This is what women’s health care looks like
‘I rolled into a very bright room, and then I was out,” a patient reflected during a postoperative visit recently. “What came out of me? And what did this procedure look like?”
Where do I begin?
On a daily basis, women put themselves in the hands of hospital staff like me. Often they are in a state of desperation: Their pain or bleeding is no longer tolerable, or they have come to us for an emergency procedure — the delivery of their baby or a condition requiring urgent uterine surgery.
What follows is routine for staff. We position a woman’s body to better access the area of interest, which, in my field, means exposing her most private parts, compounding a great moment of vulnerability. This is anything but routine for my patient. Almost always, the woman in our care is anxious about the unknown and what is to come in the operating room.
Recovery is often unpredictable and can be full of pain and complications. What there usually isn’t is a conversation among and between women about these procedures we perform daily. Gynecological surgeries are a hidden part of women’s lives, rarely discussed. There is embarrassment. There is a cultural reluctance to talk about female problems “down there.”
Throughout my years as an obstetrics and gynecology resident physician, I have been privileged to operate on women of all ages and for many different purposes — delivering life, removing cancer, excising painful endometriosis or fibroids. Before their procedures, women have fears and questions that stem from the vulnerability of exposure and lack of control in the process to come: Will I be in pain? When will I feel like myself again? Will I be able to drive? Can I use stairs? Will I be able to drink or eat? How long will I have bleeding? Will I wake up from anesthesia?
Many of these women have spent years contending with daily bleeding or a uterus hanging out of their vagina. Some have been fantasizing about a medication-free vaginal delivery only to find themselves being being prepped for an emergency C-section.
In my early days, I was struck by the pattern of a patient’s blood moving through suction tubing during a surgery. Blood flowed for the good purpose of improving her life. Later, I started to notice splatters of a woman’s blood on the floor. I found them to be beautiful and symbolic of the conscientious work and reciprocal trust that these surgeries represent. I was struck by the realization that very few people outside the operating room would ever know what a woman had gone through prior to or during her surgery. Nor would they understand the recovery she had in front of her.
So I began taking photos of the blood in the OR in the hope that they might provoke conversations about women’s health. I want to illuminate the vulnerability inherent to gynecologic surgery on behalf of those who have had to go under the knife because of their uterus or ovaries or fallopian tubes or to deliver their baby. I share these photos in order to bring transparency and community to an otherwise sterile, foreign, and often terrifying experience.