I STOPPED CRYING FOR SEVENTEEN YEARS.

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“Remove all metal. Jewelry, piercings, everything.”

I’d walked into the ER hours earlier, describing symptoms my father, a chiropractor, had diagnosed over the phone. Cauda equina syndrome. So rare that the doctors assumed I was drug-seeking. A woman on welfare, in the middle of a divorce, showing up talking about nerve compression in her pelvic girdle? Sure, lady. Have a seat.

It took hours to convince them to run the tests. Hours I didn’t have. The nerves at the base of my spine were being compressed. Without immediate surgery, I would lose control of my bladder and bowels permanently. I might lose the ability to walk. The damage would be irreversible.

And now, finally, the MRI. But to get the MRI, I needed to remove all metal.

Right.

Here’s the thing about divorce and what might have been a midlife crisis at 31: I’d gotten my clitoral hood pierced.

I know. I don’t know what I was thinking either. But there it was.

And now I needed to remove it.

I tried. In the bathroom. Alone. Struggling with tiny metal balls and jewelry I couldn’t see and hands that were shaking because, you know, my spine was failing.

It wouldn’t come off.

The technician knocked. “Everything okay?”

No. Nothing was okay.

I had two choices: tell them I couldn’t remove it and delay the MRI, or ask for help.

From my mother.

Who was in the waiting room.

Who had no idea I’d done this.

I opened the door. “Mom? I need… help.”

To her eternal credit, my mother walked into that room, took one look at the situation, and said, “Okay. I guess we’re doing this.”

No judgment. No questions. Just: let’s solve the problem.

She helped me remove it. We didn’t speak about it. We walked out of that bathroom like nothing had happened.

And then she sat in the waiting room while they did the MRI and I went into emergency surgery.

The things a mother will do for you.

I’ve never brought it up since. Neither has she. And I never put it back in.

But sometimes I think about that moment, standing there, vulnerable and ridiculous and terrified, needing help with something embarrassing, and I think: that’s love. Not the pretty kind. The “okay, I guess we’re doing this” kind. The kind that shows up even when it’s weird.

THE DIAGNOSIS

They wheeled me into surgery.

When I woke up, there were tubes everywhere. A catheter. Wires. Monitors. And a doctor telling me what my life would look like now.

“You’ll need the catheter permanently. Probably a colostomy bag. This is likely forever.”

Forever.

I was 31. Two kids. A 7-year-old and a 1-year-old. A business barely holding together. In the middle of a divorce. Living in my mother’s basement. And now a lifetime sentence attached to medical equipment.

I was terrified.

I want to tell you I was brave in that moment. That I heard “forever” and immediately started fighting. But that’s the version I’ve told myself for seventeen years. The truth is I lay there and I was the same little girl I’d always been, the one rejected by her biological father, the one who learned early that if you act like you don’t care, it hurts less. The one who stopped crying somewhere along the way because the pain felt like too much and crying felt like weakness.

So I didn’t cry. I did what I’ve always done. I got fierce.

I thought: Absolutely not.

My grandmother survived World War 2. Two houses bombed out from under her. Sent to the countryside to be raised by strangers for years while the world burned. She used to say it wasn’t so bad in the bunker, the adults sang songs and we were happy. She believed that until she was in her nineties, sitting in front of Oprah, and heard someone describe PTSD for the first time. She told my mother over lunch that week: I think that happened to me.

Ninety years to name it.

My mother took everything that woman carried and raised her to keep going anyway. And then my mother did it herself. Single. Thirty years old. Two kids. Welfare. Went back to school and built a life out of nothing because that’s what she knew how to do.

I grew up watching that. I didn’t know I was taking notes. But lying in that hospital bed, I reached for the only thing I had.

Them.

The business doesn’t pause for spinal emergencies. We were in Whole Foods. We had international distribution. I was a single mom on welfare who had clawed every inch of that company into existence, and I was not going to let it fall apart because my spine had other plans.

So I made calls. From my hospital bed. On Dilaudid.

I thought I was crushing it. I was not crushing it. I was a woman on hospital-grade narcotics trying to sound like a CEO, and everyone on the other end of those calls knew it before I did. I still cringe thinking about it. Some things you can’t unknow about yourself.

