Tag Archives: pelvic pain

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PTSD in Gynaecology?

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (or PTSD) is an anxiety disorder caused by being exposed to a traumatic or frightening event. It has been described in various guises since antiquity: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-30957719, but although we have traditionally ascribed it to military veterans, it is by no means confined to those who have been in the midst of battle. Paramedics, police officers, and various other sorts of first-responders are also exposed to frightening and traumatic events. The DSM-5 (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) has even allowed a variant for those emergency workers even if they are only exposed to disturbing videos in the conduct of their jobs.

So I suppose it should not come as too much of a surprise that someone would take the leap and wonder whether the public, exposed as we all are to social media, would be at risk as well: http://www.bps.org.uk/news/viewing-violent-news-social-media-can-cause-trauma   There followed the usual offence at what seemed like an attempt to demean the diagnosis of PTSD in those felt more worthy of its acquisition, and in conditions far more important and deserving, but nonetheless there is a spectrum of manifestation inherent in most diagnoses.

The BBC posted a helpful primer on PTSD http://www.bbc.com/news/health-26867615 but in brief, the diagnosis requires: flashbacks to the event, avoidance behavior, sleep disturbance, and mood changes.

I have to say I was skeptical that we should even consider that anything found on social media could have such an important impact that could in any way be considered PTSD –however attenuated. It seemed almost an insult, a belittling of those who had undergone real trauma. Until, that is, I remembered Lucille.

She was a young lady visiting from another province who had been sent to me for a second opinion from the emergency department at the hospital across the street. Her problem was abdominal pain –chronic and unexplainable pain in the pelvic region, for which she had been thoroughly investigated elsewhere with ultrasounds, CT scans, an MRI and even –no doubt in desperation- a laparoscopy four or five years ago to view the area more directly. And all, said the accompanying note, were normal.

She was not what I was expecting; rather than an anxious woman sitting quietly in the waiting room with her face locked in pain, instead I found a smiling, smartly dressed young lady happily talking to the pregnant woman in the seat beside her. She smiled when I walked over and immediately extended her hand for me to shake.

“I’m so happy you could see me on such short notice,” she said as I led her down the corridor to my office. And she did indeed seem cheerful and, well, normal as she seated herself across from my desk by the window. “What a wonderful view of the ocean from here,” she almost purred, staring past the buildings and traffic at the almost-invisible water far in the distance. “Vancouver is such a wonderful city…”

I sensed her cheer was other than completely genuine, as her words wound down and slowed. Sometimes, with chronic conditions like pain, I like to wait until the patient is ready to speak -unprovoked, as it were. Unencumbered by a line of questioning known all too well to her that leads… nowhere. She was silent for a while as she turned her attention to the office itself, her eyes alighting like sparrows first on a painting on the wall, then on a wooden carving from Ethiopia I had placed on the desk so it looked out between the leaves of a plant. They stopped no place for long, revisiting their favoured twigs almost at random.

“Offices are all different, aren’t they?” I said, to begin the conversation.

She nodded thoughtfully. “I suspect they reveal a lot about the doctors…”

“And the patients who notice.” It provoked another smile.

Her face became serious –a major change. “Look, I don’t want to waste your time, doctor. I’m certainly grateful you could see me, but maybe I should wait until I get back to Ontario to get it checked out.”

“It..?” She looked down at her lap, as if the little sparrows were tired of flitting about. “The note from the ER said you were having some pain… Care to tell me a bit about it?”

She still seemed reluctant to look up. “Oh, I get these pains every now and then. No big deal, though.”

She risked a glance and I immediately seized the opportunity. “Well, suppose I just take a brief history and then if you feel you want to wait till you get back to Ontario, I can fill your doctor in as to what happened while you were here in paradise.”

She nodded her assent and for the first time, her eyes didn’t flee from my face. Was it hope? Or merely resignation that it was beginning again?

