EVAO's Story Part 1: My Fertility Was Gone

I was young and naive. Out with some friends after a high school basketball game we had lied to our parents about going to. We ended up at a party with some guys who were much older than us. We thought it was cool that they gave us beer and we danced and listened to music we weren’t familiar with. All I remember of the rest of the evening is waking up and being in a room I didn’t recognize with a bunch of guys I didn’t know. I was being raped-by all of them. I had never had sex before and I just wanted it all to stop…to be back home in my bed, safe with my cat and my books and the silence of the broken home I always tried to get away from. I’m not even sure how long it went on for. I know I still have scar tissue from that evening. Nothing was ever the same for me, physically or emotionally.

I never told anyone about that night. I never told my friends. I never sought counseling. I never went to the doctor. I ran off to California to live with my alcoholic mother instead of going to the high school that those boys went to-even though I knew living with her would be a nightmare…at least it was a nightmare I had conquered before.

So three years later after that horrible night my boyfriend and I decided we were ready to have sex. I went to the doctor to get on the pill. They gave me a pap smear…asked if I had ever been sexually active and I told them no. It seemed like the truth to me-after all I had been lying to myself about that night for years, putting it in the back of my head. They gave me a prescription for the pill, told me how to take it and warned me about STD’s…a week later the nurse called and asked me to come back in. I went in and was sat down in a room with the doctor and a female nurse…they told me my pap smear was abnormal and asked me again if I had ever been sexually active. Again I said no. But they just looked at each other and told me I needed to have another test where they would take a snip of my cervix and check it further. That one came back abnormal as well and it was getting harder for me to deny what had happened. I had to have an even more invasive test, one that required a laser and would take a chunk of my cervix to be sent to a histologist for testing. I found out I had cervical adneo-carcinoma one week after my 18th birthday. My birthday present was hearing that the only option I had was a hysterectomy because the “margins” of my coneization were not clean and that the cancer had spread to my uterus. I would never get pregnant, I would never carry my own children and in my mind that meant I would never have kids.

Next ...
EVAO's Story Part 2: The Glimmer of Surrogacy
EVAO's Story Part 3: And Then Something Clicked
EVAO's Story Part 4: Completing the Circle