A timely glimpse into the real-life situation of a pediatrician caught in the crosshairs of politics and morality.

 

I looked on in silence. It was in the middle of the day’s rush and I was in a daze.  I glanced across the room, and she was sitting in a chair hunched over and scared.  Her big, brown eyes seemed to quiver looking as though she was caught between wonderment and confusion.  She had just told me that she was pregnant, though I thought that she had come in to see me that day for some other reason.  She had entered the room and talked of wanting to be proactive, maybe discussing prophylactics, and I had opened the world to her.  I spoke to her with empathy and guidance as I was trained to do, gave her choices untold, and offered her control- if that was at all possible.  Now I stood between sheer horror and grappling with the impending intimacy of the pause in our conversation.                                                              

 

I told her a story of a tale as old as time, a penetration so deep that it caused millions of cells to catapult and collide, bursting into new life and dividing exponentially into reality, second by second.  I spoke of the necessity of maturity to enter into this activity, I described in painstaking detail the effects that it could have on her body, and how her youth could hinder any possibility of the potential of a future productive and healthy new life.  How it was always her choice, but, that she should wait to ever consider jumping off of this precipice into unmanned territory. 

 

She smiled in response, her eyes lit up with joy that she could be freed from the burden of womanhood for a second.  She seemed relieved as she sighed to me an easy thank you.  And I obliged.  My heart leaped for a moment knowing that I had hopefully saved another one of my patients from a current fate worse than death, something that they could not mathematically, economically, or emotionally make sense of at the same time. My chest swelled a little.  I began to float with the thought of a medical care plan, something that we could proactively put into action to deter future suffering.  I turned to leave the room and was stopped by the words,

 

“But, I forgot to mention one thing… The test was positive.”

 

Positive…Positive.  I stopped in my tracks as my head whirled a million miles an hour and I sighed in dismay.  I couldn’t help but look on in disbelief.  This girl, who had just a minute ago come in with barrettes clicking through her plaits that hung and swung around her chubby face which had now slimmed down to reveal the beauty of impending adulthood… this girl had somehow switched into some other cataclysmic dimension from which she would never be able to come back from.  Even if I took her hand, she would be in a realm that was unknown to anyone but herself.  I could not help her maneuver and could only give her the information about what that path would look like.

 

The biggest problem that I faced was- how could I communicate with her when she didn’t have the words.  She had new life inside of her, there were so many parts to her body that she had come to realize in this past year, as she had been exposed to the feelings and the embrace of adult actions, she did not have the words to describe what her body was doing and why her body was doing it.  She had no idea about sex, only what little she had been told by her family and figured out in silly videos, a pose, a pout, to remain silent while her boyfriend and she explored and celebrated each other, all the while not knowing the implications of not using anything to protect herself.  She was at once a perfect contradiction and a perfect candidate in the system.

 

She did not possess the knowledge nor the experience to navigate.  She did not know how to tell him to wear something through their time together nor did she know that even him pulling away and then coming back in posed a threat to her future productivity.  Her dreams and hopes were essentially dashed.  I tried my very best not to cry. 

 

Her face was a little downcast with her eyes floating like two saucers sliding along the ice, darting every which way intermittently. This is the process, I told myself, trust the process. But so many people had gone through the same thing.  I said my best words and gave in-depth explanations, only to have mothers preemptively storm the room and demand that their daughter “just get the shot”.  Some women told me that their daughters didn’t have the right to make decisions for their own bodies and that I, as an agent of the State, needed to do better than to not let her make the choice and just blindly give her whatever I wanted to give her. 

 

“She doesn’t know what she’s doing, just give it to her”  they ordered. 

 

There was something halting in the movement of her skin, butter pecan brown with thin, taut fingers that struggled to remain relaxed, though she couldn’t stop tapping her foot in anticipation of what I was going to say next.  “Have your parents ever talked to you about sex?”  I asked.  She told me that they had tried in the past and ended up with frustrated sighs and long pauses, fatigue growing staler by the minute as her mother tried to refer to the importance of the discussion.  She wanted to tell her own daughter that long ago, she was wanted and the impetus of every dream to be untold for over a decade as her parents’ goals cascaded around them in a time of happiness and confusion.  And this was life. 

 

My breath stayed level and calm as she attempted to look down at her feet.  Her clothes were a mishmash of what she had found cute and bold. She was in-between, still trying to figure out where her gender ended and her sexuality began, tight in some places and loosely baggy in others to accommodate the growing changes that she did not know about in her belly.

 

“What do I do? “ she asked and giggled sheepishly. I could see the overwhelming innocence in her demeanor.

“ Let’s just start with some definitions. First, this is your vagina.” I showed her a picture of the medical diagram and flinched slightly as she looked at the sloping curves of the drawing in surprise. She had never seen this before. She slowly regained her composure and looked on nodding slowly, trying to absorb all that I might potentially say, and at the same time, I knew that my captive audience had begun.