by Katie Leonard
They’re very common, you know, not even something you can control, just something you get, something some women are more prone to than others, like stretch marks and boyfriends and a heavy flow. A genetic component—primordial destiny.
I was moving apartments. Hot summer, twenty-three years old. Fifth-floor walkup to fourth-story elevator building, the old apartment bare and dusty. I swept every corner and filled every hole so no one would know that I was ever there; poured the contents of the fridge into a trash bag, felt it split open when I carried it out onto the landing, got on my hands and knees to make sure ketchup wouldn’t bake into the stairwell, and I failed. My sticky grease stain legacy.
The cyst grew slow and then fast, a thought then an action. I felt it pulsing into my inner thigh and labia. Each step hurt. Packed the pain with me and moved uptown. Laid in my bed the first night in the new place. No AC. The ceiling fan was circulating dust, and I felt the cyst with every breath I took. I lay as still as I could and still, still I felt it.
The apartment was in flux. One girl remained from the previous lease, a new roommate was en route from Texas, and a subletter was overstaying her welcome and slowly packing her belongings. The subletter chattered at me when I moved in, asking me my name and where I was from as she shoved cat toys and beauty products into black industrial trash bags. Her name was Erin, and she was some kind of disaster of a human, 29 years old with abysmal credit and a black cat named Bear. She was working at a cocktail bar and conceptually enrolled in graduate school at Columbia. I asked her what program she was doing and she didn’t tell me. She had no suitcases or furniture to show for any of it. She had been sleeping on an air mattress for six months. There was a dreamlike quality to her, everything ephemeral. Almost and maybe and perhaps.
I couldn’t sit correctly, had to lay at an angle everywhere I went. I was draped across the brown sectional in my new living room, the window AC going full tilt, no lights on, dull midday light casting shadows across the trash bags and piles of cardboard as Erin packed. Fainting couch and a feeble woman, oh how these things do happen.
The only real treatment for Bartholin cysts is to take short baths multiple times a day. Dull the pain with tepid bathwater for fifteen minutes at a time. My new bathroom was the size of a walk-in closet, with a tiny toilet, tiny sink, tiny tub—doll-sized. My body was the largest thing in there. The bathtub didn’t have a stopper, just a hole, and I plugged it by holding an empty mason jar over it. I sat and listened to Erin shove her belongings into bags, the cat pouncing from high surfaces and landing with a heavy thud.
I kept the water hot. It was the only thing that brought relief, and even then, just for a moment, just right when I sat down. I sat in two inches of water every hour on the hour for fifteen minutes at a time, sweat dripping off my nose.
I kept alternating temperatures, the artificial wind of the GE air conditioning unit to the steaming hot bathroom. Pilgrimage of sorts.
I became convinced this was hell, the pain never lessening, only increasing, seeping its way to my liver and stomach. Began to view water as a cleansing force, remembered being baptized and wondered if they did that right, if maybe there was some kind of miscommunication with God that led me here, now, shaky and feverish in Harlem. If we never bothered to learn how to effectively treat and prevent Bartholin cysts because of original sin. If doctors were instruments of justice.
I found an online discussion forum from 2015. Women talking to women: Try witch hazel on a compress, apply to cyst. Try popping with a sterile needle. When I went to the doctor, they put in a Word catheter that was so painful I begged for relief, but they only gave me ibuprofen. Never go to the doctor, they’re useless. Worst pain of my life. Try killing yourself.
Day slipped into night, baths increasing in length: every hour, thirty minutes spent in the bath, thirty minutes out. I morphed slowly into an aquatic mammal. Hot in my room, hot in the bath, thought maybe this was something I could sweat out. Medieval peasant mindset: punishment and penance. I thought of every bad thing I ever did.
I woke up before the sun. The sky morphed from dusky indigo to shimmering red to unblemished blue. Carolina blue. That’s what the sky’s color is. God loves Tar Heels so much, he made the sky Carolina blue. My father would say that; most old North Carolinian men would. I felt homesick in a way that made me want to vomit. Central AC in North Carolina, at least. None of this window unit bullshit.
Erin’s time as a resident was coming to an ignominious end. All her stuff piled in a corner of the living room, indistinguishable from trash. She didn’t have movers or friends. She was trying to get a man she was sleeping with to come and help her, but he didn’t. She called an Uber and took three of the bags with her. Said she’d be back later for the rest. The remaining roommate and I looked on. The whole thing felt sad to me.
I looked at the forum again. Take a Q-tip and dab isopropyl alcohol on there. Use a cotton ball soaked in vinegar. Seriously, have you tried killing yourself?
I decided it was time for medical intervention. The Friday before the Fourth of July, I fired up Zocdoc and called out of work. I found a clinic in Kips Bay that had availability, made an appointment, and headed out the door.
