Written by Emily Catherine Hughes   

Disclaimer: Read not if your senses are delicate to thy shedding of blood.

Alternate title: “Emergence delirium.”

Alternate alternate title: “Physiological fucked-shui.”

This is not a my first period story.

I didn’t recognize my menarche for what it was when I made my Mata Hari metamorphosis in honors earth science at fourteen, so I ignored it for awhile until rudimentary realization kicked in. When I returned home, I spent the evening discouraged and aggravated as I first attempted to grapple with tampons. My mom, when I told her, uttered the nauseating sentiment, “You’re a woman!”, which I vowed never to do if ever I had a daughter.

Twice the following year, I called her to pick me up from school during that time of the month, once for vomiting and another time for “bleeding through” and soiling my clothes — a spectacular skyrocket of self-confidence for a tenth-grader.

She remembers me once walking down the hallway in our house, enduring a blood-“flood.” My (a)typical period indicators, to this day, often include queasiness, throwing up, and soreness of my thoracic and lumbar spinal vertebrae.

The summer prior to my junior year of high school, my family spent a portion of our vacation in a house-for-rent in a historical town on the coast of Lake Erie, aptly named Lakeside Chautauqua, along with a family whose matriarch my mom had been friends with since the years of their youth.

During our stay, abdominal pains kept me awake at night in the room I shared with my parents. I would just lie on a mattress on the floor, my designated sleeping spot, protractedly moaning. Think the appendicitis scene from Madeline.

One afternoon, a group of us Lakesiders, adults and children, had congregated at the local movie theater when, out of nowhere, I felt a gushing sensation in my underwear. I defaulted to the bathroom, where I discovered a deluge of thick, dark blood had soaked through m’breeches. My vagina was the elevator from The Shining.

My mom eventually discovered me caching away in a bathroom stall, evaluated the damage, and gave me a garment to wrap around my waist so we could escape to our rental house.

Once we arrived, I immediately peregrinated to the bathroom, peeled off my stained undergarments and panicked Carrie-White-in-the-locker-room-style, washing red from my body in the bathtub as though I’d just been drenched in pig’s blood and eviscerated prom via unbridled telekinesis.

Delightfully, I spent the evening naked, bleeding and puking simultaneously, while my alarmed mother called an “online health nurse” in a fruitless attempt to ascertain what the hell was causing this multi-orifice eruption and if it could be classified as an emergency.

The menstrual monsoon eventually subsided. When we returned home, my mom called our pediatrician to recommend a gynecologist for me to see. We were referred to a male doctor, but I requested a woman, which resulted in our visit with Carol, a female nurse. (Go Carole.)

I was initially diag-guessed with an ovarian cyst and prescribed birth control pills to, ideally, shrink the presumed benign growth.

Around this time, I was also administered a slew of ultrasounds, whose sonogram results elicited perplexity from doctors and no decisive explanation. A “mass” was discovered in the vicinity of my breadbasket and I eventually underwent an abdominal MRI to determine the root issue on the decisive.

The MRI machine was an open-ended metal tubular contraption reminiscent of but slightly less claustrophobia-inducing than the cryogenic box that held E.T. and the carbonite crusher in which Han Solo was frozen. It appeared to have originated in Caractacus Potts’s workshop or Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.

During my appointment, my MRI maestro gave me a pair of noise-blocking aviator headphones to block the abrasive whirring and clanking of the apparatus. While I was inside it, I pretended I was in a spaceship. I was sixteen years old.

To me, both the MRI and ultrasound scans resembled the clouds in Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” if they were black-and-white and on hallucinogens. I couldn’t distinguish a damn thing.

Uterus didelphys

Following months of medical tests and the shedding of uterine blood and optical tears, I was finally informed that I had a congenital malformation resulting from a “Müllerian duct anomaly.”

Congenital: of or relating to a condition present at birth — not necessarily pertaining to the genitals, as I initially assumed. Though in my case, the issue was both genital and congenital.

As it were, my matrix had never properly fused in my mother’s utero, bequeathing me with two separate but attached uterine chambers and a vaginal septum. I think. The scientific term for this is uterus didelphys, which, incidentally, doubles as my Native American name.

One of the delphyses (delphi?) had been blocked off entirely, until it, to my understanding, burst with a years’ worth of dammed — damned — period plasma, which accounted for the summer bloodbath and ensuing oral expulsion.

My condition, by the way, is not to be confused with the absurd Venus-flytrap “vagina dentata” in the horror film Teeth, in which a formerly chaste evangelical girl discovers incisors in her box and uses them to bite off the genitals of misbehaving boys in bed. Terrific film, though … but I’m getting off topic.

We were hastily scheduled a consultation with a specialist from Johns Hopkins and it was determined that I required invasive surgery, which ensued in Baltimore, a two-hour drive from my house.

I was drugged with roughly ten different sedatives/analgesics and subjected to a between-the-legs-surgery at Hopkins to rectify the hitch, waking up with stitches in my cervix.

Upon regaining consciousness, I was informed that I’d had an averse reaction to the general anesthesia during the procedure, designated emergence delirium, which reportedly involved “thrashing” and necessitated my re-tranquilization. A swell sentiment to wake up to after surgery on my reproductive system.

Dr. G., the Hopkins professional who had implemented the surgery, informed us that in cases like mine, in conjunction with the Müllerian syndrome, the urinary tract and kidneys might also have been affected. I was written a prescription for an X-ray with contrast to investigate this, and the radiologist’s results concluded I had:

Unilateral renal agenesis

Clinical vernacular-decipherer: unilateral = one side, renal = kidney, agenesis = failed to grow.

One night, my mom stood in the doorframe to her bedroom and gravely informed me that the doctor had called. Evidently, she said, I’d been missing my left kidney from birth.

(Heavens to Murgatroyd! A fist-sized piece of anatomy, utterly absent! Like Frosty the Snowman in Frosty Returns, that horrid spinoff of the original animated movie.)

Since the function of a kidney is to act as a blood purifier, this likely explains my low tolerance for alcohol. Darwinian marvel that I am, I rely entirely on Merl, my trusty right kiddo, to keep my blood a-filtered, lest I grow to require dialysis in old age like my late-and-great-aunt Marilyn.

Merl, I’ve been told, is of normal size and functionality, as opposed to a compensatory Goliath superkidney. To preserve it, I’ve been instructed to avoid contact sports and binge drinking.

For a while, I donned a silver medical bracelet stamped with NO LEFT KIDNEY, mostly because my cautious mother suggested it and I wanted to claim ownership of my “birth defect.”

At eighteen, I visited a nephrologist — kidney doctor — who administered blood samples that, thankfully, returned normal results. Most of the other patients at the practice were geriatric.

Despite my biological blip, I live my life no differently than I would with two fully-functioning kidneys and only one uterine chamber.

For procreative purposes, everything below my belly-button functions normally. However, if I ever carry a pregnancy to term, I’d be considered a “high-risk” case, would require the supervision of medical specialists, and be a probable contender for a Cesarean section — which sounds mad superior to traditional vaginal delivery.

It amazes me that I subsisted up until my late teens completely unaware I was devoid of a vital organ (and unknowingly possessed a wonky uterus). Biology, man. It’s unbelievable.

Emily Hughes is a renowned coffee connoisseur whose caffeine tolerance (dependence) rivals those of the Lorelais Gilmore. Her record for most cups consumed in a single day is twelve.