“No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body.” –Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body.

*

I once had a nightmare from seeing a silent trailer. It was for a movie called The Human Centipede, in which a doctor decides to trap strangers in his lab of horrors and sew them together, mouth to anus, into a literal human centipede. The sound for the trailer, for whatever reason, did not work. The muted image created an afterimage that hibernated inside my brain for weeks. 

I have always had a love-hate relationship with horror. I love a good haunting; I hate to be haunted. In body horror films, you don’t get killed by the werewolf or the one-hooked man. Those deaths would be too quick, too easy. Instead, you watch yourself slowly transform into the monster itself. Your skin grows fur, your body mutates into insects, your legs multiply into spiders. You live forever with the beast beneath your skin, considering your choices—that to kill the Devil growing inside you, you must be willing to kill yourself.

Or perhaps I hate body horror because it feels hauntingly familiar.

*

When it started, I thought I was hypoglycemic, needing to eat every two hours or so in order not to feel faint. But the faintness always followed. Within a few months, I couldn’t walk up the stairs or even down my street without getting out of breath, sometimes needing to plop down in the middle of a sidewalk. I developed strange cravings for rocks and blocks of cement. I would walk down fractured concrete, eating slabs of pavement. I ran my hand down a cracked wall, the drywall smelled like earth and minerals. 

In 2015, I was living without health insurance and going to a sliding-scale clinic where I saw a perfectly nice white nurse practitioner. “I don’t think this is normal,” I said to her again and again. There were clots the size of small fruit coming out of my body. I wore adult diapers to avoid having to wash my sheets every night. The bleeding had not stopped for almost two months.

“I can prescribe you more iron,” she replied. After multiple appointments with no change in my symptoms, she agreed to insert an IUD to help manage the blood loss. It fell out a few days later when I went to get an ultrasound. Had it not been for my sonographer giving me my results (against hospital protocol), I might never have known what was wrong with me. “What do you mean she said you have fibroids?” my NP asked. She looked incredulous. She never bothered to read the results herself.

A uterine fibroid, which is a tumor found in the uterus, is benign more than ninety-nine percent of the time. Still, I was told by my doctor that multiple fibroids could increase my chances of uterine cancer. Seventy percent of people with uteruses will develop fibroids over the course of their lifetime. This number increases to eighty percent for Black folk, most of them women, who are three times more likely to be hospitalized for fibroids than any other demographic. There is no conclusive research on why we are more likely to develop fibroids and get them so young, observes Dr. Erica E. Marsh, a professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan Medical School and Chief of the Division of Reproductive Endocrinology and Infertility. But she suggests there may be a link between higher levels of estradiol and estrogen-producing enzymes and fibroid growth. Yet medical experts agree that we cannot get to the root of why fibroids are so prevalent in our bodies when only examining us through our parts. “We know that race is also about racism,” Dr. Marsh told me, “and racism can look like increased exposure to environmental toxins or beauty products—all of which can lead to different disease characteristics.” 

Racism itself appears in our bodies as PTSD, as depression, as fibroids. It can become difficult to recognize the bloating Black body as your own.

*

Six days into 2016, I couldn’t get out of bed to use the bathroom. I sat on the floor for thirty minutes, hyperventilating, before a friend picked me up to take me to the E.R. My blood count had dropped to 5 HGB. This number, the doctors said, can often signify heart failure, which in turn can signify death. I was transfused two blood units on two separate occasions, staying in the hospital for several nights at a time. The perfectly nice white male surgeon made an incision to exorcize the fibroids from my uterus. The cut was about the width of my palm. I could not feel his hands as he sewed my sides back together. 

“Why didn’t you come in sooner?” the E.R. physician asked me on my first visit. “You lost a lot of blood. You could have died.” The statement stilled me. “I’m surprised your previous doctor never detected this,” she continued. “Fibroids are actually quite common.”

In fact, fibroids are so common in Black women’s bodies it is a wonder we are so frequently disbelieved. That is, of course, until you consider our history within the field of medicine. 

Historically, my body was considered stronger, like a mule’s. Bodies like mine were once experimented on without the use of anesthesia, our skin too thick to feel the pain.  J. Marion Sims, the so-called “father of gynecology,” once said that the experiments he performed on enslaved Black women’s bodies were “not painful enough to justify the trouble and risk” of administering anesthesia and yet were also “so painful, that none but a woman could have borne them.” Known for finding a cure for vesicovaginal fistula (a debilitating childbirth complication), Sims perfected his first operation on an enslaved girl named Anarcha, who was seventeen when he first purchased her. His success came after thirty failed attempts at stripping her naked along with a dozen others, her body held down by a group of white men, scraping away at her vaginal edges and suturing her back together. There was a statue venerating Sims’ legacy in Central Park, a few blocks from my high school, for eighty-four years, until it was finally taken down in 2018. 