We all expect that we will be able to find the treasure where nobody has succeeded before, but the only thing I could discover in her history that might be remotely related to her pain was an episode of Chlamydia –a sexually transmitted condition- several years before. It had been treated and subsequent cultures had demonstrated cure. “When did the pain start?” I asked, almost as an afterthought, but I think she could see through my strategy.

The memory seemed uncomfortable to her, and she looked out the window again.

After an awkward moment of fidgetting silence, I said, “Sexual diseases are always difficult to talk about, I think…”

“My friend didn’t think so,” she suddenly blurted out before I could even finish my poorly worded attempt to console her. “She got an STI and had to be hospitalized when it spread through her abdomen… They even had to operate to remove the pus. She sent me a picture of her tubes they took during the operation…” She looked as if she were about to cry, but grabbed a tissue from the desk and dabbed her eyes to recover. She lapsed into a morose silence and turned her head so she could see the door.

“You know, I’d been fond of the guy who gave it to me; I’d gone out with him for a couple of years… And yes we used condoms!” She stabbed me with a sudden glare and turned her head away again. “I did everything right, but I still got it.” She sighed heavily and stared at her lap again. “I mean, how do I know I don’t still have it -but without symptoms? Or that I haven’t gotten it again from somebody?” Her hands were nervously clasping and unclasping. “They did a laparoscopy shortly after the infection and it was normal, but that was years ago…”

The time for my questions was over; I let her talk.

“I read that PID [pelvic inflammatory disease] can be silent after an infection and the damage can be going on even without symptoms…” She considered that for a second or two. “I suppose I twisted my doctor’s arm to do the laparoscopy. But anyway, she didn’t find anything. Nothing abnormal.” Another sigh. But my girlfriend kept warning me about it, so of course I read as much about it as I could online. I even looked at videos of operations for PID…” Her eyes teared up immediately. “I couldn’t stop looking at them,” she managed to whisper between sobs. “They were terrible! Frightening: great slimy fat tubes stuck to bowels and everything… And in some of the videos, when they tried to dissect them, there was blood everywhere! And pus oozing out of dark little spaces the tubes had walled off…” She considered the implications of what she’d said and closed her eyes briefly. Hid behind her face. “I’ve hardly had sex since that Email and I’m never going to trust anybody again,” she blurted out abruptly with her fists clenched. “I mean I keep thinking about those videos; I wake up in the middle of the night, and there they are, running through my mind!”

She stared at my face for a second. “You think I’m stupid for watching all those videos, don’t you?” she yelled at me. “But I couldn’t help it! I just knew that it was going on inside of me: big fat greasy sausages filled with sticky white ooze..!” And then, just as suddenly she stood up and pinned me to the wall with venomed eyes. “You’re the same as all the rest, you know. And I know you don’t believe me!”

She turned and walked to the door. “And don’t bother sending anything to my doctor in Ontario, either. I’m gonna find another one.”

She disappeared through the door leaving me wondering how I could have handled things differently. But in a moment a head poked around the door again –but only briefly. Awkwardly. “I’m sorry doctor… You’re really great! Honestly.” And then it disappeared into whatever hellish world it was forced to inhabit.

Did she have PTSD? A variation of it somewhere on the spectrum? Or was she just embarrassed that she’d disclosed so much to a stranger? I suppose I’ll never know, but I hope that somebody, somewhere, takes her seriously. She, just like anybody else with PTSD has a life to live. Deserves to live.

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The Unexpected

What I like about the unexpected is that you never expect it. It’s a surprise. A gift. And the world is filled with this stuff. Each day at work –I’m a gynaecologist- there are little treasures hidden within appointments, presents in names. Especially the unpronounceable Persian names that unravel when I try to work at them one syllable at a time to call some nervous woman from the waiting room. But she inevitably understands my bumbled attempt, smiles, and when she sees my embarrassment, immediately forgives.

