, and that Chris will be in attendance. Yes, I am on the following medications. No, I do not wish to view the pregnancy tissue after the procedure. The counselor hands me a napkin with two stale cookies in it and a glass cup of ginger ale to consume as she goes over what I have checked off and what I haven’t. She offers two suggestions, first handing me a blue handout describing a method of birth control I have never heard of before – “Quinacrine Sterilization”. The smile never leaves her face, never changes shape, and I wonder if botox was administered to keep it that way. The smile explains this very effective method of permanent female sterilization that involves several malaria pills being inserted into the uterus through the cervix. “No anesthetic required.” A method discovered in Africa to stop overpopulation, convenient because of a surplus of malaria pills which just happen to guard not only against a disease carried by mosquitoes, but form permanent scar tissue in the fallopian tubes, blocking eggs from flowing down to the uterus. I am horrified, but know it is in my best interest to seem extremely interested in the possibility of my cervix being opened once again, to be filled with quinacrine tablets. Next suggestion, that I begin taking anti-psychotics again. Note that this counselor has no medical training, but feels it is her right to examine the list of psychiatric medications I take and make recommendations. Since I stopped taking anti-psychotics and realized that I had been involuntarily subjected to a chemical lobotomy from age nineteen to twenty-four, every clinician I see tries to convince me to put the straightjacket back on. Yet I did not expect this at an abortion clinic. I start into the script I have had to formulate for these interactions. “No, I have been on Olanzipine, Seroquel, Risperidone, Clozapine…I will never ingest another anti-psychotic again. These pills made me lethargic and I found them to be [indeed] equivalent to a chemical lobotomy.” Usually this shuts said clinician up, but this one is especially enthusiastic. She suggests crushing up a Seroquel tablet before bed each night, licking my finger, and placing a “tiny amount” of the powder on my tongue. Perhaps if I had been in a wittier mood I would have asked if I could snort the powder through a straw instead, and if this is what she does as a bedtime ritual. No time or energy for wit. Get me out of here. “No thanks.” “Okay, any other questions?” “My partner will be called in soon, right?” “Yes, right away.” “And what kind of medication will you provide for the cramping?” “You will have to discuss that with the doctor.”
Time to change into a loose fitting skirt with an African design printed on it. Coincidence? Bizarre. “Attach a pad to your underwear, slip it in the pocket of the skirt, place your personal belongings in this plastic bin.” There is still room for some wittiness. “Just like at the airport, hey?” The smile finally moves, “I never thought of that before!!!” What an epiphany. I follow these instructions and am led into “OR1”.
Two white ativan tablets are placed under my tongue as a nurse has me sit at the end of the operating table and prepares an I.V. “You will be given fentanyl, which is, like, 1000 times more powerful than morphine. Like, 99.9% of women simply fall asleep or only remember my face.” Chris is still absent, and after she comments on the scars on my forearms – “When did you do this, honey? You did it the right way, huh? You read too much, don’t ya!” – I ask if he can be brought in. She returns to tell me that he is no longer in the waiting room, but she will go back to get him in a few minutes. I have a few minutes to take note of the features of “OR1”. The first thing I observe is that several panels are missing from the ceiling, and a plastic sheet is fluttering in the December air that perhaps once shielded the room from the elements, but no longer serves any purpose, except perhaps to instill some ironic sense of “American Beauty”. Yeah, right. This is a medical facility. The grey sky is the only beauty that can be seen from the table. Directly below the missing ceiling panels is the abortion machine, a device that immediately reminds me of the artifact I once found in the “arts and crafts closet” of a psychiatric ward in Winnipeg – “The Konvulsulator” – a portable electroshock “therapy” device. The dirty beige plastic encasing is identical, as are the analog dials and knobs, labeled with numbers in an ancient font from an era before the computer materialized. On top of the device is a large cylindrical tube. I assume this is where my “pregnancy tissue” will be excreted. I look around the rest of the