My doctor said that ultrasounds can play tricks sometimes. That she wouldn’t know for sure which side the tumor (a teratoma my boyfriend and I had nicknamed Terri) was on until they were inside. And then she started walking us through the procedure, step by step. I had heard it before, but my boyfriend hadn’t. 

She told us where they planned to make the incisions. How they would have to fill my abdomen with air to make more room, to move my organs out of the way. I imagined my stomach as a balloon, or better still a cave, damp and dark, full of lost echoes bouncing off rocks the shape of a bladder, a uterus, and Terri. My doctor explained how, if the tumor ruptured, other steps would need to be taken with urgency. That if there was any bleeding, it might lead to complexities. I listened closely and nodded, picturing each of the incisions as she described them. One by one, I could feel each of the holes sinking into my body, exposing my insides to air.

While my doctor spoke, my mind drifted back to an evening a few months ago when I had been talking with my boyfriend about what I should do, trying to determine whether the surgery was worth the risk. We had been together for nearly five years at this point, and he had been with me during my last surgery. But this time was different—this one scared me. For weeks I had been going over all my questions with him. Trying to make sense out of all the wondering. Do I leave Terri alone? Do I trust that the tumor is benign and won’t twist up my insides or rupture? Do I have the four-centimeter mass of misplaced cells removed from the inside of my ovary—and risk losing my ovary all together? But there was one question that I kept avoiding.

This was the first time I realized how badly I wanted to have a baby. I had thought about it before, sure, but never according to any timeline. I had never made any real plan outside of a “probably someday” half promise to myself. And then I was diagnosed with a teratoma in my left ovary, a tumor that—if it grew, twisted, or ruptured—could jeopardize the health of my ovary, and in a worst-case scenario, could make it harder for me to have children. And then I finally had the courage to admit to myself that, at thirty-two years old, someday wasn’t really all that far away anymore. And at this point I had already avoided making a decision about my tumor for over two years. The waiting, the not knowing, was weighing more heavily on me than I liked to let on. I needed to do something. But what if that something did go wrong? That premature loss—the idea of not being able to experience the magic of having a baby scared me. But the reality that it wasn’t too late yet made the decision harder.

I got home from the doctor that day and described to my boyfriend what I had learned about the procedure, what my options were. From a single-seater leather chair in the corner, he watched me pace back and forth across our studio apartment weighing each potential outcome against the next, debating whether I was making the right decision to have it removed. I tiptoed around the conversation of wanting to have a baby until the mood became tense, frustrated. I was holding something back and he could tell. He grew quiet and shifted in his seat, arms and legs stiff, waiting for me to reveal what was really on my mind. I started to cry. I have never been good at being direct about my feelings, and this time was no exception. And then I told him how, for the first time in my life, I knew for certain that I wanted to have a child. That I was afraid if things went wrong with the surgery, I wouldn’t be able to. And then I asked if he saw himself having kids with me.

His body language shifted, and his responses became lawyer-like, artful. He answered my question by saying that I didn’t need to worry about that right now, that I just needed to focus on the surgery. I asked him again and he told me that he isn’t going to promise me anything, that he’s not just going to tell me what I want to hear. The conversation ended with him saying that yes, of course he wanted to. But by then I felt too drained and empty to find comfort in it.

I excused myself to the bathroom to shower. Behind the locked door, I placed my hands on my belly and imagined what it would be like to be pregnant, to have a baby. I would be a good mom. And then I sensed Terri, my tumor, growing inside of me like a threat. Composed of flesh and bone, or maybe hair and mucus, cells the same as mine. I pulled my dress up above my waist and traced my fingertips across my belly, the skin soft from all the cocoa butter lotion I had started covering it with in preparation for the surgery. I already knew they were going to pump air into my stomach, and I imagined the sudden swelling and stretching of my skin and feared stretch marks I hadn’t earned. I took big, deep belly breaths and felt my stomach expand, and then let out all the air in my lungs so that it would fall flat again. 

I looked down to see the two-inch scar from my hernia surgery and searched for the still-fading scars from my appendectomy. I wondered where my new scars would be. One on either hip, one more inside my belly button, and if I was unlucky, a fourth somewhere else. And then I wondered what my belly would look like if I were pregnant instead of marked with scars—if my body were growing and nourishing a child rather than being held together by scar tissue. I took a deep breath and my lungs skipped as I let the familiar worried question cross my mind, Will I ever get to?