*

During my first E.R. visit, the doctor told me she didn’t understand how I could have been walking around and working for so long in my condition. “My last doctor told me everything was fine,” I replied. When your pain is ignored for that long, you start to believe it’s not there. I am strong as a mule, I want to say, my skin as thick as rope. 

*

To this day, Black women are less likely than other demographics to be prescribed pain medication for anything from broken bones to cervical cancer. It may be easier to believe the pain is normal than to sit in the knowledge that on a subconscious level, no one cares. “Disrespect can also look like ignoring it,” Dr. Laura Riley, the first Black woman appointed as the OB-GYN-in-Chief at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, as well as the current department director, said to me. “If you are seeing your doctor for only ten minutes and they’re talking more than listening, you might never get to the point of making a diagnosis.” 

*

Almost exactly a year after my surgery, Jordan Peele’s Get Out premiered in the theaters. The film centers around Chris, a Black photographer who goes to meet his white girlfriend’s parents for the very first time. It is then revealed that his girlfriend, Rose, and her family, the Armitages, have a history of stealing Black bodies and selling them to white liberals as pets. Soon after Chris arrives at their home, we see his photo paraded before a sea of white party-goers, eager to purchase him at the Armitage silent auction. When the procedure happens, his mind will sink beneath the surface of his body, out of reach. It will be replaced by that of his new owner. The man who wins Chris’s body is a perfectly nice white photographer who claims he wants him, not for the Blackness of his limbs but for the insight of his eyes. “I want your eye, man,” he calmly explains as Chris is strapped to a chair, waiting for his brain to be cut out. “Those things you see through.” The eyes Chris sees through are wide as paper plates. The fear in them surrounds his pupils as they sink into white.

*

I have always had a love-hate relationship with horror. I love a good haunting; I hate to be haunted. As though without warning our human skin could grow fur, our vaginas be sewn shut, our wombs grow benign tumors the size of grapefruit. 

*

In 1845, J. Marion Sims told Anarcha to kneel naked on her hands and knees while he inserted the speculum he invented into her body again and again. Several white men stood alongside to watch. “I saw everything as no man had seen before,” he remarked. 

*

In the days before my surgery, I lay awake in my hospital bed, sure I would be killed. I was told that due to my age, I was likely to redevelop fibroids after my surgery, but that they wouldn’t consider permanent options like hysterectomies even though I had (and still have) no desire to birth children. Their reason had little to do with the potential medical risks (which were relatively low) but with the idea that I might one day live to regret the decision. Somehow an imagined regret carried more weight for them than the foreign body causing my uterus to expand to twice its natural size. 

Today, Black folk are more likely to be offered hysterectomies than less invasive options like hormone or radiation treatments. We are twice as likely to get hysterectomies than white folk, as a result of our fibroids. Yet I was told that to get one, I would need to sit on the decision for at least thirty days, at which time I would sign a form authorizing my doctor to remove my uterus. One doctor told me I probably wouldn’t find a physician willing to take away my option to give birth at my age, which was thirty at the time. 

In all likelihood, the doctors were trying to correct decades of history by not pushing me towards a hysterectomy as has been done to countless Black women before me. “We don’t want to take away your choice to have children,” one doctor explained to me. The irony of preserving my choice by removing another was not lost on me. At this time my body had become completely unrecognizable to me. The throbbing in my head felt like the annoying neighbor in a sitcom—the kind of pain you learn to live with, never forgetting it is there. My fibroids themselves had grown to the size of a twenty-nine-week-old fetus. I did not need another baby. I was already in my third trimester, carrying a tumor in my womb. 

Because I needed emergency surgery, I did not have the luxury of waiting a month for permission to have a hysterectomy. I had an open myomectomy, knowing there was an eighty-four percent chance of seeing my fibroids again within eight years. 

*

I was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, historically one of the poorest neighborhoods in NYC. I took my first breath inside Brookdale Hospital, one of fifteen hospitals in the country (less than one percent) to repeatedly receive a failing grade—a hospital that has some of the country’s highest birth complication rates for women, over seventy-five percent of whom are Black. 