And there are cross cultural surprises that don’t anymore. Surprise, that is. There are some people for whom a question has to be asked with a lot of forethought. It cannot merely trip off of the tongue; it must be planned well in advance. A simple query in taking her history such as “You’re not married, are you?” might elicit ‘yes’ –meaning either ‘Yes I am married,’ or ‘yes, you are correct in saying I am not married.’ I love it.

Or consider the argumentative patient who doesn’t want to tell you why she is there. Her name provides no advance warning, nor does the note from the referring doctor. The first clue is usually the defiant, silent stare, and the arms tightly enfolded across her chest as if to prove that coming to see me was definitely not her idea. I suspect the behaviour is a punishment, although for whom I’ve yet to determine. And what do I usually do? I ignore the theatre and simply ask her why her doctor sent her. If that doesn’t work, I sit back in my chair and smile at her, hoping the time will allow her to acclimatize. Relax. Sooner or later, of course, she realizes she has to do something  or pay for extra parking, so she will sigh, undo her arms, unlock her eyes and either apologize or leave. I never know which way it will go.

But sometimes I am caught off guard. Something unexpected happens that even I did not anticipate. That something happened only a few months ago in fact: a movie star. Well, sort of…

It was just before lunch, and my stomach was rumbling. I had only one patient to see before I could escape for the morning, so I quickly glanced at the referral note. ‘Pain’ was all it said. Damn! I suppose the family doctor was in a hurry, but even an adjective, a descriptive, might have pointed the word in a more helpful direction. I shrugged mentally and then let it go –after all I was the detective, not him.

I walked down the corridor to the waiting room rehearsing her name. “Jojo?” I said with a little uptick at the end to indicate that I wasn’t entirely sure I’d got the name right, or whether it was a name only her closest friends used.

An unsmiling woman with short hair stood up and walked over to me. She shook my hand, but I could tell she didn’t really want to touch me. She wouldn’t make eye contact either. That made me a little nervous, but I assumed that she was just shy and understandably anxious. But I have to confess that apart from that, my initial impression of her was, well… absent. Nothing about her cried out for attention. She was average height, average build, with a pleasant but decidedly unstriking appearance –we are all beautiful in our own ways, but sometimes it is easier to notice, I suppose. I dislike the adjective ‘plain’ when applied to people, but occasionally it’s difficult to find another word without seeming patronizing. Let us just say she was neither attractive, nor unattractive but somewhere on that hazy continuum verging on, well, average.

She sat rather primly on the chair opposite my desk, eyes fixated on something on the wall to the left of my head. I fought the temptation to turn and see what she was looking at and distracted myself by asking her why she’d come to see me.

“Pain,” she said simply, without moving her eyes.

I waited what I thought was a polite interval for her to continue, but when she didn’t  I fidgeted with a pen on my desk -a signal, I hoped.

She glanced briefly at her hands and then her eyes flew back to their accustomed branch on the wall. “It’s been interfering with work lately,” she said, as if she had unlocked a door.

I felt I was getting somewhere. “In what way?” I asked, smiling to reassure her that I would understand.

She stared even harder at the wall and said, without a hint of embarrassment, “I get terrible pain when he…” I could actually see her adjusting words in her head. “When he enters…” She seemed pleased with the word she’d chosen and smiled for the first time –at the wall, mind you, but I figured it was a rapport starter. Suddenly she appeared to reconsider. “No, not ‘enters’ exactly… when he’s, uhmm…” -this seemed to be a real challenge for her- “…you know, in there and looking around.” I could tell she wasn’t exactly happy with her description, but she didn’t offer any more metaphors and resumed the neutral expression she had worn coming into the office.

I assumed I had simply misinterpreted the temporal juxtaposition of  her personal life and work, so I let it pass without further comment, although I did make a few mistakes typing it into the computer. The rest of the history was easier for her and even the subsequent physical examination, despite the pain, didn’t appear to bother her unduly. After she had come back into the office from the examination room, she seemed more relaxed than I’d seen her. “You found it, eh?” she said after sitting down and making more comfortable eye contact with the now familiar space on the wall behind me. “The part he hits,” she added to make sure I knew what she meant.

