Jay Whittaker

My left ovary is smothered in seven centimetres of cyst. A risk to be reduced.

        ~

A beachcombed husk in my palm, multiple crumpled chambers deflated and dried, bereft of hatched whelks. A self-contained nodule of nothing, pod of naught.

        ~

Wobbling on a wooden stool in the school biology lab, I clench my sharpened pencil, transcribe the handbag and curved horns into my exercise book. I will keep practising until fluent, ready to reproduce constituent parts in cartoonish simplicity –

a handbag and curved horns.

I lay my transparent ruler across the paper and draw straight lines, and label (best handwriting): Ovaries, Ampulla, Endometrium, Fallopian Tubes.

But I don’t know them. Not viscerally.

        ~

And how much less interesting than the febrile atmosphere in the school hall on the day one hundred twelve-year-olds are herded in to watch the childbirth video.

At the crowning, commotion at the front. The boy who faints will be taunted for years.

        ~

Imagine: my abdomen crammed with congealed jelly babies.

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Sometimes I looked up and my mother was watching me, as though wondering what she’d done.

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My mother told me:

It was the bloody ants’ fault. I was pregnant with you. Your father was away. You know how I hate ants in the house.

        ~

I am possible.

        ~

Inexorable ant-march across a kitchen floor. No one to talk her down or reassure. Scrubbing. Safe to use ant powder inside when pregnant? Not sure. Read and reread the packet. Relentless. Ants keep marching. Need to empty the cupboard under counter anyway, in case the ants find it, find the flour and sugar inside. Visions of a never-ending ant army carrying their sugar lumps aloft, victorious, back to their queen.

Lifting and bending – getting up and down – panicking about ants and – wet in her knickers – a pooling. Blood –

I am choosing

A punishment for leaving it so late to have a child. For thinking, in their cleverness, with their science, they were above this. The thought of her mother’s told-you-so triumph.

        ~

The GP said his wife took these tablets too; I would never have taken anything when I was pregnant, I even stopped smoking, I was so careful but I thought I was miscarrying —

A risk reduced.

I am possible.

        ~

Alone in bed, sleepless, praying to the god her husband denies.

        ~

She tells me when I am eighteen, have left home for a university ninety miles north, It was in the Sunday Times a few years after you were born. All the cancers in the daughters are at puberty; you’re safe. She tells me now because of course maybe you shouldn’t go on the pill.

I am already on the pill.

She tells me in such a way that makes it clear we won’t talk about it again.

        ~

A hunt for the unknown, the untold, the unnamed. In the Science Library, I turn the handle on a microfilm reader, not too fast (nausea). Oestrogen. Estrogen. Diethylstilbestrol. Diethylstilboestrol. Stilbestrol. DES. Leading me to the long shelves of Index Medicus, metres of cloth-bound volumes, to rifle Bible-thin paper.

I school myself in libraries, their tools, fiche readers, bibliographies, catalogues, all they contain. All that was withheld. All that was never vocalised.

All the swallowed words.

        ~

My inheritance:

Great grandfather – dies of sarcoma.

Grandmother – dies of breast cancer.

Mother – exposure to DES in pregnancy. Two breast cancers. Dies of ovarian cancer.

Me – exposure to DES in utero. One breast cancer (and counting).

I am choosing.

        ~

Buried deep in my pelvis and scheduled for excision: tissue, but more than tissue. My snail shells, my coiled snakes. Mysterious, seen on scans, analysed by faceless medics, discussed in front of me in medical language by my partner and my consultant, doctor to doctor – I have no clue, really.

I am excising a possibility.

        ~

Absence is a poke of pain when I bend forward too quickly, a stabbing gyroscope, a whirligig of knife-ache when I lie on my left side.

        ~

A risk reduced.