Wow, No Thank You - Samantha Irby Page 0,42

cruelest part of the whole thing was that it didn’t even fucking work. I spent most days prostrate atop an unyielding crimson tide. Birth control begat acid reflux begat two esophageal ulcers begat vaginal and oral thrush, and by the way, I never stopped bleeding, not even for a second. There were weeks at a time when I had to take Diflucan to kill the yeast in my vagina, while rubbing on Nystatin cream to kill it in my armpits and droppering fiery oil of oregano (I was so itchy and delirious from near-constant blood loss that, yes, I resorted to natural remedies out of sheer desperation) onto the mucus membrane under my tongue to kill the yeast living and multiplying on my tongue, and I guess what I’m actually saying is that, sure, I move this body around every day but I’m not actually in charge of it, and I have no idea and no control over anything that happens within it. Why are people so terrified of the impending rule of our robot overlords when we have no idea where our pancreases are? I have spent years held hostage by the whims of a small, pear-shaped sex organ located somewhere between my butt and where pee comes out, that I can’t see and have never had plans to even make use of. Why does no one talk about how weird it is to be so beholden to the dispositions of our intestines and our throats?

The doctors didn’t know what was going on, either. I mean, dude knows more than I do, for sure, but I had three transvaginal ultrasounds and a battery of bloodwork and diagnostic tests, and, every single time, he shrugged like, “Welp, I dunno! I guess you’re just a heavy bleeder!” while my uterus sloshed around sounding like a dishwasher and I could feel liquid seeping through four layers of protective padding onto that embarrassingly crinkly paper spread across the exam table. It seemed like he was cool with the idea that maybe I would just eat raw steaks for every meal in an effort to keep my iron up while waiting it out, until I finally just asked him if we could take a blowtorch to the entire apparatus and, after making sure for the millionth time that I really don’t want to have a baby despite my apathy and rapidly advancing age, he was like, “Wait, but are you actually sure?”

Here is a list of things I would rather do than carry a human to term in my battered uterus, which I imagine at this point looked like one of those purplish beefsteak tomatoes that has rotted and been left in the compost bin under the sink for weeks:

take a soupy diarrhea shit in the middle of the floor in a public place, then eat it

listen to a man’s jokes

let city rats crawl on me and stick their rotting teeth in my eyeballs

take a five-hour Amtrak ride without headphones in the summer with broken a/c

post all the pictures of my nine greasy chins I’ve accidentally taken with my front-facing camera

let a million bees sting me, one at a time, while watching my body swell like an infected water balloon

remove a Cuterebra from a fractious dog

tweet something politically spicy, then engage with every robot who responds

ask a young person to explicitly describe their favorite meme to me using only words

work as a bill collector for a predatory lending agency

let a grown man named Chip try to sell me a car

eat soft cheese, then play toilet roulette while running a bunch of errands on the bus

ask a new mom to give me her stance on vaccines

put money in my mouth after watching three cars run over it in the rain

print my last hundred Google searches and hand them out to strangers

try to get an unregistered firearm through TSA at a busy airport

clean a public bathroom with no gloves on, with my tongue!

have a