I smiled and nodded in agreement.

“So, what do you think?”

I’d felt a rather large and tender ovarian cyst in her pelvis -probably from endometriosis, judging from the rest of her history. “Well…” I tried to frame my response in a non-frightening fashion, but it was difficult. Ovarian cysts are always frightening. Threatening. “The area that was the most tender was around your left ovary. It seems larger than it should be –a cyst, maybe…” I thought the ‘maybe’ might diffuse the fright I could see in the eyes that now sought mine. “I’d like to get an ultrasound first, though, before we decide what to do.”

“You mean, like it might be… cancer?” I could tell it was difficult for her even to fashion the word in her mouth.

I smiled disarmingly. “No, more probably endometriosis.” I was about to elaborate on the word when her face turned sour and her eyes fled to the wall again.

“So, if it is a cyst, what are you going to have to do about it?” She sounded angry, but her face grew expressionless.

“Well, if it is a cyst, we’ll have to remove it.”

Her eyes immediately saucered and focussed on the front of my shirt. “You mean surgery?” I could almost see the italics. “Sorry, I don’t do surgery, doctor!” Her face changed; it was no longer unreadable.

“Why don’t we just wait to see what the ultrasound finds and then decide what we…”

But she was already putting on her coat. “You don’t understand, doctor.” She was having trouble fitting the two sides of the zipper together, so it gave me time to ask why she seemed so upset. She sighed, left the zipper for a moment and actually looked at me. Me -not the wall, not my shirt, not her hands- me. “It’s my work… I can’t have any scars for my work.” She stood up and walked to the door, still unzipped.

“The scars from a laparoscope are really quite small, Jojo. I…”

But she stopped at the door and turned to face me as she interrupted irritably. “Any scars. I can’t have any scars! That’s what they told me…”

“Who told you?”

“My producers.” I couldn’t keep the concern off of my face, so she continued. “No scars –that’s what they said.”

My face relaxed. “Producers? So you’re an actor? In the movies?” I must have looked impressed because she nodded modestly and leaned seductively on the door frame. “But… they’d be tiny little scars. And most of them would be lower down on your abdomen. Even the skimpiest little bathing suit would hide them.”

She cocked her head and allowed herself a tiny smile before she left. “I never get to wear one for very long,” she said as she disappeared down the hallway.

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The Solopsist

I have always been influenced by something Lewis Thomas, the American polymath writer-physician once said at a lecture I attended. He felt he would be better served by a doctor who had read Shakespeare than someone who had merely focussed all of his formative years on learning medicine. His point, I think, was that to really help people you had to understand who they were, what they thought, how they lived. We are all more than our bodies.

Me? I have always loved philosophy, cherished its Greek etymological roots: love of wisdom, and at least pretended I understood how it might help me to interact with my patients: to accept all points of view with equanimity –or to spell it as Sir William Osler did in his famous essay, Aequanimitas –imperturbability.

Philosophy helps you to do that, but only if you don’t get too enmeshed in the details. Only if you don’t privilege one tenet over another. Only if you never accept that you are at the end of the journey. Or meet someone who is…

My conversations with patients have changed over the years from that of an expert trying to impress, to a teacher trying to listen -the difference between an encyclopedia and a manual, I suppose. Part of it is age, I’m sure, but a better part is the belief that, as Osler put it: “Listen to your patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.” And although directive listening works best, sometimes the topic turns an unexpected corner and a tangent is entered. I like tangents but not in the office -they can terminally entangle the discussion. They are like blackberry bushes in a field: I try to stay away from them.

