2012 Map Literary Nonfiction Contest Honorable Mention
10/31/98
I am a cautionary tale. I am the after-school special you tell your college-bound daughter to watch, the pamphlet on drinking/date rape/safe sex you pick up at the university health center. If you work up the nerve to listen to my story, you cannot help but think, Thank G‑d that wasn’t me. Because you would know better, of course.
Would it make a difference if I told you I never drank in high school, that college was the first time I became that girl who was always up for a party? Would I look better to you if I explained that before this, I was never the girl that got the boy; that I was the smart one, never the pretty one? That I was a virgin? How about if I told you I was testing for my purple belt in karate before I quit in high school, that I knew self-defense? That I was a feminist and knew rape was never the victim’s fault and if it ever happened to me, I’d press charges?
Forget it.
Forget all of it.
Because when it actually happens, the impact decimates everything you thought you knew or thought you felt.
Every year on the first of November, I wake up surprised I am still alive. Surprised I have lived through the night, through another anniversary. It never fails; the moment I open my eyes that morning, amazement, then relief, flood my body and I relax into my pillows. I’m not sure why this is; maybe it is the overwhelming importance the day holds, maybe it is the fact that 13 years ago, part of me did die the night of the 31st. I recite the Hebrew Shehechiyanu blessing – Thank you, G‑d, for bringing me to this moment – and get ready for my day.
He had a soccer player’s body – lean, sinewy, muscular, stronger than he looked. His curly hair was the color of milk chocolate laced with golden caramel, and always looked slightly disheveled, like he’d just stretched his way out of bed. It never hung in his eyes, though. His eyes were a startling blue, a Crayola-color blue somewhere between cornflower and periwinkle. Maybe a mixture of both. When he wore his royal blue Patagonia fleece, all you saw were those eyes. He had an easy smile, one that showed off slightly crooked teeth.
A Pre-Med and Biology major, he wanted to be a doctor and was a popular senior fraternity brother. I was a 17 year old college freshman and a little too naïve. I saw him in the library the day after I met him, in a dark-blue, almost black, cotton roll neck sweater. He was carrying Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I loved that. How evolved and sensitive of him, I thought. Maybe this is why my copy of that very book sits in my bag, still unread for Thursday’s class; I cannot bring myself to read the words he lingered over. I have not read Woolf since meeting him.
He never told me to be quiet. But I’ve kept our secret, save for the anonymous report to the school five months later. But even then, I did not share his name. Only his fraternity, which caused enough scandal amongst the 1800 students at the school. No one had ever named a fraternity before in a “Jane Doe” report. Tau Kappa Epsilon. TKE. For the next three years I would not be able to look at those fraternity sweatshirts without my heart racing and a feeling of panic rising in my throat. But I didn’t know that then. How would I find the words to explain that he looked so harmless and sexy in his jeans that sagged from his hipbones, revealing the waistband of his Banana Republic boxers? That I was drunk, he was drunk, and that I still believed in the inherent goodness of people?
In his darkened room, two floors up from the Halloween party, bars of light bounced on the walls through the small slits of the blinds, allowing us to see each other. The floorboards shook from the bass of the music below us, and I could hear fraternity brothers and their girlfriends laughing in the hallway. He pulled me down onto the couch and I asked him if the door was locked, so no one would come in. He went over and locked it. I was straddling him, our lips were touching, and the warmth we created let the beer-soaked saliva and sweat make our skin dewy and damp. His breath filling my lungs, his hands on my hips and his voice, asking me what my intentions were. What are your intentions? A window of escape that I slammed shut with my reply. I did not give the right answer.
He traced a chain of kisses around my neck, dipping down across the top of my chest. As he paused at the crevice at the base of my neck, that shallow curve of skin between my collarbones, his breath tickled me, and I moaned. You like that, he said. Do you like when men kiss you there? And he touched his lips to my body, his tongue leaving traces of damp heat across my skin.
Still kissing him, I suddenly found myself on my back, his weight on mine and those blue eyes above me. Time stopped, it absolutely fucking stopped, while it inexplicably careened ahead. I could not move. My body was so heavy and sank into the cushions of the couch. The cold metal sound of a belt buckle from his “70s pimp” costume unbuckling as he shoved aside the sweatpants of my Sporty Spice costume. In that alcohol-fogged haze, there was a split second – just a moment – of violent clarity as I looked up at the top right-hand corner of the ceiling; oh. So THIS is how it’s gonna go down. This was followed by what I thought for years was resignation – a numbness that paralyzed me and left me stunned. It was not until later, while doing PTSD research for class, I would realize that what I felt was shock. His arms and hands were everywhere all at once – inside me, outside me, his fingerprints marking me for life. I will not ever be able to tell therapists where my arms were. More than twelve years later, I will start remembering more about the assault. These flashbacks will come to me at night, waking me in a panic and leaving my body sore with somatic reminders of the past. I will remember his arms on either side of me with his hands on the side of the couch for leverage, and I will wonder if he had my wrists. I will wish I never started remembering these things.
