Memoir: I Still Don't Touch Myself by Lindsey Kugler
“she felt a weird lump and it caused her a lot of concern”
Fiction by Lindsey Kugler
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My skin glued from sweat to the ripped leather top of my doctor’s examination table. I had no shirt on and sat alone in the room. Originally my mother was worried about my thyroid. She made an appointment because I had too much chin hair, discharge in my white cotton bras, and concerning up-and-downs. It was the first time anyone felt me up.
My doctor was a bony woman with short, tight curls that are common with old women in Arizona. Her glasses covered the top half of her face and she wore crisply starched plaid shirts with pearl buttons. Her face was serious and stony. She never smiled unless it was at her own jokes I found unfunny and passive aggressive. She had unforgiving hands and struck me with short sentences like my late grandmother.
“Are you sexually active?” she asked me.
I shook my head. I sweated through my underwear.
“You can tell me the truth,” she said.
I shook my head again.
“Do you play with your breasts when you masturbate?” she asked.
My stomach tightened and I stopped breathing. The familiar feeling of blood rushed to my cheeks and dizziness took over. I shook my head harder.
“Does anyone else play with your breasts?” she asked.
I looked like a malfunctioning robot with how much I shook my head.
“Does anyone touch your breasts roughly? Tell me the truth,” she asked.
I didn’t answer. My doctor’s hands were methodical and slow. She squeezed me so hard that I winced and started to cry. The L’s of her hands molded around the underside of my breasts and her rough kneading made me dizzier. I clenched my teeth as hard as I could to redistribute the pain. The tears made everything blurry.
She left the room and I cried for relief until the nurse came in and she asked if she could feel too. I agreed. Doctors don’t consult with nurses for fun. My doctor and the nurse left the room and my mother came in looking upset. I don’t think she had been told anything. My mother knew standard procedure from something being up. Something was up.
When my doctor came back in she told my mother she felt a weird lump and it caused her a lot of concern for reasons I don’t remember. I tuned out and glazed over with sweat and nausea. My mother stayed stoic upon our return to the car and I cried in panic. I hyperventilated, wiped my tears and snot all over my face. She held onto me as the air conditioning blasted onto us.
She then dropped me off at summer school where I sat down counting out the length of my breaths. We were mid-assignment: to perform a poem to three different peers. The skin of the back of my thighs glued to the dimpled blue plastic seat glued to the metal rod glued to the wooden flat top with a shiny etched coating.
The big kid with the sweaty face and phallic nickname squatted in front of my desk. My eyes had been stuck to the stained navy carpet but I shot up when he interrupted.
“Can I say my poem to you?” he asked.
He spoke to me in a soft voice—different from his usual class clown cries.
I nodded and said, “Yeah.”
His selected poem was Edgar Allen Poe’s "The Raven." The kids around me went blurry and the Raven kid’s voice took on an aggressively soft phone sex rhythm. He recited "The Raven" to me with his eyes on mine through each line. I couldn’t blink and I couldn’t ignore the shooting pain in my chest. As he stared he made my skin flush hot. I have yet to attend a longer performance.
“What do you think?” he asked in the same predatory hush.
“I—I think you did good,” I said.
He got up from in front of my desk and moved on.
I started to cry. I expected the tears to cool down my cheeks but they boiled on my skin and my teacher asked me what was wrong. She hugged me and told me to go to the bathroom to calm down.
I was better by the time I sat in the stall. My forehead pressed against the wall with crush’s names and penises all over it. The dented and dirty blue plastic stall was cold and I closed my eyes with relief.
Throughout the week I broke down at the weirdest stuff. The way the foil crinkled when I unwrapped my burrito from the lunch cart, the way Britney Spears looked on her album cover, or the way my mother would tell me to just not think about it.
I thought about it all the time.
Suspecting cancer is a shitty thing to imply to a rookie hypochondriac. While watching television, melted into the couch with my face pressed into a pillow, I imagined my soul floating up above my body when I died. My cancer body abandoned on Earth and my soul swirled up to whatever cloudy heaven above. I didn’t have any connection to cancer. I didn’t know anyone who had it although my aunt would get and thankfully beat breast cancer a decade later. But, lying on the couch, I only conceptually knew cancer. Then I moved just enough to feel the ghost pains and the laugh track on the television made me feel embarrassed.
The follow-up appointment was a blur. Typically when a doctor suspects cancer there are things like a biopsy done to determine if a tumor or a lump is malignant. These biopsies can be done with needles and are painful and invasive. Sometimes it’s surgery. The truth is that I don’t remember any of these things happening to me and I don’t think I blocked them out. I just think they didn’t happen at all. I do know I refused to touch myself during the week I thought it was cancer.
The last appointment my mother was in the room. I held my breath again. I turned red and hot. My doctor squeezed my breasts with her bony, cold hands. There was no way it could hurt anymore than the last time but it did. It made me tremble. I clenched my teeth as hard as I could and she took decades longer than she did before.
“Relax,” she said.
After my doctor told me the lump disappeared—dissipated into the flesh she had just squeezed—my mother yipped and pumped her fists into the air like people do when soccer players score goals.
“Yeah, baby!” she said.
My doctor washed her hands and talked to my mother about how confused everyone in the practice had been. Several clients of hers, girls my age, had the same lumps and they turned out to be benign as well. My doctor worried there was something exploding in all of us but she couldn’t figure it out.
“Better safe than sorry,” she said to me with a wink and a smile.
Not long after my week with cancer my doctor died in a car accident. I remember getting the letter in the mail on neon green paper addressed to me like I paid the bills, like I made the appointments. I didn’t do either of those things. The office had attached a poorly copied obituary in case we hadn’t seen it but my mother already had. It was news to me.
To this day breast examinations are painful. They cause medical professionals pause. Some took longer with their hands and looked at me apprehensively. “Thought I felt something there,” they said. “You have a lot of tight breast tissue.” I used that last line to try and sound sexy describing myself to a boy once. I think it worked.
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Lindsey Kugler is the author of the book HERE (University of Hell Press). She is an alumna of the Independent Publishing Resource Center’s Writing Certificate Program and lives in Portland, Oregon.