endometrial biopsy

---

They will tell you that it could be cancer, that they just want to be sure.

The c-word will be bigger than you thought, scarier than you thought, maybe because you've just seen it up close. You will follow [redacted]'s example and instruct everyone not to freak out.

And then you will take 600mg of ibuprofen in the morning and find yourself in the very pink exam room, where there will be a bottle of apple juice on the counter. Mom will be there, too. There will be a collection of brochures on the wall, and the women on them will look down at you with perfect white smiles. They seem happy.

Naturally, your pants will come off. You'll glance at the instruments laid out on the table, vaguely aware of the fact that they've been in and out of you many times before. But you will try not to think too hard about this. Instead, you'll focus on covering yourself the best you can with a large sheet of paper that could conceivably be called a blanket.

They'll have you on the exam table with your head on a pillow and feet in the stirrups. The table itself won't be too hard or too soft; it'll be just right, and you might close your eyes for a moment. Of course, you'll still wish that you weren't riding this body with its ass sticking over the edge of the table.

You will stare at the ceiling as everything goes in and for a moment you will wonder whether your humanity is a lie because you came in so confident that you could take it but you have no idea what "it" is and the way it hurts is clearly not meant to be comprehended or described or located and all you can do is bite down on the stick that is 600mg of ibuprofen as if it might save you from this.

Even when the human returns, you can only understand that the pain is underhanded. You cannot understand what is happening to you, only that everything is clenching and that there is nothing to do but to take it, whatever it is.

But the worst part is that you can take it, with your 600mg of ibuprofen. You can take it, simply by leaking wetness out of your eyes and dropping Mom's hand because she's too real and you need to be somewhere where nothing is real. You can take it because you are a good girl—or at least, you try to be, spreading your legs wider whenever they tell you to.

Every time a soft animal noise escapes you, you wonder if you are doing well enough.

And then somewhere, sometime, it will be over. You will see bits of yourself floating around in this test-tube-jar-thing. A sterile blue hospital glove will stir the concoction with a tiny brush, its bristles stained pink.

They'll give you your apple juice.

You will walk out as though nothing ever happened, past advertisements for vaginal rejuvenation and skin tightening, past the smiling moms plastered over the walls.

And nothing will have happened, because the sample comes back benign.