The morning after, I woke up in my dorm room top bunk bed, my head heavy, my hair smelling like beer, and my mouth dry. In the bathroom, I saw myself in the mirror. I looked the same. I still looked like me. How was this possible? I ignored the poster on the wall about date rape drugs, avoided the bulletpoint list on the inside of the stall door instructing you what to do if you’re raped. Washing my hands, I looked myself in the eye in the mirror and thought, Did that really happen? Really? Are you sure? Maybe he didn’t REALLY mean it. Because things like this don’t happen. Not to me. Not at private colleges plucked from the J.Crew catalog. Not by a boy who smiles at me from across the room. Not at a school where a year’s tuition equals the cost of a BMW.
No one mentioned a thing at breakfast. These girls who had walked back to the dorm with me the night before as I tearfully confided that I simply did not remember everything and that I think something happened, were silent. These are girls with whom I lived, partied and studied. They were my rugby teammates. These are the girls that could not find me the night before, who tried calling the boy’s room – only to figure out years later, when we finally compared accounts of that night, that he had turned the ringer off. But during breakfast, we ate our multi-grain pancakes and cereal and orange juice and planned our next workout. There is a picture of myself with these girls on our way to the gym that afternoon, and when I compare it to pictures of the night before, before we went out, I try to look for a difference. I search my face, my eyes, the way I seem to inhabit my body. I never find anything.
Even then, I was still wonderfully ignorant of the fallout of that night. I sensed I’d crossed a line into an “after” – everything else was “before”, a life that belonged to someone else, another girl I used to be and would no longer recognize. But if I’d known how far-reaching the destruction would be, I would not have been able to accept it. I would not be, as people so optimistically say, a survivor.
Am I, though? What exactly have I survived, and are you sure, in fact, that I have? How are we defining survival? Or do you tout the concept of survivorship so you don’t have to acknowledge the terrifying possibility that maybe surviving wasn’t worth it? So you don’t wonder what it’s like not to have a “first time story” you can share with your girl friends over drinks? Do you affirm my Resilience and Strength so you can go home at night and not think about whether I stay awake, hour after hour, mourning losses of which I am not even fully aware? When you tell me I made all the right choices, that I did what I had to do to survive, is it because you cannot imagine what it is like to have an error in judgment – make one bad choice – and then pay for that every day for the rest of your life? So you don’t have to dwell on the endless questions about why I kept hooking up with him for the next month? Do you wonder why I never named him in the report, even though I think of his name daily – and he has probably long forgotten mine? Do you tell me I am brave because you’d rather not think of me doing all the things I did in order to stay at that school, like nights hooking up with random boys and losing too much weight?
I would gladly trade my “survivor” status for a re-do of that night. I would trade it for almost anything. Because if you knew me before, you might question how much of me really survived. You would sense the fear around men and hear the timidity in my voice. You would notice the distance at which I now stand, the coldness of my manner and my hesitancy in trusting, and I would not be the girl you once knew.
At the time I had no visible bruises, nothing visibly askew. The real damage, the tangible damage, would not be apparent until seven years later in the spring of 2005. He was still the only one with whom I’d had sex. My sex life was not nonexistent, but I drew the line at some point. Well, my body did. It kind of kills the mood when one of you starts getting nauseous or has a panic attack right before that crucial moment. My Pap tests were always erratically abnormal after that Halloween, but they were ASCUS – atypical cells of undetermined significance. Meaning there are abnormal cells with no apparent cause. HPV tests always came back negative, so a biopsy wasn’t necessary, as per the guidelines at the time. At some point, my doctor, knowing my history, did a biopsy. It was the first time that she did not say at the end of the visit, “Everything seems fine!” I knew then that something might be wrong.
I called for the results and had them faxed over to the office, since I worked for my doctor. LSIL. Low-grade squamous intraepithelial lesion. Also known as low-grade dysplasia, or cervical intraepithelial neoplasia I (CIN1). These are abnormal cells that usually revert back to normal within months. My doctor wasn’t concerned, but I was. I had just watched Jennifer, my mentor, go through treatment for advanced breast cancer at the age of 39 and was still shaken up about it. I obtained the slides and sent them to Sloan-Kettering for a second look. They found that the lab had read the slides wrong, and it was at least HSIL, or high-grade intraepithelial lesions (advanced dysplasia, CIN2 or CIN3). They wanted to see me as soon as possible.
Do you know what it is like to be 24 years old and sitting in a waiting room at a top cancer center, surrounded by women who are at least 30 years your senior? I never saw anyone remotely close to my age. Because this wasn’t supposed to happen. That visit to Sloan-Kettering found high-grade dysplasia, and I suddenly found myself in possession of a shiny blue and white plastic MSKCC patient ID card.
