Teratoma
by Veirs Tallis
When stomach pains sent me to the hospital for an emergency operation, I learned that my female plumbing had scrapped together a golf ball-sized tumor that when sliced open showed signs of human design. The hospital staff presented it to me bisected and floating in ether, long mousy hairs dragging from the center in it like seaweed on a manatee’s tail. Inside its beige interior, I counted six small teeth and spotted a seventh crowded against one large tooth. In a moment of joy, I realized that the crowded little tooth looked like the one in the center of my own face. I had not only been capable of creating a scrap of life with no interference, but I had even managed to create a family resemblance.
“You’ve got a talent for these,” the nurse said. “It’s called a dermoid cyst. There were three others on your ovary, but this was the biggest one. Might want to change birth control to avoid growing more of these, they’re highly dependent on artificial hormones.”
“I want a high-hormone, low testosterone pill,” I told my OBGYN at the earliest appointment I could possibly get with her.
“Are you sure? Most girls say the hormones make them feel nuts. You might enjoy a low-hormone IUD.”
“Oh, well, I’m allergic to copper.”
“You might try a Depo shot, that’s pretty high hormone,” she said, not looking up from her laptop. “It’s literally a shot of progestin you take every 90 days.”
I hesitated. “How long would that take to kick in?”
“Oh, it works instantly. I can double-check, but I also think it’s fully covered by your health insurance. You’ve got a good plan.” She finally looked up.
“Um…. Could I get a prescription for a high-hormone birth control too? Just in case it didn’t work out?”
“Sure.” She was already standing and fiddling around a drawer for rubber gloves. “Just don’t take the pills until the window of time between your shots is over.”
I didn’t even wait to leave the CVS before I stuffed three pills into my mouth like candy.
Those first 90 days were memorable. After the Depo shot, the pain was so bad in my arm that I took a painkiller and went to sleep for a whole weekend. I woke up Monday with two hard pimples the size of frog eyes on my chin. The nausea was something else entirely, and even romanticizing it as morning sickness didn’t help. As those first 30 days progressed, I gained clogged pores, a tweaker’s edginess, and perpetually swollen breasts. Near the end of the month, I tore into a Costco supply of NuvaRings I obtained from a second gynecologist outside my network.
Waiting in the OBGYN for my second Depo shot, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror some nurse had hung near the coats. I saw an unmistakable natal roundness in my lower abdomen. Certainly no one would have thought I was pregnant, but it might not be long now until they did.
In my sixth month of this experiment, I found myself drawing eyes on every surface I could drag a pen across: large eyes fat with tears, fanned with bovine lashes, and alluringly lidded. In my dreams, I was pursued by them the way princesses are flocked by woodland creatures. Large wet eyes landed on my outstretched fingers like birds and snaked around my ankles like cats. In month eight, my dreams were only of water and I knew something was awake in my womb. In these deep dreams, the thing and I would find each other and swim in the drifting dark together, talking without words and drinking each other.
In the grocery store, an older woman looked past my hormonal chin explosions and eye bags to put her hand encouragingly on my crescent gut. “Boy,” she insisted, grinning. I smiled warmly, touched the space above my eye and then the space above hers. We both laughed.
My due date was when the pain became excruciating enough. “Are you pregnant?” the nurse taking my vitals asked, staring hard at my stomach when I said no. They took a blood sample from me anyway, baffled when it came back negative. “Honey, you must have a watermelon in there,” one nurse said, shaking her head as she pulled my gurney into the operating theater.
I counted down with the anesthesiologist. I had long ago made peace with the fact that I wouldn’t be awake for the main event, but I was still giddy for the delivery. “See you soon,” I said to the room of inattentive, fretting professionals before retreating down into myself.
The surgeon was sawing now, holding the cyst by a full head of hair while he dragged the scalpel back and forth across the largest cyst in the history of the hospital. Beneath the cut was a layer of pure white. Eventually, the cyst popped with an enormous sudden give. The flaps retracted. The cyst, a little startled, blinked.
Veirs Tallis is a hobbyist writer living in Washington, D.C. She received her B.S. in Psychology from Villanova University. When she is not writing and working, she keeps bees at a Victorian garden cemetery in D.C. She can be found on Twitter @Veirsly or via email at tallisveirs@gmail.com.