But I couldn’t put the phone down. Couldn’t afford to. So I didn’t.

On day three, I read an article in our local paper about the heroin problem in Santa Cruz. The way they described the experience sounded exactly like what I was feeling on Dilaudid. And I’d watched friends get addicted to pain pills before. I knew what that road looked like.

I told my nurse: If I ask for it again, don’t give it to me.

Day three. Spine surgery. And I was more afraid of the pills than the pain.

THE REFUSAL

My birthday was in two weeks.

I was not, under any circumstances, going out with a catheter bag strapped to my leg.

So I did what any reasonable person does when doctors tell them something is impossible: I went to YouTube.

I watched videos on catheter removal. I studied pelvic floor anatomy. I read medical journals I only half understood. I learned about neuroplasticity, visualization, and the kind of mind-body connection that makes scientists uncomfortable.

And then I started talking to my pelvis.

Out loud.

“You know how to do this. You’ve done this your whole life. Remember.”

Every day. Lying in bed. Talking to nerves that supposedly didn’t work anymore. Asking my body to rewire itself. To figure it out.

Two weeks later, I removed the catheter myself.

The doctors just stared at me.

I went out for my birthday. I wore something that didn’t accommodate medical equipment. I drank something I probably shouldn’t have. And I stood in a bar bathroom at one point, alone, and just breathed. Because two weeks ago a doctor had told me this was forever. And here I was. Standing. Free. In a bathroom I’d chosen to walk into, not one where I was asking my mother to help me remove a piercing while my spine collapsed.

Problem solved, right?

Not even close.

THE THINGS THEY DON’T TELL YOU

Here’s what the medical forms don’t mention: I couldn’t have an orgasm for three years.

Not “it was difficult.” Not “it took time.” Three years. That entire system went offline and stayed offline while my body slowly figured out how to rewire itself.

Nobody talks about this part. Not the doctors, not the recovery pamphlets, not the follow-up appointments where they check boxes and ask about mobility. Nobody asks if your body still feels like yours.

And then one day, about three years in, it came back. Not the way it was before. To my surprise, it had moved. Shifted. What used to be external became internal, a kind of orgasm I’d never had before. Cerebral. Deeper. Like my body had rerouted itself around the damage and found something different on the other side.

I don’t know how to describe it other than: my body figured it out. Not back to normal. Just… new.

The mind-body connection isn’t woo-woo nonsense. It’s neuroscience. Your brain is constantly rewiring based on what you tell it to focus on.

But you have to be willing to do the weird stuff. And you have to be patient.

Which, if we’re being honest, is harder than the weird stuff.

WHAT CONTINUING ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE

Every week I get a colonic.

If you don’t know what that involves, consider yourself lucky. If you do know, you understand why I sit in my car in the parking lot every Wednesday and have to talk myself into walking through the door.

It is deeply unglamorous. It is uncomfortable. And it is the thing standing between me and a colostomy bag, so I go.

But there are weeks when I sit in that parking lot longer than I should. When I think about what it would feel like to just stop. To accept the bag. To let the fight be over and stop spending every Wednesday like this.

In those moments it’s not the fierce version of me that shows up. It’s the other one. The one who is just tired. The one who wanted, more than anything, to be a normal 31-year-old woman who didn’t have to fight her own body to exist in it. The one I locked away a long time ago because she felt like a liability.

She still shows up on Wednesdays. She’s the one who doesn’t want to go inside.

I go in anyway.

My feelings live right at the surface now. After seventeen years of keeping them at arm’s length, of being too fierce and too busy and too focused on survival to actually feel anything, they came back. All of them. At once.

I cry at commercials. I cry at my kids. I cried last week at a song I’ve heard a hundred times. The woman who stopped crying at 31 because it felt like weakness is now the woman who cries at everything, and she has no apologies for it.

Seventeen years of fighting to get my body back. And the last thing to come back was the part I’d worked the hardest to protect myself from.

I’m still here. Still managing. Still sitting in that parking lot every Wednesday.

Still choosing. And now, finally, still feeling.