Sophie Panzer
The letters arrive when we turn 26. Your coverage is about to expire. We are on our own, no longer allowed this final vestige of parental protection. Our bodies sense threat as we scramble for new plans and turn soft, vulnerable, volatile. Skin erupts into rashes, insides twist with novel pains. Moles creep beyond their borders and must be scooped out by the dermatologist. Don’t sleep on your side this week. We ask our primary care doctors for anxiety medication because we cannot afford psychiatrists. The blue pills make us tired. The green pills make us bloated. The white pills make us so nauseous our beds feel like boats on a stormy sea. When we tell the doctor this he makes us pee in a cup. Is there any possibility you could be pregnant? We are exhausted all the time. We do not understand how we once woke up at 6 a.m. in high school and stayed out past midnight in college. We wait months to see a gastroenterologist for stomach cramps and get scheduled for a colonoscopy. The nurse stabs and stabs and can’t find a vein. When we emerge from the drooling fog of anesthesia our wrists bloom with bruises, hurt worse than our worried guts. We swallow tiny cameras and are informed we have Crohn’s disease or colitis, immune systems gone feral and gnawing at our digestive tracts. We are given steroids and our faces swell like the moon. We go for pelvic exams and gasp with pain when the speculum goes in. The gynecologist frowns, lips pursed in frustration. I need you to relax. We whimper and grit our teeth during the pap smear. Relax. Our results are uploaded to our patient portal and we weep for two hours. Abnormality. Low grade squamous intraepithelial lesion. It sounds like poisonous flowers. Our grandmothers died of cervical cancer and our aunts died of ovarian cancer and the gynecologist has not called to explain what these gruesome words mean. We call the office and cry some more while waiting for a harried nurse to pick up. It’s fine, we’re just going to monitor it. Come back for another one in a year. We find another gynecologist and this one gives us a colposcopy and a biopsy. It’s just a little pinch, you’ll barely feel it. But of course this is a lie and we cry out against her broken promise. She notices the tears streaming down our faces and asks about our pain. Even my boyfriend hurts now. She diagnoses hypertonic pelvic floor dysfunction, prescribes physical therapy. Our new insurance covers two PTs in a twenty mile radius and neither are accepting new patients. At home we lie down in the dark and wonder if having a body is worth anything. There is a bill on the kitchen table. We are too afraid to open it.
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Sophie Panzer is the author of three chapbooks and her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her work appears in New World Writing, Heavy Feather Review, MAYDAY, The Lumiere Review, hex literary, The Hellebore, and others. She lives in Philadelphia.