There was a patient who wouldn’t let me, though. A PhD candidate in Philosophy, she had come to see me because of pelvic pain. And while she readily conceded that she was under considerable stress writing her dissertation, she felt that her problem was reality-based. I should have just written it down; I shouldn’t have asked what she meant…

“Reality is the sum total of all that is,”  she said, settling back all too comfortably in her chair. “The question, of course, is does it include potentiality –all that might be, or could be imagined to be?”

Of course.

She closed her eyes, for a moment as if digesting the profundity of what she had just said, and then opened them suddenly and stared at the ceiling. “But our realities differ, don’t they? I mean, you inhabit a different mental world than me; you can no more apprehend my sensations than I can yours. We are on different sides of a wall.”

She had to be kidding; I didn’t ask anything like that. But nonetheless, I felt it incumbent upon me to defend my profession –my humanity, for that matter. I decided to sit back in my chair as well- fight opaque answer with precise question. “But surely if you really believed that I couldn’t appreciate your pain, you wouldn’t have come here.” I then pasted on my most innocent smile. “And anyway, I don’t have to feel your pain, just accept that you are experiencing it and take it from there.” I put on a more contemplative, but satisfied smile.

My answer didn’t faze her in the slightest. I think she had her rebuttal ready before my smile had even fully blossomed. It started with a deep theatrical sigh. “Do you ever wonder if we define the world, doctor –our own world, that is?” She was sitting on the opposite side of the desk from me, but suddenly she leaned forward and put her elbows on it to fix me with a stare that would have done Medusa proud. I even stiffened reflexively.

“Don’t we all define our worlds?” I said, rather proud of my response.

“Yes, but differently.” She looked as intense as her words. “Pain has a different meaning to each of us: a different feeling, a different impact… it is only an If  to anybody but myself: If, as you say, you have pain; if as you assert, the pain is seven out of ten… If all of these things are as you tell me, I have only your word to go on. There is no objective way of demonstrating your thesis. So aren’t you left with the same undefinable as you started..?”

Wow. And to think I was only going to ask her how long she’d had the pain. She ended her explanation rather tentatively, thank god, because I had lost her shortly after her first attempt at clarification. I began to wonder if this dissemblage was a PhD syndrome: full of sound and fury, yet signifying nothing –practice for the defence of her thesis. Equivocation. Obfuscation. Playing with words like others play with cards.

Sometimes, however, it is necessary to find out more about the pain than its meaning. I wanted to pin her down on the more mundane aspects of her symptoms: more like where than why. Or when, not if. It occurred to me that her road to if  was not the road to solution and I was trying to figure out how to phrase it more philosophically when she straightened in her chair as if she’d suddenly received an electric jolt and stabbed me with her eyes.

“I realize that my approach to pain is different from yours, doctor, but the reason just occurred to me: I have defined it that way. Not you; not your reality. Mine… I am the one at fault.”

I tended to agree with her, although I probably wouldn’t have put it that way. “So…” -I sensed an opportunity when her face wrinkled as she thought through the ramifications of her enlightenment… A word-gap- “Where, exactly does…”

But she saw through my plan, and the door closed again. “You see I create the reality in which I suffer…” She paused, but not long enough for me to remember what I was going to ask, let alone to say it. “And so by coming here, I define you in a way… Both you and your response… Do you see what I mean?” She said it with such hope in her face that I almost said yes.

And then, just as suddenly, her face fell on hard times and the intensity disappeared. “But despite my solopsism, I still have pain.” Gradually, her expression refocussed like a magnifying glass and I could see her deep brown eyes dissolve in tears. “Can you help me even from your side of the wall?”

Solopsism? I smiled a real smile and nodded. I looked up the word as soon as I got home.

by

The Crown Jewel

 

Ahh, those were the days! The days when naivete reigned. The once-upon-a-times when my practice was young and everyone around me seemed old. They spoke a language I had not anticipated in my training; they seem to have subscribed to different dictionaries, or the words were smudged so they did their best with what they could make out. I began to wonder if my background in the prairies had hidden me from modern descriptive English. Cloaked me in innocence. After all, it was the place where I was assured by a teacher in grade three that Winnipeg was the only place in the world where we did not speak with an accent.

