“Any complaints other than sleeping?Any pains or ailments?Irregular periods?”
I bark out a laugh before realizing it isn’t really funny.
“Did you forget my uterus is long gone?”
She winces.“Jesus, I’m sorry.Of course.”
She’s one of the very few who know I was diagnosed with endometrial cancer at twenty-three years old which cost me my uterus, but that left me alive and cancer-free.
I was living in Seattle at the time.My mother had moved us there when I was fourteen because of better job opportunities for her.I didn’t want to move, but I had no choice; being a single mother, Mom was the only parent, the only one providing for us, so she made the call.
“What about mood swings?Hot flashes?”
“You think I’m menopausal?I’m not even forty,” I protest.
“You will be in three months and it’s not unheard of, women who have a hysterectomy but still have their ovaries can enter perimenopause earlier than average.”
I scoff.I might as well haveofficial spinstertattooed on my forehead.
“No new pains or ailments.I haven’t noticed any hot flashes, unless you count pulling my muffins out of the oven, and the only mood swings I have are a direct result of not sleeping,” I grumble, already regretting my impromptu visit.
Dana grins and lifts her hands in capitulation.
“Fair enough, but I think it’s been a while since you’ve had your blood work done, so why don’t we do that and make sure there’s nothing else going on.”
I quietly concede with a nod, and Dana opens a drawer to pull out a couple of collection tubes, a syringe, alcohol wipes, and a tourniquet.
“It was the phone call,” I blurt out when I feel the needle slide under my skin.
Dana, who is focused on her work, lifts her gaze.
“Phone call?”she prompts.
“Yeah.Remember Ken?”
She looks shocked.“Your half brother?I thought you lost touch with him.”
I nod.More like I banned him from my life, but lost touch with him sounds much friendlier.
“I was surprised too.”
I’d actually been too shocked to speak which, as it turned out, wasn’t necessary anyway.He did all the talking.
“Seeing as you think it had something to do with your inability to sleep, I gather the call didn’t go well?”she probes gently as she slips the needle from my arm.
“Fair statement.He was just stirring up old family drama.”
It had been a lot more than that, but there’s no way I can talk about it.
Hell, other than Savvy, I haven’t even told anyone Ken was in jail.He’d been seventeen when we moved to Seattle and quickly got himself tangled up with a street gang, The Lotus Squad.That was not a great time.Mom did her best to pull him out of that world, but he brushed her off.He dropped out of school and barely came home anymore.
By the time he was twenty-one, he was in jail, convicted of a list of violent, gang-related crimes—including an aggravated robbery—earning him a twenty-five-year sentence.I only saw him once while he was incarcerated.Let’s just say that was an experience I didn’t wish to repeat, and I actively erased him from my life out of self-preservation.
Until he called me, I hadn’t spoken to him in twenty years.
“Family drama is the worst,” Dana commiserates.
She tapes down the cotton ball she’s had pressed against the puncture wound.
