I'd walked into the ER hours earlier, describing symptoms my father — a chiropractor — had diagnosed over the phone. Cauda equina syndrome. So rare that the doctors assumed I was drug-seeking. A woman on welfare, in the middle of a divorce, showing up talking about nerve compression in her pelvic girdle? Sure, lady. Have a seat.

It took hours to convince them to run the tests. Hours I didn't have. The nerves at the base of my spine were being compressed. Without immediate surgery, I would lose control of my bladder and bowels permanently. I might lose the ability to walk. The damage would be irreversible.

And now, finally, the MRI. But to get the MRI, I needed to remove all metal.

Right.

Here's the thing about divorce and what might have been a midlife crisis at 31: I'd gotten my clitoral hood pierced.

I know. I don't know what I was thinking either. But there it was.

And now I needed to remove it.

I tried. In the bathroom. Alone. Struggling with tiny metal balls and jewelry I couldn't see and hands that were shaking because, you know, my spine was failing.

It wouldn't come off.

The technician knocked. "Everything okay?"

No. Nothing was okay.

I had two choices: tell them I couldn't remove it and delay the MRI, or ask for help.

From my mother.

Who was in the waiting room.

Who had no idea I'd done this.

I opened the door. "Mom? I need… help."

To her eternal credit, my mother walked into that room, took one look at the situation, and said, "Okay. I guess we're doing this."

No judgment. No questions. Just: let's solve the problem.

She helped me remove it. We didn't speak about it. We walked out of that bathroom like nothing had happened.

And then she sat in the waiting room while they did the MRI and I went into emergency surgery.

The things a mother will do for you.

I've never brought it up since. Neither has she. And I never put it back in.

But sometimes I think about that moment — standing there, vulnerable and ridiculous and terrified, needing help with something embarrassing — and I think: that's love. Not the pretty kind. The "okay, I guess we're doing this" kind. The kind that shows up even when it's weird.

THE DIAGNOSIS

They wheeled me into surgery.

When I woke up, there were tubes everywhere. A catheter. Wires. Monitors. And a doctor telling me what my life would look like now.

"You'll need the catheter permanently. Probably a colostomy bag. This is likely forever."

Forever.

I was 31. Two kids — a 7-year-old and a 1-year-old. A business barely holding together. In the middle of a divorce. Living in my mother's basement. And now a lifetime sentence attached to medical equipment.

I was terrified.

I want to tell you I was brave in that moment. That I heard "forever" and immediately started fighting. But that's the version I've told myself for seventeen years. The truth is I lay there and I was the same little girl I'd always been — the one rejected by her biological father, the one who learned early that if you act like you don't care, it hurts less. The one who stopped crying somewhere along the way because the pain felt like too much and crying felt like weakness.

So I didn't cry. I did what I've always done. I got fierce.

I thought: Absolutely not.

My mother always said my will was stronger than hers. She got hers from her mother. Three generations of women who refused to stay down. I don't know if that's strength or stubbornness or just the only thing we know how to do. But lying in that hospital bed, it was all I had.

And then — because the business doesn't stop just because your spine is failing — I started making calls from my hospital bed. On Dilaudid.

Any semblance of normalcy was not there. It was clear to everyone on the other end of the phone that something was very wrong with me. The things that come out of your mouth on hospital-grade narcotics feel brilliant in the moment and mortifying in retrospect. One of those cringe moments you carry with you forever, wishing you'd just put the fricken phone down.

But the company was scaling. We were in Whole Foods. We had international distribution. And I was a single mom on welfare who couldn't afford to let it fall apart, even from a hospital bed.

On day three, I read an article in our local paper about the heroin problem in Santa Cruz. The way they described the experience sounded exactly like what I was feeling on Dilaudid. And I'd watched friends get addicted to pain pills before. I knew what that road looked like.

I told my nurse: If I ask for it again, don't give it to me.

Day three. Spine surgery. And I was more afraid of the pills than the pain.

THE REFUSAL

My birthday was in two weeks.

I was not — under any circumstances — going out with a catheter bag strapped to my leg.

So I did what any reasonable person does when doctors tell them something is impossible: I went to YouTube.

I watched videos on catheter removal. I studied pelvic floor anatomy. I read medical journals I only half understood. I learned about neuroplasticity, visualization, and the kind of mind-body connection that makes scientists uncomfortable at dinner parties.

And then I started talking to my pelvis.

Out loud.

"You know how to do this. You've done this your whole life. Remember."

Every day. Lying in bed. Talking to nerves that supposedly didn't work anymore. Asking my body to rewire itself. To figure it out.

Two weeks later, I removed the catheter myself.

The doctors just stared at me.

I went out for my birthday. I wore something that didn't accommodate medical equipment. I drank something I probably shouldn't have. And I stood in a bar bathroom at one point, alone, and just breathed. Because two weeks ago a doctor had told me this was forever. And here I was. Standing. Free. In a bathroom I'd chosen to walk into, not one where I was asking my mother to help me remove a piercing while my spine collapsed.

Problem solved, right?

Not even close.

THE THINGS THEY DON'T TELL YOU

Here's what the medical forms don't mention: I couldn't have an orgasm for three years.

Not "it was difficult." Not "it took time." Three years. That entire system went offline and stayed offline while my body slowly figured out how to rewire itself.

Nobody talks about this part. Not the doctors, not the recovery pamphlets, not the follow-up appointments where they check boxes and ask about mobility. Nobody asks if your body still feels like yours.

And then one day, about three years in, it came back. Not the way it was before. To my surprise, it had moved. Shifted. What used to be external became internal — a kind of orgasm I'd never had before. Cerebral. Deeper. Like my body had rerouted itself around the damage and found something different on the other side.

I don't know how to describe it other than: my body figured it out. Not back to normal. Just… new.

The mind-body connection isn't woo-woo nonsense. It's neuroscience. Your brain is constantly rewiring based on what you tell it to focus on.

But you have to be willing to do the weird stuff. And you have to be patient.

Which, if we're being honest, is harder than the weird stuff.

WHAT CONTINUING ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

Every week I get a colonic.

Every week it feels like gas pain — the deep, cramping kind that makes you question every choice that led you here. Every week I don't want to go. I sit in my car in the parking lot and think: Is this my life?

Sometimes I think about surrendering. Just accepting the colostomy bag. Letting the fight be over. What would it feel like to stop?

And sometimes, in that parking lot, the armor slips. Not the fierce version of me that refused the catheter and talked her pelvis into working again. The other one. The one I've spent my whole life protecting. The little girl who just wanted to be loved and learned to pretend she didn't need it.

She's still in there. She's the one who's tired. She's the one who doesn't want to go inside.

I go in anyway. Not because I'm brave. Because my mother raised me, and her mother raised her, and somewhere in that line of women, quitting wasn't passed down.

I will die on this hill.

I cry all the time now.

The woman who stopped crying because it felt like weakness, who armored up at 31 and didn't come back down for years — she cries at commercials. At her kids. At nothing. At everything.

My feelings live so close to the surface now, after years of being boxed up and hidden away — like that box of junk you shove in the back of your closet and pretend isn't there. Seventeen years of fighting to get my body back, and the thing that finally came back last was the part I'd locked away on purpose.

I'm still here. Still managing. Still sitting in that parking lot every Wednesday.

Still choosing. And now, finally, still feeling.

Originally published at https://saintkaymedia.com.