room. Large and empty. Dull blue tile flooring, a drain in floor in the middle of the room. One wall lined with standard issue formica institutional cabinets. One shelf lined with little dark orange-brown vials that also look like they belong in a museum, one of the pharmaceutical museums in Eastern Europe that I researched during the summer. This whole room should be a fixture in a museum. The door opens and I can almost see Chris’s black cowboy hat and shining eyes – but no. In comes the nurse, now accompanied by the doctor. I immediately ask her about the cramping concerns and she mutters something about it being the responsibility of my GP. I expected this answer, as the previous day my GP ensured me that this would surely be taken care of at the clinic. One last time, “Can Chris be brought in now?” “There was a line to get in at the door and he left.” The I.V. is started. I see the doctor, who will not look past my exposed vagina, hold up a phallic device I am familiar with – the always enjoyable “internal ultrasound”. Then I feel the familiar pinch of the needle, freezing my cervix with dental anaesthetic. What comes next is unexpected. Last time I lay in a room like this I was told when the procedure would begin. Suddenly I feel my uterus being violently stabbed. It feels like I am being fucked through my cervix with a vacuum, like it is being removed each time some “pregnancy tissue” is sucked out and then penetrated again. I moan loudly eight times, once with each stab. “I’m turning the fentanyl up to 150!” The nurse sounds panicked. I realize that I am one of 0.001 women who does not fall asleep, who will remember each detail of this procedure. I realize that the room is not likely soundproof, and that I am scaring the fuck out of the other ladies lined up in chairs and beds outside waiting for their turn to be fucked/unfucked. I continue to moan, not doing so is not possible, I apologize ladies, as I accept the experience and wait for it to be over. When it is, the doctor scurries out of the room before she can see my face, and the nurse removes the pad and underwear from the skirt pocket and helps me into them.
I continue to moan as I am led to the chair where a heating pad is waiting for me. I ask for Chris again. As soon as I see my love’s face, his jacket, his eyes, his beard, the safety of his frame, his kaleidoscopic aura, my body gives in to the drugs. I can hardly hold my eyes open as he kisses me and comforts me. The sound of his voice, my favourite sound, my favourite sound. I describe what has taken place in his absence and we analyze this place, talking full speed. Only my eyelids are non-functional. A new nurse quickly feeds me two Tylenol number threes. “Are you ready to go and get changed, or do you need five more minutes?” “Five more minutes.” And I’m sure precisely five minutes pass before the curtain is thrust open and this time I am not offered a choice. There is confusion about where Chris should wait for me, so he chooses to go outside, I will meet him there. I hurry into the change room, well, limp, hurriedly, into the change room. I check to make sure the pad is not soaked with an alarming amount of blood (a chart on the wall indicates what amount of blood is normal with a spectrum of black and white images of soaked pads) and rush to get dressed, to collect my belongings from the bucket, just like at the airport – “they” want me to move it along, I want to get past this checkpoint as fast as possible after being violated by a man or a woman holding some kind of wand, the design of which is in my best interest, of course.
I exit the room and follow the clearly posted signage to lead me backwards through the maze. No one wishes me well on my way out, though for some reason I find it necessary to attempt to smile and wave at the receptionist. No acknowledgement, I am a ghost now. I see Chris’s back as I stand at the top of a staircase, windows and door below. Why was this place so hard to find?
I exit and breathe the fresh air and look at the grey sky from a new perspective. The same grey sky, the same beauty. Chris leads me home and I pass out for an hour that feels like five. Now come the visions of faces, a nurse’s face? I don’t remember. I awake to the pain I was worried about and we are thrust into the next battle. Four hours later we manage to acquire ten Tylenol #3s, but not without being accused of being “drug seekers”, not without Chris putting a pharmacist in his/her place and thus being banned from the pharmacy, not without the pharmacist calling me to give me this all-important announcement about his “disruption to ‘our’ store”.
Aftermath. Illusory numbness. Denouement not yet in sight.
