A Non-Medical View Of The Uterus: Blood, Babies & Hysteria
When I was a kid, I had an irrational fear that my internal organs would fall out of me. It made perfect sense in my head. Gravity is real and I do have a hole at the base of my body, after all. I had this fear long before I knew the word uterus in addition to stomach, liver and intestines. Our education system selectively reveals our own bodies to us. Now I know it wasn’t that irrational after all, never mind all the jokes.
One morning as I was chopping vegetables, when a family member casually announced,
“I think I saw my uterus today.”
I dropped my knife and blustered whathowwhere. That was when I learnt the word prolapse.
My gynac, my hype woman
I became friends with my gynaecologist more than a decade ago. Not the kind of friends where we go for movies together and catch up for coffee. Maybe not friends since this is not a reciprocal relationship. But she is a trusted advisor in one of the most important things in my life – my body. She has been a crucial aspect of my realisations about myself.
I am NOT a collection of body parts to be serviced by different mechanics and optimised to serve someone else.
During routine check-ups, I ask what I should be doing to better care for my health. That’s how I found out about the HPV vaccine. I have weathered fibroids and scary breast lumps under her guidance. In one such conversation, she said,
“You could consider freezing your eggs.”
I thought about it for many weeks. Taking responsibility for my health feels empowering. I make the decisions whose consequences my body experiences. It often throws into sharp relief, how much these are micro-wars – the fight to call my body my own.
Eventually, I told her that I didn’t want to. My reasons were not the expense or discomfort of the procedure. I was single at the time. I feared that if I ever got into a relationship, I would not have the excuse of “I’m too old to get pregnant.” to exercise my agency.
Life taught me that my consent will not be sought in matters that affect my body. I let go of the option because I feared it would only be an option for other people, even to use against me. My life does not have the space to consider what if I would want to have a baby later in life. In the cost-benefit analysis of child-bearing, I chose agency.
A complex mega system within the body
The female reproductive apparatus is an extremely complex system. Among its many wonderous features, it counts self-cleaning as a matter of course. Almost as if nature evolved to give the owners of these organs as little trouble as possible, given how much oppression and lack of access society gives us.
It also has the most enviable production cycle in the world, with a finely calibrated system of raw material generation, inventory management and waste disposal. All of these come with another set of checks and balances called hormones.
Hormones that signal the production of eggs in ovaries.
Hormones to increase chances of fertilisation that reach as far as glowing skin, heightened energy and better mood.
Hormones that trigger the disposal of that month’s stock.
And a whole host of other hormones to make the raw materials grow an entire human being. There are even hormones that induce the brain to be more attuned to a newborn’s needs and recalibrate the entire body into protection and nourishment of this being.
This is the body that the world subjects to menstruation taboos, to body-shaming and to a narrative of being ‘the weaker sex’. And this is the world in which we seek medical assistance.
The medical industry is adequately appointed with feudal worship, marketing bluster and plain unethical capitalism. Add to that the sexism that pervades even doctors. After all, they are human with irrational beliefs, personal agenda and experiential reactions over logical thinking. How does one survive in a system designed to reduce women’s humanity and treat our bodies as the property of male owners?
Ask the layperson what a gynaecologist does and they’ll mumble about bleeding and baby-making. If they care in any way about the older female members of their family, they might know the word hysterectomy. Menstruation, babies and hysterectomy – this encompasses the entire range of caring for a complex female body, in the minds of most people.
Never mind the wide variety of experiences (and issues) that menstruators around the world have. Let’s even set aside the complicated and frankly still life-threatening process of childbirth (why in 2025 do so many people with access to money and top medical support still die on the labour table?).
The easy Hysterectomy prescription
Let’s talk about what sounds like a simple procedure – hysterectomy. Hysterectomies are overprescribed and underdescribed. Here is how a few prominent sources describe it:
Mayo Clinic: Vaginal hysterectomy is a surgical procedure to remove the uterus through the vagina.