“I’ll never go to that hospital again,” my mother said about my birth. She screamed for hours before a doctor finally entered her hospital room. By then, my head had already crowned. After my birth, my mother’s body was what she described as “all torn up.” She had to pee from a catheter for four days. “My next babies would have midwives,” my mother said to me.

*

In 1916, Margaret Sanger founded the nation’s first birth control clinic—what would later become the inaugural Planned Parenthood in Brownsville. Though hailed as a feminist icon of pro-choice, Sanger garnered support for birth control through her allegiance to the eugenics movement, asserting that the process helped to weed out what she called, “an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.” 

The popularity of eugenics dates back to the nineteenth century, when enslaved Black men were castrated as punishment for their inability to be reined in like horses. In the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of Black women were coerced into getting hysterectomies, if they were told they were happening at all. Our bodies, once worth more if we could breed, had become a threat to the white feminist movement’s concept of womanhood. 

In 1997, Black feminist scholar Dorothy Roberts made a shrewd observation in her seminal masterpiece, Killing the Black Body. She asserted that a criticism of the traditional pro-choice movement has always been that while white women have historically been shamed into not having abortions, Black women have often been ridiculed for their audacity to procreate (see for example the crack baby, the welfare queen, the jezebel). 

*

Before my second procedure at the close of 2022, my fibroids were smaller than the first time, the largest one reminiscent of a large plum. I did not bother to ask for a hysterectomy this time around but was reassured by doctors that there were less invasive options available to me than those that existed when I almost died in 2016. This time, the radiologist explained that I would be undergoing what’s called a uterine fibroid embolization. He would insert a thin catheter into an artery at my groin or wrist, cutting off the fibroids from their blood supply and causing them to shrink.

*

Nights before the procedure, I had a dream I was in Seattle Grace Hospital, located within the world of Grey’s Anatomy. I was in the E.R., where orderlies were bringing patients into the units before they began shooting them and turning them into vampires. I ran down the hall, looking for Dr. Bailey. I was sure this was the episode where she saved us because every episode is the one where she saves us. But she never showed. 

Unlike with my first surgery, I was awake for this procedure. My white male radiologist was patient and kind throughout, answering all my questions. Yet his medical team seemed surprised when I told them we weren’t using anesthesia. 

“Fucking white men,” my Black OBGYN said when I told her that the interventional radiologist didn’t think that anesthesia was necessary for the procedure. 

The medical staff did give me a mild sedative, but I was awake enough to ask the doctor to explain the terms he was using and what he was doing as he was doing it. It was, in some ways an empowering experience to be awake, although I was terrified, because my body remained attached to my mind throughout this period of horror. When the procedure began, the Black Physician’s Assistant played “Can We Talk” by Tevin Campbell to calm my nerves. 

At one point I asked the doctor if he’d ever seen Grey’s Anatomy. He had not. At another, the pain became such that I began to throw up, again and again, all over myself. I grabbed my doctor’s arm to tell him I was dying. I don’t remember his response, but I’m sure I didn’t believe it.

*

 Six months later, in June of 2023, I did my first follow-up MRI. My results showed that my uterus had shrunk to half its previous size. Its shape was now considered “normal.” Currently, most of my fibroids appear to be shrinking. One stubbornly proceeds to grow. Another is still roughly the size that it was before the procedure. My symptoms feel more or less the same.

My doctor told me that there are some who decide to repeat the procedure to see success in the shrinking of their fibroids, the lessening of their symptoms. He said that others will experience early menopause as a result of the procedure, and that others still will have hysterectomies within five to ten years due to the high likelihood that their fibroids will return. “Look on the bright side,” he told me, “In ten years, you’ll be in menopause, and you won’t even have to worry about all this.” I felt myself sink inside myself in his office, trying to make sense of my choices.

*

Complications due to fibroids are not the sexy topic that attracts headlines à la Black maternal death rates. We have yet to hear a celebrity testimony on what it is like for Black women to live with fibroids in the ways that have brought attention to issues like mortality concerns for Black women in labor (see Beyoncé, Serena Williams, for instance). It is much sexier to report on death than it is to report on subsistence living, on chronic pain, on almost dying. 

*

When the character in Get Out who wants Chris’s eyes explains to him the body-snatching process he is about to be subjected to, the man is calm, cordial, smiling even. He tells Chris what his life will be like after the process called the transmutation. “You won’t be gone,” he explains. “At least not completely. A sliver of you will still be in there somewhere. Limited consciousness. You’ll be able to see and hear what your body is doing, but your existence will be as a passenger. An audience. You will live in…” 

“The Sunken Place,” Chris responds.

