Guest Writer Wednesday: Ashley's Unicornuate Uterus Story
Ashley, a Nashville-based writer, mother, and educator shares her unicornuate uterus story. I found myself nod, nod, nodding in agreement…parallel processing my unique story as I read through hers. Thank you, Ashley, for offering us a healing moment. A communal inhale and exhale as we share, grieve, validate, and process together. (Content warning: fertility/pregnancy loss, abortion, and pregnancy trauma).
No Amount of Planning
Ashley N Roth
I like to know what will happen next. As a child, I flipped ahead to guarantee my Choose Your Own Adventure decision was the correct one. In my angsty teen years, I drew literal storyboards for my life, mapping out where I would publish my first bestseller, the Marlene Dietrich-inspired dress I would wear to accept my Oscar, the torrid affairs I would have with all my celebrity crushes. Even now, I like to be in control.
Life is defined by unplanned surprises. Mine included. It churned out several, including a carousel of seemingly disparate, and unconnected events—although each and every one of them was linked to a secret my own body kept from me. The first of these moments happened when I was 11, babysitting two recalcitrant boys who were always streaked with dirt. I marked my first period on my cat calendar and waited for the same time next month, and the month after that, conserving the pads my dad bought for me in an embarrassing spectacle. The second period arrived nearly a year later. I didn’t know this lapse of time could be an early sign. I thought it was simply the fledgling hormones of an uncoordinated adolescence.
My second sign arrived when I was 28, a newish university transfer hitting my belated adulting stride. This newfound self ignored the excruciating cramps and dark sticky blood I’d had for days because I had midterms. That same overly ambitious self also ignored my MIA period that month. Until that moment, I’d never had a “scare.” I had survived the wild and carefree early 20s without a single uncomfortable conversation with any of my partners. It must have been my inexperience that pushed me to keep ignoring my symptoms, until I was doubled over in pain and seeing stars. The famous Cedars-Sinai diagnosed my ectopic pregnancy and the startling news that I apparently only had one working kidney and a shriveled, useless pelvic kidney. They sent me home with methotrexate to dissolve the pregnancy. Too preoccupied with this renal reveal and the risk of fatality from my ectopic, I wasn’t capable of connecting the dots or researching any leads.
Three years after that ectopic, my body sensed my first real pregnancy before any official symptoms arrived. Doctors labeled me high watch due to the previous ectopic, never knowing I was also high risk. Once my hormones reached optimal levels, I was given the green light for normal—at least in the medical sense. At home, it was anything but. My pregnancy wasn’t planned, but I felt ready to be a mother, even though I was in a miserable relationship and already prepping myself for life as a single parent. Anxiety took a toll, and it was this stress I blamed when I saw my toilet fill with blood two months before my daughter was due. I was diagnosed with preterm labor and prescribed bed rest, delighting my longtime cat companion. After a week, I was permitted to move around, albeit with caution. Being a person who hates sitting still, I moved around. I might have moved around a little too much, because it was only two days after being relieved from bedrest I returned to the hospital with a strange cramping. This time I wasn’t going home. I was already three centimeters dilated, and although my contractions didn’t register on their machines, I was dilating more and more. Labor wasn’t how I’d imagined, the contractions ripples and not the clenches I had heard about. My daughter was born 11 hours after I arrived at thirty-three weeks and five days. I never was able to use my birth plan. Doctors never identified a cause for her premature birth.
Motherhood was a tunnel, the outside world engulfed in darkness. It was a survival technique to get myself and my baby through the complications of premature infancy. She was nearly a year old when I revisited the old diagrams of escape and began to make them a reality. This was a space void of surprise. Everything was planned months in advance.
Those connected surprises were dormant for years, until I shared a surprise with the person with whom I had been in a slow-moving, cautious relationship for barely six months. After minimal mulling and short conversation, the practical choice was made. We barely knew each other and I didn’t want another traumatic situation. We passed the pamphlet between us in the waiting room. It wasn’t the right time. There was always later.
That surprise reiterated the necessity for planning. He held my hand while the gynecologist tried to insert my Paragard. Pain flashed white behind my eyes. The doctor refused to continue. She sent me home with a single Valium and a rescheduled appointment. That appointment was successful. I didn’t know an IUD shouldn’t be such a struggle. I didn’t know the device wasn’t made for my body.
