Seduction and Sedation
By Alexandra McManus
Illustration by Diana Hernandez
Lying on my back, I am struck by how similar his bed feels to the sterile surface of an operating room table. There is no bright light hovering above me, but instead the streetlight outside lights his room with a soft glow. It also casts the shadows of trees onto his ceiling, an x-ray-like projection. With it being 3 am, the world is quiet except for the occasional hum of a car driving by. When we do speak, we are whispering. A cool mountain breeze that I’ve never felt before creeps through his cracked window and trickles down the wall onto us like a sedative fog. The chill makes his room seem purified, like a waiting room.
We are two strangers undressing, entangling, and stumbling over our words as well as each other. I remark on a tattoo of his I hadn’t noticed, he compliments my curly hair. This is an attempt to fastrack a friendly repertoire despite just a few hours of knowing one another. His hands are in my hair, his lips on my neck, while my eyes gaze around the room trying to learn what I can. A plant hangs from the ceiling, with a tag still stuck to its container. Based on a couple of cardboard boxes in the corner and a few framed posters leaning against different spots on the wall, I guess that he just moved. When I ask, he looks around as if he hadn’t noticed his change in address, and in a chit chat voice inquires where I think he should put his desk. This sidebar is a brief shift in tone, and when he giggles and snaps back to the task at hand, I’m reminded of a conversation with my pre-op nurse this summer.
“Full recovery takes about four to six weeks to allow for internal healing. Do not lift, push or pull any heavy objects for a few weeks. Do not resume sexual intercourse until your doctor says it is okay … oh, do you go to OU? Sorry, I just noticed your tote bag! My niece goes there, she’s a sophomore and she just rushed tri-delt, any chance you know her?”
“I don’t think so. I’m a senior. What’s her major?”
“Marketing, her name is Meghan,” the nurse answered. She had been friendly and peppy all morning, but now spoke with genuine eagerness. We’ve briefly exited the confines of our otherwise standardized conversation. I met her eyes and actually wished that I could tell her yes.
“Mmh, no I don’t think I do. Is she enjoying Norman? I’m dreading graduation.”
“Oh, she loves it!” she answers cheerily, but her focus returns to her clipboard. There are two beats of silence before she resumes informing me about where the surgeon will make incisions on my abdomen. Our chat has concluded. Two people can’t jabber about professors and hidden gems on campus when one person is in scrubs and the other is in a thin, itchy paper gown. In sex and surgery, only so much small talk is respectable and appropriate.
In that hospital I didn’t get anesthesia until right before the act, but tonight I am mentally tallying up my drinks as we begin ours; an Aperol Spritz, a vodka Redbull, a couple Modelos with lime … I find that in my bubbly state, in this guy’s bed, my memories of the surgery and my perception of the present blur.
He’s asking about my having an overnight stay, and we decide that it is the soundest decision. We will continue to monitor my condition in the morning. For now though, I’m fit for operation. Currently I’m not fighting my sedation, although I can’t recall whether it’s from an anesthesia face mask or liquor.
I look up at him and see that one front tooth is slightly crooked over the other, and I remember my surgeon’s was too. He’s just as kind as she was, reassuring me and checking in to see how I’m doing. In both of these nights spent with strangers, trusting my health in the hands of another, I feel stuck inside my body. Right before surgery, when I first laid down on the operating table, I had started crying and hyperventilating. The nurses were sweet, but even when they put something in my IV to calm me down, I couldn’t get a grip. I had never been so aware of how flesh and blood I was. I knew I would be fine, my surgeon had informed me there was a very small chance of any serious complications. People get surgery every day, and I knew that, but I was feeling an overwhelming resentment towards my own body. Already it had turned on me, allowed something to grow and shift my insides, and now these strangers had to shut my brain off for an hour or so and poke around inside it.
I apologized over and over for being so melodramatic. The nurses above my head, who looked upside down from my point of view, nodded gently as I tried and failed to excuse my own still-streaming tears. “I just wasn’t expecting all this, I was just out shopping with friends … I’m sorry I don’t know what my issue is … all those ultrasounds just sucked and reminded me of highschool … I start my last semester of college next week … I just got myself so worked up while waiting out there.”
