My Annual Date with the Stirrups

A date with the stirrups and a pull to the past for remembrance had me thirty miles away and back into the dark cloud of my former OB’s office. I tell myself, “it’s only once a year”. “She knows my medical history.” Yet part of me realized yesterday that I voluntarily walk into the plume of the dark past each and every year for much more than good medical care and an annual exam. 
Over nine years ago, she was my ticket to Scotland. Not published in my book to save literary confusion, I had first been under the care of another OB (whom delivered my first born and diagnosed my first miscarriage). I was raw, split open from the deep wounds of fresh infidelity. I was newly pregnant, confused, desperate and so grossly un-evolved I believed my world was ending. And it was ending— for all intents and purposes it was in fact never the same, but it also wasn’t the end of days that I imagined. 
In that desperation, I saw a trip with my husband to Europe as a saving grace for our marriage. And in my all-consuming state of insecurity, I also saw my absence from that trip as the end. When my first OB refused to grant his blessing for my travels abroad, I found an OB that would. 
It was that desperation for my ticket across the pond that led me to her— the OB that would deliver painful news, the OB that would extend introductions to those that saved lives, the OB that would sit with me for hours as I said goodbye to our son, and the OB that saved my own life in the physical and emotional sense. 
As I sat in the remodeled waiting room reading a Scottish detective novel, I was unfazed by the past. A few memories danced in my mind as women were called in for ultrasounds, but the vastly different view of the new waiting area acted as a barrier for the darker memories that waft in the exam corridors. 
Once summoned behind closed doors, I could feel the intensity of the past. “Exam room six” instructed the nurse. Her face was new, but the message was all the same. It was always exam room six for bad news or was that exam room five? I could never remember. I didn’t want to remember. My husband always knew. He had convinced himself we always received the worst news of our lives in one of those exam rooms but came out unscathed if assigned to the other. 
This visit, however, I was safe from the dark cloud that haunted so many of my former years. I didn’t have a baby to protect. I wasn’t there for anything but an exam; a simple routine annual exam. 
As my OB entered the room and took her usual seat, I looked down at my bare feet and gown and back up to her eyes. Those eyes—at times welled with tears and emotions that you rarely see in your doctor. Those eyes that communicated beyond the medical dialogue spewing from her lips to say “I’m here”—- to say “I am sorry” on a human level. 
It was that medical table where I cratered a hundred times. It were her eyes that I looked deeply into as I emotionally blurted my husband was having an affair and that I was pregnant and scared. Having told no one, I told her— a stranger, my new doctor. 
It was those eyes welled with tears as she relayed our baby in utero was likely going to die. It was those eyes again many years later welled with tears as she handed our swaddled son to us for one long goodbye. 
Today, however, she sat (as did I) with the memories of the past behind our eyes. The conversation was void of tragic news, loss, and angst. There we were with our medical history conversing about running and my next marathon race. 
She had asked how “the family was doing” and I saw her in eyes what she meant, but I couldn’t go there. Not now. Not with her. 
As much as I couldn’t go there, I knew with reflection, however, that I still have her as my OB/GYN so part of me “goes there” each and every year—to remember, to reflect and perhaps to feel I’ve conquered. 
So much of our process of recovery is moving on and partially forgetting. We may not forget the events of our lives, but we distance ourselves from the emotions. It is being near places and people from those times of deep afflictions that can easily and uncomfortably bring those repressed memories to the forefront. 
Day-to-day I don’t want to feel those moments where the axis fell off my world. They are sacred, and they are tucked away. All the same, erasing the past is disgraceful to who you’ve become, what you’ve overcome and the loss that you’ve suffered. 
For me, my annual trek thirty miles away to the dark corridors of exam room five and six is my personal pilgrimage back into a time of excruciating metamorphosis and profound loss— but the juxtaposition of walking in as a survivor is why it’s necessary. 
Always move forward…. but always reach back and grab a bit of the past to remind you of the journey that got you here today. 
Read more in my book, Love For Our Afflictions by Ariana Carruth. Available at Barnes&Noble.com, Amazon, iBookstore, etc.