Crossing the line from person to patient was an experience, despite Memorial’s best efforts to ease the transition. On the sixth floor, the gyn-onc floor, a wall of clean, clear windows overlook Manhattan, the soothing seafoam green, peach and brown carpet meets the marble tiles near the gold elevators, flat screen plasma televisions perch on the walls and artistically placed waterfalls splash insistently. There is a table stocked with coffee supplies, sucking candies, graham crackers and tea assortments. I usually chose the graham crackers. Miniature refrigerators under the counter hold bottled waters, orange juice, apple juice and ginger ale.
I would often catch the other people in the waiting room staring at me. I should have gotten used to the looks as time went on, but I still felt myself flush when I met their eyes. Many of them assumed I was there for a family member, waiting while she was being examined. After all, I sat there alone with a book, no one sitting nervously beside me or talking about nothing to distract me from the churning in my stomach.
At each visit, I was called back and placed in an exam room, given the standard speech about undressing and the robe, and left alone. The robes are nice; in the summer they were seersucker and in the winter they were cotton thermal. I wondered who it was that accounted for little details like this, and if they realize anyone noticed. I always kept my socks on because they always kept the rooms so cold. I would hop onto the table and pull one of the sheets over my lap. Except these really were blankets, not the flimsy tissue-sized things that pass for covers at a regular gynecologist’s office. This was really the only time I ever felt alone; in that empty, quiet room. This was where it felt like a place for sick people. Except I was…not?
A LEEP was performed to get rid of the cervical carcinoma-in-situ that had somehow evaded detection for so long. This involved slicing off the affected part of the cervix with an electrified wire loop. Complications can involve bleeding, narrowing of the cervix (stenosis) that can cause problems getting pregnant, and – my favorite – an “incompetent cervix” during pregnancy. This is when the cervix is not able to stay closed, increasing the risk of miscarriage and preterm delivery. A LEEP gets rid of the diseased tissue, but the dysplasia can recur in a small amount of patients, necessitating another LEEP or a cold-knife conization, which involves removing a larger, cone-shaped piece of the cervix.
May 20, 2005 was a rainy day in Manhattan. I wore my favorite True Religion jeans, a pale pink Lacoste polo, and carried the new Marc by Marc Jacobs bag I’d bought the week before at Bloomingdale’s. I was eyeing the bag and admiring its buttery-soft blue leather, telling myself I couldn’t afford it as a graduate student. But then I remembered the upcoming surgery and thought to myself, what if the news is bad? Why not buy this bag? So I did. I was sitting in MSKCC’s waiting room with my friends Emily and Jessi, who had insisted on accompanying me. Rob Thomas was playing on the Today Show, and to this day, when I hear “This is How a Heart Breaks,” I am transported right back to that morning.
When I was finally called back, I changed into the robe and sat on the table, reviewing informed consent with the nurse practitioner who was helping my doctor that morning. They started the procedure, and I remember lying on my back on the table and turning my head to the right, and staring out at the gray sky, the raindrops running down the glass windows. A sharp pain literally sliced through me as the nurse grabbed my hand tightly and told me I was doing great. I started shaking uncontrollably; my legs trembled and I broke out into a cold sweat. Another sharp slice and it was done. Monsel’s solution was applied to stop the bleeding, and I was told I could get dressed and go back to the waiting room, and they’d check up on me in a little bit.
Knees wobbling, I slowly walked back into the waiting room, a dull ache starting to spread through my lower back and pelvis. I gingerly sat down on a chair as the room swam around me, and Emily got me graham crackers and orange juice to ease my shaking. The pain soon became unbearable, and she went up to the receptionist and told her what was going on. The nurse brought me back into another room, where I was given more orange juice and told to lie down. I was checked once more, and when I felt stable enough to walk and the shaking calmed, was released once again. With an appointment set up for the next month, we left MSKCC and walked out into the rain.
I was 24 and had my own gynecologic oncologist. I had an oncologist. Because of him. He had given me HPV (despite consistent negative results, my oncologist assumes it is there, causing the dysplasia) and my body cannot fight it off. His cells have taken up residence, altering the landscape of my own cellular makeup. He has marked his territory. We are bound for life.
For six years I’ve endured multiple biopsies, Paps every three months, and dealt with complications from scar tissue that formed post-surgery. Without my family’s knowledge of any of these events, I have paid in nearly every way: emotionally, physically, financially and socially. After every Pap, I wait for my results, mentally planning my course of action in case I get bad news. I am acutely aware of the sword of Damocles that hangs above my head, just out of sight. When going over my health history with new doctors, I silently sit through their safer sex talk when they hear I’ve had a LEEP. I’m not that kind of girl, I want to say. I never would have had unsafe sex. But I don’t. My body has become something to contend with; I now know it is capable of betrayal.
Despite what well-meaning people tell me, I think some kinds of damage are irreparable. Not everything that is broken can be put back together again. At least, not in the way it once was. Some cracks are not able to be sealed. They stubbornly stay open, letting pain and grief flow through – sometimes a deluge, other times, barely a trickle. Sometimes you fall into these cracks and manage to pull yourself out before you drown. Or sometimes, you fall and simply let the current carry you.
Glen. His name is Glen.
Katie Kohler is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University.
