None of the Above(9)

I pulled the crepe paper gown over myself. “Is that a problem?”

“It’s not an emergency, but things could get strangulated, or caught, in the future. I’ll give you a referral for a surgeon.”

Strangulated was definitely not a word you liked to hear in a doctor’s office. As my blood pressure started to rise, Dr. Johnson reached next to my legs and pulled something out of the exam table that clanked as it unfolded. The stirrups.

“Just put your heels here, scooch toward the bottom of the table so you’re to the end, and lie back. I’m going to start with the internal exam. This is the speculum I’m going to use to see inside.” She brought out a contraption that looked like a metal duck bill and presented it to me in the palm of her hand the way they showed off things on QVC.

When she went between my legs I pulled my knees together and Dr. Johnson had to push them apart. I stared up at the ceiling again. There was a water stain on the corner of one of the tiles.

“Try to relax,” Dr. Johnson said.

That was pretty much impossible, but I closed my eyes and tried to think of other things. Cute puppies. Precalc. The new pair of racing spikes my dad had given me for my birthday. Coach Auerbach had told me that if I was really serious I needed three different pairs—one for racing, one for hurdling practice, and one for . . .

“Holy sh—!” It was like being torn apart from the inside. I gasped in pain and my knees came together, knocking Dr. Johnson in the forehead. I sat up and reached my hand out to apologize. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry.”

Dr. Johnson slid her stool back and looked at me. There was a sharp furrow between her eyes. “No, that’s okay.” She pulled nervously at her latex gloves. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t able to complete the exam. I’ll have to try again.”

I took a deep breath and lay down. The poking started again, and I clenched my hand on the paper covering the table.

“Huh . . . ,” Dr. Johnson muttered to herself.

“What?”

“No, I’m . . . Was it very painful when you had intercourse for the first time?”

“Um, yeah.” It seemed so obvious that I laughed through clenched teeth.

“There are a lot of lacerations. And your vagina is unusually short.”

What the hell did that mean?

“I’m also having some trouble seeing your cervix for the Pap, so I’m going to bring over our ultrasound.”

As I stared up at the ceiling, my heart started going crazy and I could feel my throat tighten. A couple of seconds later, before I could really start to panic, Dr. Johnson came in with a machine that looked like a rolling laptop. I winced as she put some ice-cold glop onto my stomach. As she swirled a little probe beneath my belly button, another furrow formed between her eyes. She frowned twice, and pressed harder.

It seemed to be hours before she finally gave up. “I’m sorry to keep you here longer, Kristin, but I’m going to have to order some extra blood tests.”

That’s when I started feeling numb, remembering how we’d take Mom to get her blood drawn after chemo and the phlebotomists would stick her again and again like she was a human voodoo doll as they filled vial after vial of sluggish, dark blood.

“What’s going on?” I whispered as I got dressed.

Dr. Johnson didn’t look at me at first, just tapped her pencil against my chart as if she was trying to figure out how much to tell me. Finally, she seemed to come to a decision. “Why don’t you sit down.”

I shuffled over to the plastic chair by the door, heart pounding.

“So, Kristin,” Dr. Johnson said, “in that ultrasound I just did, I wasn’t able to find your uterus—your womb—at all.”

“What do you mean?” I stared at her blankly.

“I want you to think back to all your visits to doctors in the past. Did anyone ever mention anything to you about something called androgen insensitivity syndrome, or AIS?”

“No,” I said, panic rising. “What is that? It’s not some kind of cancer, is it?”

“Oh, no,” Dr. Johnson said. “It’s not anything like that. It’s just a . . . a unique genetic syndrome that causes an intersex state—where a person looks outwardly like a female, but has some of the internal characteristics of a male.”

“What do you mean, internal? Like my brain?” My chest tightened.

Dr. Johnson’s mouth opened, but then she paused, as if she wasn’t sure whether she should go on. I was still trying to understand what she’d said, so I focused on her mouth as if that would allow me to understand better. I noticed that her lip liner was a shade too dark for her lipstick. “Kristin. Miss Lattimer,” she said. Why was she being so formal all of a sudden?

“I think that you may be—” Dr. Johnson stopped again and fingered nervously at the lanyard of her ID badge, and at her awkwardness I felt a sudden surge of sympathy toward her. So I swallowed and put on my listening face, and was smiling when Dr. Johnson gathered herself and, on the third try, said what she had to say.

“Miss Lattimer, I think that you might be what some people call a hermaphrodite.”





CHAPTER 4


I blinked. A distant roaring filled my head, like the sound of a seashell pressed against my ear.