Cleveland Clinic: A hysterectomy is a surgical procedure that removes your uterus.
John Hopkins: Hysterectomy is surgery to remove the uterus.
How many of you knew that some hysterectomies also remove the ovaries? I’m not yet sure what happens in hysterectomies that only remove the uterus. Are the fallopian tubes just left hanging like so many unwanted wires discarded by messy computer technicians or electrical engineers? These are not easy answers to get. Medical professionals focus on the wiring of the body, rather than health which is a a more human thing. The internet is full of content that comes with a commercial agenda.
‘Elective surgery’ is one of those terms that passes legal muster and does not require its champions to explain the consequences. When the uterus is one part of a vast network of organs and chemical balance, how does it make sense to treat it as a mechanical part that can be yanked out and discarded on whim?
Many tend to see hysterectomies as relatively simple procedures, especially for menopausal people. But the uterus is not a single machine in a factory, to be discarded when it becomes redundant. It’s one cog (an important one) in a very complex set of operations that impact the entire body.
Read the list of side effects that the pharmaceutical industry is legally bound to inform you about (so they do it in fine print and in inaccessible language). If you undertake to fight the deliberate obfuscation of facts like we did, you’ll need to question whether the benefits of taking the uterus out, outweigh the risks of disrupting a system in balance.
I’ll tell you some of the things that have been known to happen. Bodies change drastically. Hair loss as well as hair growth in hitherto smooth places like the face. Vaginal dryness and urinary incontinence, things that are buried under layers of shame that women aren’t allowed to admit to even when they’re healthy. Did we forget how much hormones can do in a body and a mind? Count depression, anxiety, mood swings – things that a lot of menstruators are resigned to experiencing once a month may now be permanent. And then there is possible memory loss, difficulty sleeping and an inability to concentrate. Losing the uterus just might make some people stupider (because that’s how the world sees it).
How sexism shows up in hysterectomy conversations
The fact that hysterectomies are prescribed so casually tells you how the world sees female bodies. A lot of people’s reactions ranged from,
“Oh, everyone I know gets a hysterectomy after a certain age.”
to
“She’s past menopause anyway so she doesn’t need the uterus.”
The cards are stacked against the female sex. Doctors are notoriously unsympathetic to the pain of women patients. Families and other people take the approach of ‘pain must be endured’ when it comes to women. Gynaecological health is shrouded in policing & silencing. This is not a simple body to tend to or treat.
What this hysterectomy told me about the world
As it turned out, my family member had not glimpsed her uterus but a different organ. Still, the vagina became an entry point for the whole world’s opinions about her body and health. Even though there was no medical issue with her reproductive organs. The word ‘hysterectomy’ is a label that lets people dismiss the complexity of female health (which goes beyond the reproductive).
It would be many months of gynaecologists and other specialists of bones, nerves and anatomical paraphernalia before we reached a treatment plan. My family prioritised exploration, the accuracy of medical diagnosis and weighing the cost/benefits of many solutions. Most people do not. Many cannot. It’s too expensive and I don’t mean just the financial costs.
Regardless of who the person has been, their entire existence is reduced to a single function of reproduction. All we are is baby-makers. And where does that leave one such as me, single and child-free by choice but very much in possession of a female anatomy?
Does nobody else realise they were built, cell by cell in a uterus, the very organ that they so callously dismiss? Maybe sentimentality has no place in health. But this is the same world that has an efficient, accessible solution for erectile dysfunction in elderly men. While a menopausal woman is treated as just a defunct machine. Medicine is falling short of a science when it genders the magnitude of health problems and discriminates in their treatment.
One of the tactics of Israeli aggression on Palestine has been the blockage of access to medical supplies. This means thousands of menstruators (think pubescent girls and perimenopausal women as well as youthful adults) are surviving this nightmare without sanitary supplies. I came across an internet factoid (so yes, this is suspect) that said that the Taliban has outlawed women studying medicine. The laws also do not permit female patients to be examined by male doctors. Let the implications of that sink in.