Of course, since then I have lived in many places, and my vocabulary has expanded accordingly -but it is the jargon of common things by and large: words we might use with a person in the office, or a friend at a coffee shop. Every day things… Doctors generally do not unwrap their esoteria in public, and their user-unfriendly descriptives for particular bodily parts or conditions go largely untranslated. Unappreciated in the main. And anyway, most people have their own names for the stuff.

But when you’re first starting and building a practice, the world is freshly scrubbed and terminology an adventure. I quickly discovered that patients are wont to try new doctors in a never ending quest for clarity –someone whose explanations they can understand. Someone who doesn’t have to resort to pointing at the area in question. We are all under somebody’s microscope.

*

It was only my second month in practice, and I wasn’t very busy.

“Doctor, I hope you can help me,” the olive-skinned woman said as soon as she sat down. Her long black hair was carefully pinned on her head, but as she gestured, little strands would escape and cross her eyes like windshield wiper blades. Far from annoying her, she hurried the transit in a trained fluid sweep of her head as if it was an integral part of her everyday speech.

She was a heavy woman, but dressed in a stunning green blouse and black jeans, she wore her weight, like her height, as a gift. The most striking feature about her, though, was her eyes. Intense and brown, they prowled the room in search of prey, then fastened upon me like a cat, and once engaged, stapled me to my chair.

I struggled to disengage and tried to focus on her chart for a moment. Usually there is an explanatory referral letter, but there were only three words scrawled in pencil –hurriedly, I think, because they were almost undecipherable.

My face must have fallen, because she unlatched her eyes, scanned the upside-down letters, and said, “Dr. Edwards is a man of few words, eh?”

I looked up, embarrassed at my inability to decipher the letters, and turned the page so she could read it. “Any idea what it says?”

She studied my face to see if I was kidding. “He was kind of puzzled by my stuff, so he told me to explain it to you… Anyway, it says ‘something quadrant pain’ –whatever that means.” A mischievous look snuck onto her face and her body shivered ever so slightly, the movement slowly descending like a wave. “I’ve got pain in my parts… My private parts,” she added quickly, concerned that fancy might draw me to more public venues.

“And when do you get pain… there?” I asked, hoping for more clarity.

She thought about it for a moment. “Well, mostly during my monthlies I suppose, but occasionally during his act.” I must have looked blank, because her eyes dropped briefly as she searched for a more apt description. “You know,when he… walks through the door,” she said, and sat back in her chair convinced she had simplified the term.

She struggled through her history with a litany of words I had never heard before. Things like ‘tweenie-legs’ and ‘bloaty-stuff’ surfaced briefly, then sank just as quickly after I’d made a stab at translating them into something I could dictate to her doctor.

But when we’d plodded through the symptoms and I’d had a chance to examine her, it seemed likely that she had endometriosis –a painful condition where some of the endometrial cells that normally line the uterus and are expelled during menstruation, are forced back through the Fallopian tubes into the abdominal cavity where they can grow.

The condition is usually diagnosed and treated with a laparoscope –a telescope inserted through the belly button under an anaesthetic. Pretty standard stuff. But this seemed to worry her more than the condition itself. “I’m kinda worried about my crown jewel,” she said, her brown eyes watering.

I smiled and assured her that I would not be taking anything out of her. I had heard the expression ‘crown jewels’ before but always in the plural, and never referring to women. But, summoning up a vague memory of trash talk in the YMCA locker room, I assumed it was a code for ovary and not wanting to become entrapped in another of her semantic vortices, I left it at that.

*

The last thing she said to me in the OR before the anaesthesiologist put her to sleep was “Careful of the crown jewel, eh, doc?” I touched her shoulder reassuringly and watched her close her eyes as the medication took hold.