I took the 2 train to Penn Station and then walked to the M34 bus. I had on my purple platform Crocs. I had been roofied while wearing them almost a year ago. I thought about that night, the desperation I had while waiting for the train. Couldn’t control my body, my limbs heavy and foreign. Mind-body connection severed. Rational brain versus emotional. How we are supposed to be in control of our bodies. Body controlling mine. Engaged in outright rebellion, in fact. The French Revolution of my vagina.
The bus came. It was cold. I took a seat in between two people. It hurt to stand, hurt to sit. I angled all of my weight on the cyst. Counterintuitive, but it worked. It overloaded the pain signals.
I walked into the clinic and knew it was a mistake as soon as I saw it. It was in the basement of a brownstone and had a neon sign in the waiting area that read “Beautiful Days.” I sat in intake and calmly explained my situation to the nurse. He barely spoke English. He googled what a Bartholin cyst was and made a face. I said, “I know. They’re very common.”
I decided I had nothing to lose. “The cyst is the size of a golf ball,” I said. He hurried me along after that. Shame was something I had abandoned overnight.
They put me in their only patient room. It was large and had a window AC. Paper crinkled under me. I looked at my Crocs.
The nurse practitioner came in.
“The doctor isn’t here right now, and I looked up the cyst.”
It did not inspire confidence that she, too, had to research the cyst. The very common cyst with dozens of forum discussion posts on Patient.info and Mumsy.net, among the many other online medical communities for people suffering from shared conditions. If I made it out of this, I would become a moderator.
“I don’t think that’s something we have the ability to treat here, today. But if you want, I could look at it?”
“So you’re saying you can’t do anything, but you can look at it?”
We looked at each other.
“Yes.”
“Yeah, I am not going to do that. I am not going to show you my Frankenstein vagina,” I said.
Walked out past the intake nurse who was now terrified of me. I stood in the shade, tired and angry. Goddamn fake medical clinic. I looked up urgent cares and found a CityMD four blocks away.
I pictured how each step would feel, the sweat forming around my bra strap. Punishment for undefined sins. I lined them up in front me: had premarital sex, hadn’t been to church in years, barely knew anything about the Bible, wrote an entire paper about John Milton despite not reading any John Milton. Got an A on that paper and therefore talked about Paradise Lost more than one would expect. Superiority complex about education despite working a dead-end job. Superiority complex, period. I hated the subletter despite not knowing her, hated the cat.
Harsh light of day. No one helped me move, either. The super had to help me load the last of my stuff into an Uber. The Uber driver was worried about me. He insisted on unloading everything. He got a delivery driver to help, and they both carried my belongings to the front door of my new building.
CityMD couldn’t help me. The doctor looked at it and told me it had abscessed. It required draining by a gynecologist. “Might be hard to find one right before a holiday weekend.” She said it in a reprimanding tone. Like it was my fault. The front desk would help me find someone. “Looks painful,” she added. I nodded. Yeah, it was.
The woman working at the front desk had a French manicure. The doctor told her that I needed a gynecologist recommendation for today to drain a Bartholin cyst. I wondered if that violated HIPAA. Front desk woman nodded. A common condition experienced by many. She found someone five blocks away on Fifty-Seventh and Second. They got me the next available appointment. It was in an hour and a half.
I sat in the waiting room for a moment, eventually decided I didn’t want to wait under the watchful eye of the front desk. I walked outside and felt a moment of kinship with my abscessed cyst. Misunderstood misanthrope that it was. Mind-body connection between two misshapen blights limping across Manhattan.
Hadn’t eaten anything all day. Grocery store with a deli across the street. A cold rush of air as I walked inside, and I briefly glimpsed myself in the window. My mouth set into a line and my shoulders hunched forward. Not very pretty, I thought.
A turkey sandwich and a bottle of water cost $18. A rip off. CityMD charged me $100 to do nothing. I had walked out of the first place without paying. My insurance deductible was $8,500. Healthcare in America: nurse had to google Bartholin cyst, paid a doctor to do nothing. Classic.
I stood outside the grocery store and took a sip of water as heat bubbled off the sidewalk. It smelled terrible. New York in the summer. The thing no one tells you is how much dog shit there is.
The sandwich was in a plastic container. I opened it and took a bite. No condiments. Turkey and provolone and tomato on a roll. Took another bite, closed it, walked to a trash can on the corner, threw it away. I sat on a fire hydrant, my tailbone connecting with the metal.
The cyst felt angry, throbbing. I had angered it by letting someone see. It was just trying to live, too. Rage filled, seeking revenge. I understood it. The parts of yourself that you hide away. It didn’t ask to exist, didn’t ask to be hated. It was only doing what it knew how to do, what it was created to do.
I called my mother in a moment of desperation, my voice wobbly. The fire hydrant, my Crocs melting into the sidewalk. Silence on the line. “Let me know when you’re feeling better.” Not much she could do from 500 miles away. She was right, not much she could do. Just had to keep moving.