~O~O~O~O~O~O~
If this post felt too heavy, you could watch a movie called ‘Love and Other Drugs‘. It is a romantic comedy featuring very good-looking white people. It also explores Big Pharma and how the medical industry treats female bodies.
Hysteria
Nobody asks daughters how they feel about motherhood
Which is strange since isn’t it usually daughters who become mothers?
But then nobody asks a uterus if it knows how to spell hysterectomy
Hustera, the womb
The disturbance at its core
The churn in source from whence all life began
Hysteria, exclusive only to women
Of anguish and pain and tears
and unreasonable rage
Of wails too raucous for men’s ears
Of resistance at every stage
I looked at the uterus they took from my mother
Streaked with red, soft and tiny
Smaller than my fist
My fists, my knees, my hair, my eyeballs
Even my own uterus
Came out of this little thing
Now encased in a glass jar
As the doctor’s tired eyes waited for me to get used to it
I stared at the removed uterus and ovaries
They looked like a particularly tender piece of meat
I remember the last time
I was in a room with a piece of anatomy floating in a glass jar
My tonsils. I refused to look at them. I couldn’t explain why.
I only knew I couldn’t comprehend the horror of having a piece of me
sliced out and asked to look at it
like some kind of trophy
Isn’t that how motherhood is?
I wouldn’t know.
This uterus inside me has never carried life.
The glass catches the light as the doctor’s hand wobbles
I came from this?
It feels like such a loss
The first home I’ve ever had
It was once part of me
And I have been its only occupant
But I’ve no time to dwell on that
I wonder if anybody dies of hysterectomy.
A woman’s body is defined as a baby making machine
What happens when the part of you that creates life is taken away?
We know what happens to defunct old mills,
especially after the machinery has been taken away
Is that my fate?
And if it is, who will cry for a uterus that was never used?
Will anybody miss me?
Is a mother still a mother without her womb?
And does a daughter still exist outside the cycle of motherhood?
It’s the primal cry of every feminist
every woman asking
if all I am is of service to you
what happens when I can no longer serve?
Stop. No tears. Grin & bear it.
How many periods does it take to ruin a man’s life?
Only one. Because it means he didn’t get born.
Yes, that was a period joke. Yes, you’re allowed to laugh.
I read about the dangers of hysterectomy.
The internet says its side effects include
blood clots, pain, mood swings, hot flashes, heavy bleeding
Wait, that sounds an awful lot like….a period.
A rest of lifetime period in technicolour
as regular periods become sepia memories, I guess.
I call this poem hysteria because like hysterectomy,
it comes from the Latin word hustera.
Womb. From whence all life begins.
And as they take away the spliced out uterus, the bloodied ovaries
I realise, the single life that it gave birth to
Has been aborted too
I watch the doctor walk away with a glass jar
containing a part of me that I’ve never been able to face
Hysteria.
* If you liked this post, also check out my other posts on Health.
I experience with hysterectomy made me more mature.my mom had to have a hysterectomy.this was my first experience handling everything for my parent. Hospital hinduja mahim . First was the painful admission at the hospital as the insurance company refused to give a single room.the next day operation started in the morning. I was called to the OT in the afternoon.the Dr just opened a tray and showed me the part which was removed. I was not ready for this.looks like it is standard legal procedure to show the removed part to the kin. It’s been more than 12 years but the whole thing is just like this happened yesterday.
My mom never experienced the side effects listed above. But again as the son I would not know.
@XXfan: Yes, it appears to be a legal requirement for the hospital to show the removed parts to kin, probably to guard against organ trafficking.
Hysterectomies have been observed to cause several different symptoms, which is why they get listed in the fine print. It’s a matter of numbers so you can only imagine what happens to the cases that are not deemed to happen often enough. There are 3.5 billion menstruators on the planet so whatever constitutes ‘too small’ a number may still run into tens of thousands. There’s no telling who will be one of those.
I hope your mum is doing okay. And I don’t think it should matter if you’re a son. You can always ask her.