“Keep pressure wrap on for 24 hours”

[Currently sipping Jasmine Pu-Erh tuocha from Bird Pick Tea & Herb in El Monte, CA]

I’m sitting here with my left bicep covered by a pressure wrap to help reduce bruising after removing my Nexplanon birth control implant. I remember when it got inserted about 4 years ago that the doctor who’d wrapped my arm then did a great job; the bruise was minor. Luckily, today’s doctor was able to enter through my old scar, so that new markings would not form. I hope the bruising is minor again.

When the doctor finished the procedure today, she showed me the implant itself, slick with my blood but intact and innocuous. It looked like a shortened coffee stirrer straw. I marveled at the technology which allowed this tiny little thing to slowly dispense body-changing hormones for years throughout my body via the soft underside of my arm. The removal was short in duration but with an intense moment of pain when the local anesthetic was injected (“You’ll feel a pinch and then a burn,” she said, but I didn’t know that the burn would be a fire filling up my arm as if I were flexing the bicep in flames for eternity). Then came the bandages and pressure wrap meant to stay on for 24 hours.

I came home relieved but also fired up. My husband felt the same.

He did not like that I had to have even a moment of pain. His vasectomy was painless. Had he not gotten that done, I would have to endure insertions and removals every few years along with the body changes, hormonal imbalances, pain, and monetary costs associated for the remainder of my child-bearing years. I wasn’t the one to point all of this out. He did, in frustration at how much people with uteruses have to manage.

“All it took me was 15 minutes and a little recovery for something that is done once, most effective, lasts for as long as I want it to, and reversible if I wanted to go back. It’s just logical. I don’t see how anyone can truly say they love their partner if they make them go through that. All the trials and errors and pain.”

I know, darling. Thank you.

We also mutually railed on just how much brainpower and money went into developing this implant that could have gone to, frankly, solving any other medical ailment. This had to be developed because out of survival, we had to protect ourselves, our bodily autonomy, and the egos of men. What diseases might we have conquered had we not had to devote time and energy into yet another form of birth control because our bodies and selves are not respected? Because the fragility of toxic masculinity currently reigns?

I’m grateful that the impetus for my husband’s caring of women’s rights was not a person/me but his own values on human rights. I wish this were the norm.

Though the doctor told me to keep this particular pressure wrap on for 24 hours, I believe we collectively have been wound in a patriarchal pressure wrap for ages that is not serving to stop the bruising but attempting to hide just how bad the bruising and open injury really are.

Release us so that we can heal. This stupid thing has been on too long.

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[P.S. I unearthed something I must have written in this last four-year period while unable to sleep late at night, and I share it below with the following content/trigger warning: body image trauma. Please take care before, during, and after reading if you have experienced similar thoughts and feelings.]

“As an adult now, I wonder why I don't like my body but then I realize further that I can't recall a time when I really did once I had a sense of self. If there was a time, it was a time of naïveté. When I thought I had power because I could be sexy but in reality, I was just playing into men's hands because what power could I have if it was only to be physically desirable? That's not the power I respect or covet.

But when did it get bad? Was it when my mom constantly accused me as a young teen of being up to no good and making me feel ashamed of things I didn't even know about? What reason did she have to even be so angry? I, the studious extracurricular clueless nerd, who didn't even know what sex was nor drugs nor alcohol. Yet I was constantly yelled at.

Or was it because I never felt attractive enough for my college boyfriend who always went out to party and then eventually cheated on me with a girl that looked, at best, androgynous, while I worked so hard to be a good student, good caretaker, and struggled to see physical progress as I exercised or ran to get as fit as he seemed to obsess over being, never quite reaching my goal and then definitely not so after being betrayed. He'd said I was appealing because I was proportional. This boy contacted me 12 years later to apologize for a weight on his own chest and said his greatest fear was destroying my body image, but he has no idea how I still have those issues, even with a husband who loves me, gut and all.

And I don't need to be sexy. I just want to be healthy and feel good enough. And though my husband still finds me beautiful, I don't see that in myself and I don't feel it and then I feel guilty for not feeling it because I must be hurting his feelings. Making him feel unloved or like he has to try to convince me.

And I really hope that it's just a hormonal issue ever since I got this implant, but I'm even more scared that I'm using it as an excuse and when it's out, nothing changes and it's just me me me who feels this way. And I'm so utterly terrified of getting pregnant again that I'm afraid that subconsciously I'm just letting myself get unattractive to avoid it, even though it's becoming unhealthy and my body is breaking down as I age.

There is too much here and I do think it started with my mother but also probably with the internet that raised me during my puberty and subjected me to boys who taught me that I was only interesting if ‘certain things’ but I never knew those were wrong to want to have. I just wanted to be desirable. Now look at me.”

I’m working on it. Removing this implant was a first step. Let’s see what’s next when the excuse is gone.