Each step was torture. Inhale through mouth, exhale through nose. Didn’t even use a tampon until college, I was so afraid of myself. Now here I was, traipsing through Manhattan, shame abandoned. Character development. Mind-body connection was all I had. No one helped me move, either. My cyst felt primordial. Inherited sin. Sixth grade, no one spoke to me. Every bad thing that had ever happened. Crying in the bathroom, my math teacher asking if I was okay. The first day of school after Dad died, everything was too loud. Getting strep throat three weeks after moving to New York. Fifth-floor walkup with a 102-degree fever. The doctor had asked me if I had anyone to help me. “No,” I said. I don’t.
At the crosswalk, the doctor’s office a block away. Almost there. Sweat beaded around my hairline. The cyst was angry, reaching a fever pitch. Had to stop every fifteen feet.
Dad died alone in the woods, just the dogs with him. Sudden. People only noticed because of the barking. How angry I was. Alone then, alone now. No one likes an angry woman. Painful then, painful now. It rained during his funeral—scattered showers all day. Tired of everything being about death. The cleansing power of water. Going to therapists. Complicated grief. Everything connected; everything random. How it felt when the rain came. Baptism.
The doctor’s office had a split-unit AC. It was a solid thirty degrees cooler inside than out. I filled out my name on the sign-in sheet, the last appointment of the day. One other woman was in the waiting room. I took a deep breath and sat down.
The leather seat pressed into my thighs. Sticky perspiration. All the rage I ever felt, all the times I thought about killing myself, all the times I didn’t. Life converged around pain. Plenty of joy, but all of it foreign now. Roofied and on the subway, clinging to myself. The E train running on the F line. A woman asking me if I was okay. I woke up the next morning in bed, all my clothes on, my door locked. Bruises up my side but still, there I was. Survival instinct, animalistic and snarling. Alone in my body, complete in myself. There I was.
The air conditioner hummed on. I felt the cyst pop, wet and gushing. An immediate absence of pain. I stood up and walked to the front desk. I asked where the bathroom was, and the receptionist pointed down the hall behind me.
I closed the door to the bathroom and saw myself in the mirror. Tears in my eyes, my hair frizzy and coming out of my claw clip. I sat on the toilet and took a breath. I wadded toilet paper into my hand and used my thumb to push down on the cyst, felt the pus leave my body, massaged the cyst until it was deflated. I felt almost sad for it. Something to nothing.
I washed my hands three times, wiped down the toilet with an alcohol wipe I found in a cabinet, and left to go back to the waiting room. I felt like a new woman. Desperation replaced by effervescent disbelief.
The doctor called me in a few minutes after I sat back down. I was smug, told her the cyst burst in the waiting room. She said she still needed to look at it.
Legs up, butt scooched down to the end of the examining table.
“Well,” she said. “It has definitely burst, and it looks like you did get everything out of there.”
“Oh, great,” I said.
“I am going to put you on an antibiotic, and I think we need to cauterize this.”
“Cauterize?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “To prevent this from happening again.”
I imagined a blow torch. “Cauterize with what?”
“Silver nitrate,” she said. She seemed surprised that I would ask.
“Oh, okay,” I said. “Is that going to, like, hurt?”
“Not any more than getting another one of these,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
“I can go ahead and do that now if you’d like,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
She got what appeared to be a large matchstick and dipped it in a box. Silver nitrate, I assumed.
The doctor stuck the match into me, right to the spot that was formerly cyst. Burning deep, I could feel it in my throat. Tears in my eyes, my fingers buried into my palms, and I almost laughed. My legs spread; shame abandoned.
Suicidal in the subway, I watched the trains go by. A mother peeled a banana for her son and gently gave it to him, piece by piece. I sat on my roof that night and looked at the sky. Once, I walked an old woman home. It was the start of spring, and it had rained that morning. She clung to my arm, paper light. “Isn’t it beautiful,” she said. “Isn’t today beautiful.”
The doctor moved the matchstick left and right, patching something up. Water cleansing; fire obliterating. Peasant mindset. Atoning with pain. Dark indigo to shimmering red, day dawning unblemished blue. Everything ends; everything begins. Here I was, there I would go. Thought into action. Nothing into something into nothing again.
“Sorry, no, like, numbing gel?” I asked after.
The doctor looked at me, eyes large behind square-framed glasses.
“No,” she said. “You have to feel it.”
Katie Leonard is a 2020 graduate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where her creative writing honors thesis was one of three that received highest honors. Her previous publications have been featured in Nowhere and Cellar Door. Katie is originally from Asheville, North Carolina, and now lives in Astoria, Queens. You can find her on Substack @relatablegirl. She enjoys literary fiction, reality television, and not falling for oat milk propaganda.