Sex and the Gimpy Girl

The other day I went into a tizzy. As a rule I avoid this state, not merely because it violates the reticent courtesy demanded by my Yankee upbringing but because it reinforces the misperception that people with disabilities are difficult to deal with. But to be honest sometimes I get sick of acting the Girl Scout of cripples, and I fall out of (or perhaps into my true) character.

On this day I had scheduled a Pap smear at a clinic new to me, on the eighth floor of the hospital at the center of the Arizona Health Sciences Center. In this building I can’t reach higher than “3” on the elevator buttons, so I must make sure someone else gets on with me. When I arrived at the clinic the doors weren’t automated: another wait till some other woman came along. The counter was too high for me to reach the sign-in sheet—so high, in fact, that I couldn’t see the receptionist to ask for her help. After a thirty-five-minute wait a nurse escorted me into a windowless cubicle with a standard examining table, although I had specified when booking the appointment that I required a model that can be lowered and tilted.

“I can’t use that,” I said.

“You can’t?” She sounded skeptical and slightly aggrieved.

“No, my legs are too weak to climb up. That’s why I use a wheelchair. Surely I’m not the only woman ever to have come in here in a wheelchair.”

“Well, we don’t get many.”

“I don’t wonder,” I said with an asperity I now regret, “if this is the kind of treatment they receive.”

She skedaddled, sending back the head nurse, who assured me that they had one of the tables I needed, though it was being used and wouldn’t be available for some time. So I settled down with the book I’d brought, took my turn, and left, pretty well exhausted. The ten-minute procedure had consumed two hours, but I’d survived a classic example of the reproductive “care” women with disabilities are all too apt to receive.

Although, when I first consulted Harvey W. Buchsbaum, MD, in 1972 I hadn’t yet presented the symptoms “disseminated in space and time” necessary for a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, he had no doubt that my body had gone neurologically awry. “Not to get pregnant,” he scribbled in my chart. “Not to take birth control pills.” He did not, of course, suggest how I was to accomplish the former without resorting to the latter. He was a neurologist. Modern doctors chop their patients into pieces and parcel them out like so many cuts of beef, and this one wasn’t about to have anything to do with my reproductive system.

I betook myself to a gynecologist, who suggested that I have my uterus removed. Uh-uh, said Dr. Buchsbaum: all my innards should remain in place, a decision with which I rather concurred. I consulted another gynecologist, who recommended tubal ligation. Nope, said Dr. Buchsbaum: I ought to avoid anesthesia. If any tubules were to be prevented from transporting their reproductive cargo, they ought to reside in George’s simpler anatomy. A little xylocaine, a couple of snips, and our worries would be over. This didn’t strike me as a fair bargain. Although, owing to Rh incompatibility we had decided not to produce more children, he was only in his early thirties; if anything happened to me he would almost certainly marry again; and he might well want to have children with his new wife. So we resorted to barriers until, after a pregnancy scare a few years later, he decided that he really didn’t want more children with anyone and elected a vasectomy.

It didn’t strike me as odd, in those days, to have a bunch of guys dictating orders about my reproductive system. As I recall one of them was female, so I’m using the word “guys” loosely. But since some medical schools continue to pride themselves upon inculcating...