*

Both my surgeon and radiologist were white, male and kind. They both took the time to follow up with me before and after the procedure. They did not pressure me to make a decision. I sent both thank-you cards in appreciation for keeping my body alive throughout the process. The one who didn’t give me anesthesia probably would have, had I insisted. Even the white nurse practitioner who failed to assess me for fibroids is not a villain in this story. She may have misread my symptoms out of neglect or incompetence, or she may have simply been following procedure. “A doctor may ask a patient, is your period normal? And the patient may say yes, not knowing what it means for their period to be too heavy or last too long,” Dr. Marsh told me. “Instead, the doctor could ask, ‘Tell me about your period? How many days does your cycle last? How many menstrual products are you going through a day?’” Of course, even without these questions, it seems puzzling to assume that it’s normal for an otherwise healthy thirty-year-old to have frequent dizzy spells and difficulty walking down the street.

*

When asked whether the recent spotlight on health disparities for Black women has shifted our health outcomes, both Dr. Riley and Dr. Marsh said no. “Since 2020, there’s been a push to better reflect on equity and inclusivity in the healthcare space, but we’re still not where we need to be,” said Dr. Marsh. 

Before the repeal of Roe v. Wade, Black women were already three times more likely to die of pregnancy-related complications than any other demographic. We also represent thirty-nine percent of abortion patients in the U.S. Currently, the states with the most restrictive abortion laws also hold the highest concentrations of Black residents (See Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, for instance). This recent repeal has dire implications for the long-term health outcomes for any Black person with a uterus. With the lack of gynecological clinics and pharmacies in so many of these communities, Black people are more likely to forego or delay healthcare, contributing to serious complications related to pregnancy, fibroids, and cervical cancer.

 In Dr. Riley’s role, she has been trying to cultivate a greater focus on how providers communicate and listen to their patients. She believes that for change to happen, everyone needs to get involved, from doctors to nurses, to funders. She told me that she’s been working to develop and distribute surveys to better understand how patients are experiencing their care: “A lot of things get better just with observation. Once people know they’re being watched.” 

*

Throughout history, scientists have loved to watch bodies, analyze bodies, cut bodies open. Especially when they’re our bodies. Sarah Baartman’s body was born in the Eastern Cape of South Africa in 1789, purchased by an English surgeon in 1810, and then transferred to a French animal trainer in 1814. The white men with their advanced degrees could not understand how a woman could have an ass so fat, labia so long, skin so black. Baartman reportedly signed a contract to travel to England and, later, Paris to sing and dance while white onlookers poked her with sticks. She attested that she signed the contract of her own free will during a court hearing in London. The trouble with this is that Baartman could neither read nor write. 

Sarah Baartman was made to pose naked, sometimes carrying a spear or cloaked in animal skins. The scientific value of her body parts became second to her economic value, as white men realized they could profit off her body’s performance. And so Sarah Baartman appeared in cages to perform for audiences across Europe. At certain showings, she was made to sit on all fours alongside a baby rhinoceros. 

In her death, her body was dissected like a frog’s. Her brain, vulva, and anus were kept in jars. Her bones were hung on display in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris for nearly two centuries, until they were returned to South Africa in 2002. She was twenty-six years old. French zoologist and physiologist Baron Jones Cuvier took it upon himself to do the honors of cutting her body open. He said of her, “She had a way of pouting her lips exactly like that we have observed in the Orang-Outan. Her lips were monstrously large. Her ear was like that of many apes, the tragus weak.” 

*

At my last wax appointment, the esthetician asked how old my baby was, pointing to my scar, which my body has held since 2016. It has the appearance of a C-section and creates a dip underneath my belly, making it stick out more than it should. In thinking about my body, I sometimes think about the body of someone in Get Out, Georgina—the film’s primary Black female character and only female victim. Georgina’s brain has been cut out of her skull to make room for the white grandmother’s brain. As you watch, you can see Georgina’s sunken mind trying to escape her skin; her smile eats her alive. This body belongs to her but also to the white imagination. As if what whiteness imagines can construct our physical being: the Blackness in the center of our eyes, the thickness of our lips, the broad width of our noses. How easy it is to imagine your body hollow, a space for others to play in.  

There are times I close my eyes and imagine myself, mind sunk, legs spread wide by a white man in a white lab coat. Imagine what it would be like to be without a body: a mind in limbo, without the fat ass that gives white men wet dreams, without the wet mouth, open and compliant.

At other times, I imagine my body spread across the Hudson, lit up by stars. Its darkness never stops.