Lumps and all the Things They Could Mean
A girl in 6th grade told me she got cancer from shaving her armpits the wrong way. I believed her at the time, since I had never shaved. She became a regular in my prayers.
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When I learned what the bubonic plague was I was in 5th grade on my cousin’s trampoline. She was in 6th grade. Her history class was learning about the black plague, massive oozing puss-filled bubons that slaughtered the European population. When my dog got fleas soon after, I began checking myself for lumps in my groin and armpits.
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In 6th grade I read a woman’s magazine covered in hairspray, gritty with layers of L’Oreal, in the dusty pink bathroom at my grandmother’s house. It warned of lumps forming, cancerous tumors that would fill my chest cavity, eat holes through breast tissue like moths to wool, devour my lymph nodes. No one told me that thickening breast tissue was an aspect of puberty.
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In 10th grade I tried shaving my pubic hair to go swimming with friends. I was still a virgin, but an ingrown hair had me convinced that I had syphilis. My mom brushed off my fear, but google search promised I would not develop dementia for another 30 or so years after the “syphilis rash” went dormant.
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I thought I had early breast cancer for years until my body was explained to me by my pediatrician in 9th grade.
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Every year there are a few cases in America, mostly in the desertous regions, of the bubonic plague raising its knobby pustulous head.
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In the summer of 2018 I drank two bottles of wine and whatever else anyone dared to hand me. I laid on my face in the driveway behind my house. I'm not sure how long I laid there, but in the morning my boyfriend told me he carried me from between two cars to my bedroom. I had a rough open flap of skin on the border of my upper lip from grinding my teeth against gravel as I vomited into the dirt, but I told him it could be syphilis. My lip bruised and scabbed like an average drunken wound, but I refused to kiss him or let him eat me out unless there was a piece of seran wrap between us. I had blood work, pee tests, and a pap smear done the following week. I did not tell the doctors how the blemish appeared, and they told me that I most likely had nothing before they even ran the tests. Even after the scab fell from my upper lip and the doctor left a voicemail affirming that I had absolutely no STDs, I would not kiss my boyfriend without cling wrap between us for another week. My make-shift dental dam kept us almost sane for the time until my doctor left the voicemail that I was negative for all sexual diseases.
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Sometimes I still get scared that one small bump is the beginning of an opening syphilis sore.
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A friend in high school called me crying and asked me to come to her room. When I got there, my other friend let me in. The girl was laying in the middle of her floor with no pants or underwear. She asked me to look at her vagina because she was scared something was not right, she was scared she had an STD as a virgin or that she had developed cancer. She cried to our other friend for a long time while I fumbled around pretending to be a medical professional with my bare hands. Eventually, I realised she was talking about her labia being larger than she thought they were supposed to be based on porn, and she was scared that it was a sign of disease. I told her that my best friend growing up had labia minora that showed outside of her labia majora. I hardly knew these terms, and I had to draw her a picture with labeled parts.
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I learned what my cervix is, and that it feels like a lump with a hole in the middle. My cervix will feel like the end of my nose, said a cosmo magazine.
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When I was at my lowest weight in my adult life, I could lay on my back and see various organs protruding from between my ribs and hip bones. I thought I was pregnant at first, that I may have been seeing a head or fist press up from under layers of fat. I was not.
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I had my breasts checked by my doctor in my junior year of college, at the same time as my first pap smear. She showed me how to accurately check for breast cancer. The lumps would feel like a small pebble under my skin, and if I found something I should come in to be checked because most women are actually just feeling thickening tissue around ovulation.
