On the first day, it came for my abdomen, that sharp pain like the point of a knife, teasing the edges of my pelvis. The type of pain that makes you weep, less from the hurt, and more from the attack deep in the pit, in the core of your body.

And the doctor smiled.

“All part of being a woman, I’m afraid.”

“Or someone with a uterus,” I corrected.

He nodded in that sympathetic way you nod when your grandmother tells you she just saw her childhood friend, the one who’s been dead for decades.

“Of course. In any case, there’s not much we can do except keep an eye on it. Take some ibuprofen and see if that helps.”

I cradled my stomach, pressing my hand to my lower belly as I listened to words about how complicated my body was for having a womb, a piece of faulty machinery that no one could ever seem to troubleshoot correctly, an unfortunate bit of wiring that I would have done better had I been born without it. A refrain of “the research simply isn’t there. It’s easier to study men.”

I took the pain medication and left.

On the second day, my pinky nails fell off. They peeled from my skin like those fake ones when you test to see if the glue has set, only to find your impatience has gotten the better of you. I stared at the webbing of epithelium clutching desperately to the keratin as it pulled away. They left the raw skin behind, holding the shape of the nail without the hard shell, a faded print without enough ink.

I turned it this way and that as I lay immobile on the floor, my pelvis spasming, an invisible fish hook pulling and pulling without a moment of mercy. Took the pain meds without water, felt the chalky pills coat my throat all the way down. I went to bed to see if the nails would regrow as I slept.

On the third day, I could count all of my ribs. My nail-less fingers rubbed up and down the grooves of them, traversing the caverns, toying with the ligaments between bones. If I pressed hard enough, my loose skin would devour my stinging fingers.

Later I had lunch with a friend, grateful the ibuprofen had taken.

“You look great!” she enthused. “Have you lost weight?”

And I told her yes with a smile to repay the compliment she thought she was offering up. Because what I had lost in weight, I had gained in attractiveness. The cost mattered not. And as we sat and talked about my aching abdomen and the nails that had fallen off, we remembered all the other people we knew who had gone through this. Who soldiered on and went to work and raised their kids as their bodies fell apart, because that was our lot.

On the fourth day, I woke with all of my hair on my pillow, curled in a perfect, dense halo where my head had been. A dead rabbit deposited on my bed.

I gathered each strand, placed them lovingly in a kerchief and brought the bundle to the doctor.

He barely looked up from his clip board. “It’s probably stress. These things do happen sometimes. Nothing you can do but grin and bear it. Here, I’ll give you something else for the pain.”

He brought a device over, something foreign and metal as he asked me to lie back. “Relax. It’ll just feel like a pinch.”

And as the device entered me, I clawed at the vinyl sides of the patient’s seat without claws. I bit my lip bloody and raw and strained a muscle in my neck. But I didn’t cry out, not once. It was just a pinch.

When the visit was over and I help my bundle of hair up in supplication, the doctor grimaced. “There’s no reattaching it.”

He removed my burden and tossed it in the red bin of bio hazardous waste.

On the fifth day, my molars went loose, wiggling in my gums like saplings in overwet soil, the roots slackening their grip without solid ground to cling to.

I spent the day trying to hold them in place with my fingers crammed into my mouth, but by night, the canines and incisors had gone too, and I had not enough fingers to hold them. I buried them in the garden beside the nails, twenty-eight tiny graves lining the withering pea plants.

I called the doctor on the sixth day when my bones hollowed out. They became the brittle appendages of a bird, honey-combed and fragile. Only after I had snapped two ribs and my tibia did I learn how to walk cautiously enough so I would not break. I waited on hold as the doctor found my charts, holding the phone with both hands so it might not damage the phalanges and metacarpals.

“Hmm,” he said when I got a reprieve from the unmemorable music spaced between ads for new prescriptions. “I’m afraid there just isn’t much research in this area when it comes to women and their issues. They’ve been dealing with things like this since the dawn of time.”

I nodded. “It just happens.”

“Yes,” he said, relieved I finally understood.

When I hung up, I swallowed the last of the ibuprofen, stomach acid swelling in protect. I hadn’t wanted to mention how the medication was devouring me from the inside out. One complication at a time.

I rallied and pushed off the couch. Swallowed every wince and groan like rotten meat, and went to work.

On the last day, all the ligaments and fibrous muscle, all the organs and tissue dissolved like mist in sunlight. They evaporated into nothing. Until I was nothing.

But it’s alright. I hear it happens sometimes.

– Avrah C. Baren

Author’s Note: This piece deals with medical trauma