—

“We’re ready,” my doctor said, leaning back through the curtain. My boyfriend kissed me and hugged me goodbye, carefully dodging the tubes and wires hooked into my veins and chest. I wondered if he could feel me shaking.

My bed moved quickly through the hospital until it met a pair of double doors with narrow windows. Inside, a nurse had turned on the radio and I felt familiar sounds cocooning my body as they removed my blanket and shifted my body onto the operating table. They quickly covered my body again and, at the same time, began to slip something new into my arm, something warm that made my blood hum and vibrate. And then it all stopped.

It happened suddenly, and without warning. I woke up with an oxygen mask still covering my face and to the sounds of voices and bed wheels echoing in my ears. The world was moving around me but all I could focus on was the shaking. My whole body felt tight like a fist, each muscle contracted in on itself. My every cell seemed to be trembling, shivering not from the cold but from something else hiding much deeper in my bones. And then I felt it—something was missing. And the question rose up again, Will I be able to have a baby?

Where I had expected to feel relief, I felt something else. Something more like loss. Having a piece of myself, however small, removed from my body left me feeling raw, vulnerable—empty. The teratoma, Terri, had become a part of me, and in a way, I felt almost like I had betrayed her by cutting her out and away, reclaiming the space that she had been taking up as my own, to make room, hopefully and eventually, for something more. My body knew something was missing, and I could feel its mourning, and then too its healing.

It felt as if my body were crying. I could feel exactly where each incision had been made—my body told me everything. My eyes struggled to focus on the ceiling overhead. I could see there was someone next to me, pushing my bed, and I tried to turn my head toward them.

“You did great, everything went fine,” I heard the voice of a nurse say.

“It hurts a lot.”

I didn’t remember it hurting this badly the other times. I tried to bring small breaths into shallow lungs, but as each muscle in my body tried to release itself from the anesthesia, I felt the phantom pain of each tug, cut, and stitch that my body had endured while I was unconscious.

The nurse nodded in response, and I felt the warmth under my skin again, and my body calmed. I closed my eyes and waited while the pain rose and fell with my heartbeat. When I opened my eyes again, my boyfriend was there. It was nice to not be alone anymore. He told me the doctor called him after the procedure was over and that everything went perfectly. I smiled at him and thought to myself, I will be able to have a baby, and then I fell asleep.

When I woke up, I felt a hole in my stomach, the kind that aches deep within your soul. I wanted to roll over onto my side, to curl myself in a ball to try and alleviate my pain, but I could barely sit up. Finally, the nurse came back with some ice chips and asked how I was doing. She wanted me to try to walk and suggested a trip to the bathroom, so I sat up slowly and slipped my feet into stiff sandals. As I began shifting my body upright, I could feel the skin on my stomach pulling against numb muscles, pieces of tape gripping tight to skin held together by sutures that would eventually turn into scars.

I leaned against the nurse as she led me down the hall toward the bathroom. Outside, she held the door open for me and asked if I was okay. I nodded as I stepped cautiously inside and let her shut the door behind me. I flipped the lock and for a moment stood motionless in the middle of the room. I took a few steps toward the sink and found my reflection in the mirror on the wall above it.

I raised my hand to unhook the medical mask from my earlobe. My face looked puffy with drugs and saline; a red mark was still left on my nose from the oxygen mask.

I reached down to the skirt of my dress and pulled it up in folds, revealing my thighs, the white of my cotton-mesh underwear, and my stomach. There I found three patches of gauze, one on each of my hips and the largest over my belly button. I stared at the gauze and imagined the incisions and stitches hidden beneath.

Both of my hands still had IVs inserted and tapped to them, and I felt gravity tugging at the empty tubes as I moved my hands to cradle my belly, watching it swell with each breath. I pressed cautious fingers against my skin to see if I could feel anything. My belly was hard and swollen, and I imagined that this might be how it would feel if I were pregnant.

What I thought would be the hard parts—the deciding, the surgery, the pain afterward—weren’t really the hardest parts after all. It was the part that came next. The part where I would have to answer my questions myself: Will I be able to have a baby now? Will I do it?

I stepped toward the toilet and sat down, hunched over with my elbows on my knees and held my face in my hands. I flushed nothing, washed my hands, and left the bathroom.