I realize it's been just shy of a year since I posted Part I.  I honestly don't know why it took me this long to post Part II.

PART II

Two weeks after that afternoon, I felt well enough to have sex with my boyfriend.  Feeling my uterus contract for pleasurable reasons was amazing, even if my cervix did feel a little tender upon penetration.  But we needed to reconnect and anyway the bleeding had slowed to a dot and the cramping was pretty much gone.  I felt safe with the outcome.  The physical agony of that afternoon was already far away and foggy, even if I was still having tearful jags every other day.

I guess I could have predicted what would happen next, given that at the one-week follow-up exam at the abortion clinic, the nurse practitioner told me I still had a lot of clots in my uterus, and told me to massage my uterus firmly for ten minutes a day.  To demonstrate the firmness required she essentially punched me in the gut and proceeded to work her clenched hand into my uterus as though she were kneading a challah.  I thanked her and left, knowing she was probably right, but not wanting to endure ten minutes a day of using my belly as a speed bag. 

So when I think about it now and why it may have happened, I’m not surprised.  I was driving down the highway in a rental car from JFK airport to upstate New York to visit family, having flown out from California that morning.  Everything was fine, the boyfriend was beside me, I had inserted a Nuvaring the day before to get re-started on birth control.  I felt a trickle, then a rush of fluid.  Looking down, I saw that the crotch of my pants was completely soaked through in blood.   I calmly pulled the car over onto the shoulder.  “Babe,” I said, “I think I’m hemorrhaging.”

A commando-style in-the-car clothing change later, we was back on the road, trying for the life of me to figure out whether we needed to really freak out and go to the ER or to just let it pass and see how much blood I was really going to lose.  We opted for the latter.  After all, I couldn’t imagine bleeding out from the vagina.  It seemed ludicrous to me that I could become so anemic that I would need fluids and a transfusion.  I didn’t feel symptomatic so I just left it alone.

Looking it up on the Internet later on, I found that women often have hemorrhagic bleeding when clots and other tissue failed to expel during the abortion.  Bleeding is a way of pushing them out.  Lo and behold, I passed a lot of clots that day.

Slowly over the next few weeks a pattern established itself.  I would have minimal bleeding, minimal cramping for a few days and then BAM!  A huge gush of fluid would burst out of my vagina and I would pass three or four large, black clots. 

At first I rationalized it.  OK, I didn’t massage my uterus like they told me to, etc.  My boyfriend either didn’t have an opinion or kept it to himself, as he never told me what he thought I should do, nor did he ever freak out like it was abnormal.

But then it started to happen at work.  I could never predict it completely, so I had to wear giant phone-book style protection all the time, which annoyed me.  Around the third week of this pattern, I called the abortion provider’s hotline.  They scheduled me to go to a clinic in my neighborhood that Saturday for another follow-up to figure out what was going on.  I had to stay NPO after midnight since I might need surgery.

That Saturday morning I showed up to the clinic at 8 o’clock.  It was already packed with people.  There are a lot of people getting abortions on the weekend!  The abortion business must be very lucrative minus the overhead for security.  Anyway, at this particular clinic I didn’t encounter any protesters.  The boyfriend went off to the farmer’s market at my bidding—I didn’t want this post-abortion mess to waste anymore of our precious time, and I wanted to feel that after this was over at least I’d have a fridge full of fresh produce. 

At first they had no idea why I was there.  They made me repeat the urine test and the blood test, even though I told them it was unnecessary, I wasn’t there for an “abortion,” but whatever.  I was already familiar with the cattle-call ways of this group of clinics and the completely impersonal treatment at this clinic in a richer, whiter area of town was no different. 

When I finally was seen by the nurse practitioner, I asked her point-blank—“Do you know why I’m here?”  She was taken aback, scanned the chart she was holding in her hands, and finally looked back up at me defeated—“well, you’re here for a termination?” she asked tentatively. 

I shot back “No.  I’m here because I have been having hemorrhagic bleeding over the past three weeks.  I had the medical abortion five weeks ago.”

She lubed up the probe and scrolled around with the ultrasound trackball.  “Yup,” she said.  “You have a lot of clots and blood still in there.  You’re going to need surgery.  Have you had anything to eat or drink today?”

It hit me like a ton of bricks even though I saw it coming from a mile away. I got up and changed into a gown.  Of course I couldn’t keep my underwear or wear a tampon, so I asked for some protection and was aghast when they handed me a humongous pad attached to a thong belt.  It looked like something my mother would have worn in junior high.

They led me into a surgical suite that looked about as sterile as a two-car garage.  I swear there was sawdust on the floor.  There was a huge lamp giving off a ton of heat and a stainless steel table.  The table had a plastic chux where my lower half would be, but the rest of it was uncovered.  The CNA told me to get up on the table and lay back.  She spread my legs wide open and put them in the stirrups and drew back my gown (which opened in the front) so that I was completely naked and totally exposed without any draping.  This was how I was laid out when the medical team walked in.

The guy to my right put a butterfly needle in my anticubital vein.  I sat up a little to take a look and he warned me to not bend my arm.  They asked me if I had any questions for the doctor.  I said, “How did this happen?  I feel like I should have just had the surgical procedure to begin with.”  The doctor, an older gentleman, smiled sympathetically and said, “Yup, about 30% of the abortion pill procedures end this way.”  I was stunned.  No one had quoted me stats like that at any point in this process.

10, 9, 8, … and then I woke up freezing cold and in terrifying pain.  I cried out in fear and then I just sobbed.  Three staff members walked by me without so much as a glance.  Someone gave me a box of tissues and instructed me to get up.  I said, “I don’t think I can yet, I’m in too much pain, I might fall.”  This was met with the scoffed reply, “Oh, you’re not going to fall, just walk over here to this chair and have some orange juice.”  I got up from the gurney slowly and made my way over to a chair.  There was a pitcher of orange juice and some saltines on a table.  The CNA nodded at the orange juice—“Go ahead, get yourself some juice.”

I poured orange juice all over the table accidentally because I was so shaky and got a look of exasperation from the staffer.  She thrust a packet of pills my way and said, “Take these.”  I asked what they were.  She said “Motrin.”  I asked what strength.  She sighed audibly, rolled her eyes, and said “400.”  I took them and the packet and got up to go to the lockers to get the fuck out of there.