With Jack’s 8th birthday approaching in May, I’ve been thinking about the summer he was born. Not just the soft parts, but the parts that left a mark. Back then, the ink on his birth certificate was barely dry when the whispers of healthcare professionals shifted. They weren’t asking about his latch anymore; they were asking about my uterus. The transition from “new mom” to “medical patient” happened in a blur of postpartum fog. I was desperate to avoid the daily tether of a pill, and the IUD felt like a golden ticket—autonomy without the effort.

“Take some Tylenol before you come,” they said. Cool. Like I was heading in for a dental cleaning and not an invasive structural renovation.

I spent the week waiting and—inevitably—Googling. My screen filled with “IUD Babies,” tiny infants pictured on Facebook clutching the very plastic crosses meant to prevent them. My nerves hummed. Between the horror stories and the postpartum haze, I barely trusted Dan to keep Jack alive for an hour, let alone trusted my own body to host a stowaway.

The day arrived, and my anxiety was a high-voltage wire. In the exam room, a sweet nurse moved like a ghost, quietly laying out silver instruments on a blue paper tray. She nodded as I rambled, her eyes kind but inexperienced. “It’s routine,” she promised, though she’d never had one herself. I took a breath, trying to find center.

Then the door swung open—no knock, just a gust of sterile air.

“This is not what I need,” the doctor snapped, her voice a serrated blade directed at the nurse. “If you’re going to work with me, you’d best remember how I work.”

The room curdled. I sat on the table, a shivering bird in a paper gown, feeling the sudden, sharp weight of my own exposure. She didn’t look at me. She stated the implantation as a cold, hard fact—a chore she had performed a million times and was bored of by the millionth-and-one.

“Scoot down,” she commanded.

I wiggled my naked hips toward the edge of the table, my feet rattling in the cold stirrups. I braced. Then came the intrusion: the slick, oily slide of gel, the biting snap of the metal speculum, the clamps pinning me open. My face crumpled. I tucked my arm over my eyes, breathing shallow, hot air into the crook of my elbow.

“Your uterus is tilted,” she grunted, her frustration vibrating through the instruments buried inside me.

She shoved. She pulled. She re-inserted. I couldn’t speak; my mouth was full of the metallic taste of fear. Her movements were jagged, devoid of grace. When she pinned the mechanism open, I felt stretched beyond human limits—the sickening sensation of metal forcing its way into a space meant for softness.

“I only have one shot at this,” she muttered to herself, sounding more annoyed by the logistics than the human trembling on her table.

Suddenly, she stood up and yanked the door wide open. A draft whistled toward my open, exposed self. I froze, the white light of the hallway spilling onto my most private vulnerability. Is she having an emergency? Is there a fire? I wondered wildly.

“Can you come look?” she yelled into the hallway, her voice echoing off the linoleum.

A second doctor drifted in, holding a clipboard like a shield to block the view of my indignity. “Hi, I’m Dr. So-and-So. Is it okay if I examine you?”

“Why not?” I deadpanned to the ceiling tiles, my voice small and tight. “We’re all here. Anyone else need a sneak peek?”

I felt the mechanism shift—a shove that felt like being punched from the inside out. I winced, my fingernails digging into the thin, scratchy paper of the table. The second doctor nodded and vanished. The original doctor sighed, a sound of profound boredom.

“This will cramp a little.”

The release was not a cramp. It was a shredding. It felt like a jagged hook had been snagged on my heart and pulled downward. My insides felt ripped from the center out. My knees jerked; my body tried to coil into a fetal ball to protect itself from the intruder.

“Stop moving!” she shouted, her voice booming in the small room.

I went deaf. The world narrowed to the sound of my own heartbeat, a frantic, trapped-bird thrumming. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes, soaking into the thin paper of the headrest. My uterus was screaming, contracting in a frantic, rhythmic protest against the metal tethered inside it.

“You may want to schedule an ultrasound to make sure it’s in the right spot,” she said, marching toward the door. The snap of the latch was the final punctuation.

I cleaned myself with napkins that felt like sandpaper. The lubricant was stubborn, and the paper shredded, leaving a messy trail across my legs. I dressed robotically. I had forgotten every instruction. My brain was a white-noise machine of panic: What is inside me? Am I bleeding? Why does it hurt like this?

I found her in her office, inhaling a yogurt.

“I have a question,” I whispered.

She didn’t look up, her voice dripping with exasperation as she told me she’d already explained it. I froze, the pulse between my legs throbbing in time with her attitude. I backed away. I’d let Google be my doctor; at least Google didn’t treat me like a nuisance.

At the front desk, the next opening was a month away. A month.

“Nothing sooner?” I asked. My gut wasn’t just ringing alarm bells; it was a five-alarm fire.

“Tomorrow. At the other location.”

The next day, with Jack in the stroller because I couldn’t trust the world to hold him for me, I walked laps in a different waiting room. Laps of insecurity. Laps of rage.

They made me pee in a cup. “To make sure you’re not pregnant.”

“I was here yesterday,” I snapped, exhausted. “Nothing has happened.”

The ultrasound technician was cold until the doctor walked in—the same woman who had been called into my exam room the day before. She recognized me instantly.

“I want it out,” I said, my voice shaking. “If it’s wrong, take it out. And I didn’t even like that woman yesterday.”

The doctor’s face went grave. “It didn’t attach correctly to the wall,” she said softly. “We can take it out today.”

Jack began to scream. As I laid back for the second time in twenty-four hours, I reached out one arm to rock his stroller. “You’re fine,” I crooned to him, or maybe to myself. “You’re okay. We’ll be done in a minute.”

Aha!

The doctor popped up from between my legs, holding the bloody, plastic contraption aloft like a shark tooth found on a beach. A trophy of a war I never wanted to fight.

“Oh, thank God,” I breathed. Jack went quiet.

It wasn’t until I was packing him into his car seat that the dam broke. I called Dan and blubbered—the hurt, the violation, the sheer, staggering incompetence of it all. “It didn’t even fucking go in right!” I wailed.

I drove home with one hand on the wheel and the other reaching back to touch Jack’s soft, sleeping foot. The contrast was sickening: the tenderness of his skin versus the cold, bloody shark tooth the doctor had just pulled out of me. It’s a hell of a hike, the distance a woman goes between “routine” and “trauma” before she’s even had her morning coffee. We carry the life, we carry the metal, and we carry the bill for the doctors who don’t even know our names.

So anyway, happy Women’s Month.