Our relationship matured and we moved in together, minting our budding family unit. We made casseroles and bought picture frames and played golf outside with fallen walnuts and a stick. My mind created plans of a future of all the big life events. I began to imagine another child, one with curly hair who loved the taste of salt.
That plan, barely born, was immediately derailed by one painful surprise after another in rapid-fire succession.
First, my IUD was embedded in my uterus. I cried as they yanked it out.
A month later, my 17 year old cat passed away after 4 years in stage 4 kidney failure. Grief swallowed me whole. It could have been grief blurring my senses, or maybe submerging myself in the duties of my new teacher prep program or the artistic showcase I was organizing and performing in. My period had been late for three weeks when it dawned on me, the same time I was clenched with a familiar cramping, one I hadn’t felt in nearly a decade. There wasn’t time for medical emergencies. We had our yearly vegan thanksgiving to host a week after the show. I only slowed the day after Thanksgiving because my daughter had a high fever. I snuggled up to her, her warmth like a compress over my own worsening abdominal pain. When I got up, there was the dark sticky bloody I had almost forgotten about. It would have to wait.
Neglecting your body’s voice is a dangerous habit. It eventually screams at you, like mine did after my daughter’s fever finally calmed. My partner was at work when she and I went to the Dollar Tree and bought a two-pack pregnancy test. I knew it would be positive, and I knew something wasn’t right. My then four year old waited with me while my partner rushed from work, and I tried to think about anything besides my thirst and growing hunger. It was my second ectopic, one that would require surgery and a lengthy period without food or liquids. I asked about my future and having another child. I was 35 then. They assured me losing one tube wouldn’t make much of a difference.
“You have another one,” they promised.
In the lull before surgery, an ultrasound technician struggled to find my second ovary. She asked if that had ever occurred before. It hadn’t. Every other ultrasound I had ever had revealed both my left and right ovary, or so I thought. This was the first alarming sign, and I made a note to ask the doctor after my surgery.
The moments leading up to surgery were chaotic. I was wheeled into the surgery room and wheeled right back out because a more pressing emergency had occurred. Tears streamed down my face when I said goodbye to my daughter. This was my first surgery, my brain swarmed with stories of people dying during botched procedures. Tears were still streaming down my face when I was put under. I woke up to find my partner sitting in a chair beside my hospital bed. He held a stack of matte papers and a single glossy page. The last was a gory photograph of my uterus, evidence of the discovery made in surgery.
An anomaly.
Unicornuate.
A unicorn.
Doctors didn’t share this news. It was my partner who chose his words and tone carefully as he relayed what had been relayed to him. This was why I had one kidney. This explained my daughter’s previously unexplained premature birth. This meant he and I wouldn’t have our own baby without expensive intervention and a glut of risks. This meant nothing was going as I had planned. I can’t recall my outward reaction, but inside I was heartbroken. Everything ruined by something that had always been there.
In the second bedrest of my life, I delved into obsessive research, trying to understand my secretive reproductive system. I wrote bad poems and disjointed prose to sort through the grief of my stripped fertility and the other losses I had experienced before that. I sought therapy. Sometimes, I simply cried.
It’s been three years since I Iearned I was a “unicorn,” and I still find myself drifting into the “what-ifs,” revisiting broken plans. I imagine an alternate universe where my partner is my daughter’s biological child. I imagine us as a family of four. I wonder if we had taken a different route early on—would we have a child or the story of a devastating experience? I sometimes wish we had a normal family story, and then I realize we are our own normal. I have to embrace the choices and the fates that have lead to today. I have a miracle unicorn baby turned brilliant and compassionate child. I am in a relationship with a loving, stable, and inspiring human who means the world to me and my child. We have an overflowing garden patch. We have a front porch.
Planning is a comfort we can’t always have, and some of life’s best gems are unexpected.
About Ashley
Ashley N Roth is a Nashville-based writer, mother, and educator who often dreams of moonlighting as a silent film actress or spending her days perfecting vegan pastry dough. Her writing has appeared in So Glad You Told Me, Moonsick Magazine, FOXES Magazine, Literary Orphans, and others. She published a children's book called Tiny Tallulah and the Trouble With Zoos in 2015, and is currently wrapping up revisions on her novel. Find her online at www.ashleynroth.com
