[1,372 words]
[ I. ]
At 4 months, a baby in the womb is 6 and a half to 7 inches long. 7 inches is 17.78 centimeters. A medium cantaloupe measures 15 to 25 centimeters. If an ovarian cyst is over 6 centimeters, it should be removed. The rate of teen pregnancy in 1975 was 5.5%. The number of times I have been pregnant is zero.
II.
She’s pregnant, the doctor said to my mother. 4 months pregnant. Didn’t you notice the size of her belly? I remember thinking this was unfair; I preferred to be ignored by my mother rather than nagged about my weight.
I was 3 months into my 3rd year of high school, it was the 5th school I’d gone to, the 9th place I’d lived in 15 years. I had zero friends and had been kissed zero times.
III.
You must have been doing it out in the woods. Stop lying, the nurse hissed. I had been lying on the examination table for 6 minutes. The doctor had palpated my stomach 5 times. He had asked me 3 times when I had had sex. I had said never 3 times. My mother had said nothing.
I have 1 memory of shiny metal tools lying on a white towel and another of the doctor saying, we will have to do an internal examination. I have zero memories of the exam. At the time I had no idea where my vagina was located. I remember the doctor saying, This fetus is at 4 months gestation.
IV.
My mother asked 1 question: Does she have a mushy cervix? She should have a mushy cervix if she’s pregnant. My mother chose 2 disturbing words of the 40,000 words most Americans know. When I hear either of those words, I feel sick.
[ V. ]
If I told you that some of the numbers here are imaginary although the events are as described, would you believe me? Did you know that when imaginary numbers are squared, they yield a negative result? Perhaps you think that I am distancing myself from my experience through quantification. You think that numbers are cold and irrational abstractions. But numbers have their stories too. 13 for example or the number 3. It is hard to imagine how difficult it must be for 13 to carry her burden but 3 is not much better off. Being lucky for eternity comes with so many expectations. Desperate 13, always on the run, an outsider, not permitted in hotels or airplanes, a black cloud encircling her. But also, poor 3, she must stay bright and shiny no matter how she feels. She puts people off. Being a prime means nothing if you have no friends.
VI.
It was 2 days before our appointment with a specialist and 2 hours after I met him when he admitted me to the hospital. He told me 3 times to remain in bed or I might die. There was 1 room available in the hospital. It was on the maternity ward. There were 13 apologies for putting me on the maternity ward.
[ VII. ]
Some people say that numbers don’t exist. They say you can’t pick up the number 3 and throw it out the window. You can’t taste number 3 although if you could it might taste like cantaloupe. You could cut out the 3 on this page and crush it under your feet but you wouldn’t be crushing the number 3 any more than if you crushed a picture of me, you would have crushed me. You would only be crushing a piece of paper. You can’t hurt number 3. 3 lives outside space and time.
VIII.
I was in Room 513 for 11 hours. My parents stayed with me for 31 minutes. Do you see what I did there? Four primes. Until that night I had always wanted to be a prime. For the remainder of 11 hours the woman in the next bed talked very fast and cried. She mentioned streaming black blood from my vagina 72 times. She complained of pain once every 6 minutes. She said she would never have another child more times than I remember. We slept for zero minutes. In the morning, they took her to the first of 2 mental hospitals. I saw her again zero times.
I saw her husband 1 time. He was sad. He apologized for 15 minutes for her post-partum psychosis. I did not know what this was. I saw him again zero times.
[ IX. ]
There are three types of ovarian tumors: Type 1 is the Dermoid which often contains hair and teeth and sometimes eyeballs. It is also called a teratoma which comes from the word for monster in Greek. Type 2 is the Cystadenoma. It floats like a balloon tied to the ovary by a thin stem that resembles the stem of a flower. Type 3 is the Endometrioma. Its blood has the color and texture of melted chocolate. The percentage of cancerous cysts in 15-year-old girls is 1 percent. Palpation and pressure have a 23% chance of causing the cyst to burst. A large burst cyst causes chemical peritonitis and sepsis 93% of the time.
X.
I was in surgery for 2.3 hours. I had 26 nightmares the first night. When I finally woke up, I had 53 stitches that were removed 21 days later. I had been incoherent for 13 hours. I remained in the hospital for 5 days. My father came to see me 1 time. He played cards with me for 37 minutes. After the 1st night, my mother came zero times. I was home from school for 39 days. I lost 7 pounds. When I returned to school, a teacher told me how pretty I was now that I had lost weight.
XI.
That tumor was the size of a cantaloupe. Who said that? I have heard it, shouted, whispered, 1000s of times now. That tumor was the size of a cantaloupe. What size was the cantaloupe, I always ask, because there is a difference between small, medium, and large. A small cantaloupe weighs about 441 grams and a large one weighs 2 times 441. A four-month-old baby in the womb weighs about 400 grams. I wait for an answer. The number of responses is zero.
XII.
I ate cantaloupe 13 times before I was 17. The slices I ate were 3/4s of an inch thick. The number of times my mother said you cannot have more cantaloupe, it’s too expensive was 4 x 13. When I was 23, I bought my first cantaloupe with my own money for $2.89 and ate 29 ounces of cantaloupe. From the age of 23 to 68, I have eaten cantaloupe more times than I can count. Now I eat 1/2 of a medium cantaloupe at a time. I ate 1 this morning. Its diameter was 14.3 millimeters.
XIII.
36 years ago, I stumbled across a picture of my tumor being removed from my open belly. It was in a box of family photos, lodged among the baby pictures and the summer house photos, under some black and white prints of relatives I didn’t know. My tumor was white and covered with pulsing pink blood vessels. The man lifting it out of my body could barely hold it with two hands. His broad fingers splayed to contain it as it tried to flop back into my belly, more like a jellyfish than a cantaloupe.
Now I am 68 but the day I found that picture I was 32 years, 6 months and 1 day old. At the exact same moment, I was 15 years, 4 months, and 22 days old, and on the table in a doctor’s office. I was also in a hospital, listening to a psychotic woman who talked fast about babies and blood. I was playing cards with my father, and later, after he left, studying the 53 stitches, belly button to crotch, the raised red scar. I was lying on a gurney, being rolled into surgery, then listening to someone who was me moan with pain in a dark room.
I was thinking that even if I could, I would have zero children. I was 100 percent fine with that.
Kathryn D. Temple teaches and writes at Georgetown University. Her latest work has appeared in Streetlight, Fauxmoir, Delmarva Review, and 3Elements, among others. She was a funded finalist for the Lori White Nonfiction Fellowship in 2023. In addition to her creative work, she has published two academic books on law & emotions and many essays in academic journals. Find her on the Chesapeake Bay or at https://georgetown.academia.edu/KathrynTemple and https://medium.com/@templek