“What was that about?” the scrub nurse said as she was prepping her adomen.

I shrugged. “I was hoping I was the only one who didn’t understand…”

Belly buttons are interesting areas, I have come to realize. They exist in all sizes and shapes. Their contours run the gamut from vertical alignment to transverse and since the laparoscope has to be inserted through it, the incision has to be similarly tailored so it is inapparent after it heals. Hers was distorted, however, so I found I had to be creative. I ended up cutting a short horizontal line about as long as my little finger nail on its lower edge much to the surprise of the resident doctor who was assisting me.

“I’ve only seen it cut vertically,” she said with some hesitation evident in her voice. It wasn’t exactly a criticism –residents don’t usually criticize their staff- but I could hear the implied judgement in the tone. I smiled beneath my mask, and said something to justify my decision. But it was a bluff; I recognized my heresy all too clearly. If it healed with a ridge, or a scar, there might be complaints. It made me all the more determined to leave her ovaries unharmed.

And then, after dealing with the endometriosis, and dictating the operative report, I promptly forgot about the navel issue. Until, that is, she returned to see me several weeks later.

*

She sat down opposite me as she had that first time, but her eyes were so intense I could barely see her face. “What did you do, doctor?” she said in an accusatory tone before I could even open her chart.

“Do you still have the pain?” I asked carefully –almost shyly, given the spotlight of her eyes. I felt naked in their allegation. Like I had done something wrong.

She turned down the wattage and I could finally see the smile that had been in possession of her face all the while. “No, of course not…”

‘Of course not’? I took a deep breath as the memory of her umbilical incision rose slowly and painfully into my chest; my resident had been right.

“How did you do it?” she said a little too loudly, her eyes firmly grasping my head. “My friends all noticed; everybody’s been commenting.”

“I’m sorry,” I managed to mumble, my cheeks no doubt red with the effort. “I don’t underst…”

“The belly button!” She interrupted and then almost jumped across the desk in her frenzy. As it was, she leaned so far she was almost touching me. Then she relented and retreated slowly into her chair. “You know what I do, don’t you?”

Actually, I didn’t –in those days I rarely noticed if a profession was written on the chart- but I could hear the word ‘lawyer’ humming softly in the background.

“I dance professionally,” she said. “I specialize in the danse du ventre, to use my favorite description.” I think I must have accidently raised an eyebrow, because she rolled her eyes impatiently and added “A belly dance!”

“I still don’t…”

“My crown jewel,” she said, carefully enunciating each word as if speaking to a slow child. “I wear a ruby in my belly button as part of my act.” My face stayed blank. “It always falls out unless I glue it in. Those kittens are heavy, you know. Especially when you’re moving everything around.”

“So..?” I didn’t know where she was going with this, so I tried to stay neutral. Sensitive.

“So whatever you did worked… Sits in there like a baby in a blanket now.”

I allowed myself a smile.

“The girls in the troupe are all impressed,” she said, positively beaming. “I told them to pretend they had pain in their parts so they could get to see you.”

Well, I guess it’s a start, eh?

 

by

The Guardian

To anyone watching from a distance, they were both very much in love. Hands entwined, bodies linked at hip and shoulder, they clung to each other like moss to a tree. Her eyes sought his for sustenance, energy, approval; their movement along the corridor and into the office was sinuous and choreographed. Synchronized swimming came to mind.

After I shook their hands and introduced myself, they moved the two available chairs together and sat, linked by wood and sleeve across from me.

I glanced at the consultation request from her family doctor and smiled to welcome them. Pain was what the doctor had scribbled in barely legible letters across the page -no other explanation, no other information- as if the word itself was justification enough for a consultation. I looked up from the almost-empty page and saw them staring at me.

“What does it say?” He sounded suspicious, concerned; his curiosity was evidently dominant. Contingent.