“It’s okay honey, in a couple minutes you’ll just take a few deep breaths and it’ll be like a blink and you’ll wake up and it’ll be over,” one nurse told me, resting her hand on my shoulder. I apologized again, but couldn’t stop crying. I didn’t know how to explain that for years I had been telling doctors of my pain, but it had not been taken seriously. When I would describe cramps that left me curled up in a ball on the ground, unable to walk a few more feet to my bed, I was advised to take Tylenol for pain. Told not be alarmed unless there were multiple clots bigger than the palm of my hand. When I was seventeen, I had tried to bring up how painful sex was to one gynecologist, but she reminded me that the Bible had deemed premarital sex a sin. Each month I got better at framing the torment as a nuisance, and gave up trying to determine a cause.
How did I explain to these incredibly patient nurses that my memories of girlhood were colored in pain, in embarrassment, in fear that there was something wrong and simultaneously, a sense of self doubt? That the guilt I had carried from sneaking around with an early boyfriend felt like a lump in the pit of my stomach, and all that time one had actually been manifesting? For years I had wondered if the monthly pain was deserved in some way, either due to my actions or based on that preteen intuition that you’re weirder than everyone else. This evidence was a light at the end of the tunnel and proof that I had been in one. I had grown up with a golf ball-sized mass no one had taken notice of, got instructed to take Tylenol for the pain that must have been diagnosed as teenage dramaticism, and was left to make my peace with it.
The very last time my pain was snubbed was two weeks before the surgery. While shopping with a couple friends, I felt a pressure inside me so severe. My panicked friends drove me to the ER and helped me inside. Later I would get embarrassed that they had heard me screaming in the back of the car, groaning and dry-heaving as I came in and out of consciousness. They gave the front desk a rundown, but as soon as “cramps” were mentioned, the nurse began the usual “There’s not much we can do…”
At that moment I passed out again and collapsed onto the waiting room floor. For what seemed like the first time, my pain was taken seriously. They realized my blood pressure had bottomed out and I was admitted. Interestingly, my pain had subdued when I hit the ground. Hours of tests and waiting later, a doctor told me that what I experienced that afternoon was ovarian torsion. My ovary had gotten twisted around my newly discovered gold-ball sized cyst, cutting off blood supply. She explained that the size of my cyst was uncommon and the torsion was even more rare. Pointing to my scans on the wall, she wondered aloud how no one had caught it when I was growing up. She went on to say that the most baffling part was that when I fell in the waiting room, I knocked it back into place myself. Her and a few other doctors had been looking over my scans and estimated that I had only a minute or two left before I would’ve lost the ovary.
“This is the first time I’ve seen ovarian torsion in my fifteen years of practice. I've heard that it can be more painful than labor. There’s a bunch of staff out there looking at your scans and talking about how crazy it is that you got it back into place yourself. Normally you need emergency surgery to do that. You don’t seem phased though?” I nodded along as she went over everything, but to answer her question, I could only shrug.
It seems that girlhood is almost defined by a sense, or a suspicion, that there is something inside us that is wrong. With my ER doctor and surgical nurses, I couldn’t find the words for my budding realization that any girl who bled through her pants in a crowded middle school hallway, who had a boy grab at her because he could, who scrubbed her face raw trying to erase blemishes, whose new bra straps were gossipped about, who had been coerced into acts she didn’t even yet understand, who stole her mother’s mascara for picture day, who got dress coded at school, who tried in vain to wear lipstick in order to distract from her braces, who caught old men staring at her legs, whether or not she realized it, already had familiarity with the feeling of being under the knife. Girlhood is that binding vulnerability.
The end of my girlhood was neatly bookended with the removal of my cyst. Now twenty-two and a little drunk with a boy, the feeling resurfaces but it’s no longer threatening. This vulnerability needed for our night together is something I agreed to.
In this present moment, he is tracing my tan lines with his fingers when he feels the raised skin of two scars on my lower abdomen. Each one is about an inch inside my hips, making a triangle with my belly button. They are still a little red, even months later. His face softens and he looks up at me.
“Oh sorry, do those hurt?”
“No, you don’t need to worry about those” I insist, looking at his book shelf rather than meeting his eyes. “Sorry, I actually had surgery a couple months ago. I’m all good now though. They’re just scars from that.”
He chuckles. “You don’t have to apologize for having surgery.”
“No I know, I just mean I’m sorry about the scars, I know they’re not very cute.”
This time he really laughs and rolls his eyes. “They’re not even bad! Believe me, your scars are the last thing I’m thinking about right now. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t hurting you.”
My face feels hot and all I can do is let out a nervous laugh. They really are tiny scars, but he’s the first guy to see them. The two of us haven’t discussed our last names, but we’ve established that my scars aren’t something to feel shameful about. He notices I’m still a bit flustered, and gently but deliberately grazes them again before leaning in to kiss me. I note his good bedside manner.