“Well,” I started tentatively, “It doesn’t say much at all -just ‘Pain’.” He seemed relieved and glanced at his partner with a now-soft face. “Perhaps you can tell me more about it,” I said, pointing my eyes directly at her.

“She’s got pain all the time, doctor,” he responded, clearly used to being asked the question first. “It started out with her periods, but now she seems to have pain no matter when I ask her.” He looked at her as a teacher would his pupil. “Isn’t that right, Grace?” She nodded dutifully, perhaps relieved to have the substantive part of her history out of the way.

“How long..?” But he didn’t let me finish my question.

“It’s been going on now for…” -he glanced at her as if to refresh his memory- “What..? Six months now?” She smiled and said ‘Maybe’ to me with her eyes.

I nodded encouragingly, but groaned inwardly: taking the history was going to be painful. “Is that right, Grace?” I asked.

She looked up into his face, smiled, and then back at me. “Yes,” was all she said, and yet her eyes seemed troubled. Only her eyes…

He took over again. “I’d say six months, because that’s when we got into a little financial trouble; Grace is very sensitive to stress.” He turned to her and said, “Aren’t you, honey?” She nodded -of course.

I played with the pen I was holding. “So are you suggesting that stress might be playing a role in your pain?” The question obviously made her flustered; she didn’t seem to know how to answer. I thought I’d try to get at  least some information I could use. “Where is this pain that you’re having, Grace?”

Again she looked at him. I thought I detected a concerned expression.

“Well…” She started too slowly and it gave him time to respond.

“She gets it in her pelvis doctor. Isn’t that right Grace?” She sort of smiled. “All over her pelvis… into her back, down her legs… It’s terrible.”

“I see…” But I didn’t. “And when did you say you get this pain, Grace?” I tried to direct my questions to her, but she kept looking at him for -what?- approval?

“She gets it with her periods, but also…” This time he looked at her and they exchanged knowing but otherwise undecipherable expressions. “She also gets it when we’re making love…” He stopped, feigning embarrassment.

This was obviously why they’d come; why he’d come with her… “Well, then I think I’m going to need to get a little background information.” He looked at me as if I was going just a little bit too far. “So, let’s start with when you first started having periods…”

I took what history I could get from her, but he kept interrupting and correcting her. And when I suggested that I needed to examine her he refused.

“She’s having her period now, doctor.” He stared at her, concern evident in his body language. “And anyway, Doctor Jonas said you probably wouldn’t have to.” He blinked nervously. “She said we’d only need to talk about it.”

I took a deep breath and put down my pen. “It’s pretty difficult to come up with an appropriate diagnosis without an examination.” My turn to stare at him.

He shrugged -triumphantly, I suspected- and put on an apologetic face. “Dr. Jonas was pretty certain it was Endometriosis…”  I could almost see the capital letter in the word. He pretended to be tentative, but his manner suggested confirmation and agreement. “She thought maybe you could just prescribe something and see how it worked.”

“And did Dr. Jonas examine you, Grace?”

Another glance at him and a resigned sagging of her shoulders. “No. Jim…” She stopped suddenly with his quick almost-hidden tug on her sleeve and let her glance stall briefly on her feet before it again climbed his body to his face. “…I was having my period then, too.”

He smiled and blinked slowly -too slowly I thought- and then sighed. “We always seem to choose the wrong time for these appointments, don’t we?”

I sat back in my chair, and looked at them both for a moment. “Well, I’m not willing to prescribe anything until I have a better idea what’s going on.” I leaned over the desk and closed the chart slowly. “Maybe you should come back and see me next week when your period is over, Grace,” I said. “And you probably don’t need to take time off work to come then, Jim…” I added hopefully, letting my eyes rest on his.

They looked at each other, but this time her eyes were harder, sterner. She was about to say something when he squeezed her hand. “No, I don’t mind coming, doctor…” He gazed lovingly at her. “We go everywhere together.”