Life sentence at 13.

‘Unfortunately the news is as we had expected’.

‘What?’ Lip smack...

‘Remember, we discussed this before you went in? That we were trying to exclude various serious things.’

‘Yeah, sort of,’ X replied, furiously chewing the largest piece of gum I had seen. I sat there staring at her, incredulous that someone could be so dense. Interestingly, I wasn’t allowed to chew gum as a child (I know...my dad’s old school!)- Direct correlation to stupid (her, not me)?! I wouldn’t like to say...

‘Well, the tests confirmed what we suspected, that you can never have children’.

I was sitting in the room as the doctor told X, a 13 year old, that she can never get pregnant naturally. She should have been sad, but honestly, she simply appeared not to understand a single word that had been said. You could imagine her thinking ‘Kids?! WTF are those?’ I was frustrated for her, and I’m usually pretty chilled, I don’t get frustrated on account of other people. Not often anyway.

A recent #t about childhood memories reminded me of X, and how different our lives are/were. At 13, I was starting to like people as well as books, and stop thinking of boys as ‘disgusting’. I was trying to wear slightly more feminine shoes, and I wore dresses more regularly (of course, after my father rescinded his ban because I was no longer falling all over the place and ruining my legs with scars). I was a little bothered by being ‘older’ than I was, but I didn’t pursue it relentlessly. I was most definitely NOT having sex. So you can imagine my angst with X. She had pelvic inflammatory disease, something I didn’t know about until university. Basically, she’d had an STD for so long that it had clogged up her lady bits and so she would never be able to successfully deliver an egg to her uterus. Now, most people find this out when they’re older and try to have children but can’t. And it’s devastating for them. The problem was that she didn’t understand what an STD was, let alone the disease or its implications. Which begs the question: what the hell was she doing having sex in the first place?!

Here’s a bit of a generalisation: given she was alone in the clinic, didn’t seem to have parents to speak of, chewing gum (!) and smelt heavily of cigarette smoke, I was judging her background a little bit, and blaming what I thought was a failure of parenting and lack of education. But of course this is unfair, because I didn’t find out enough about her to know why she was in that particular position. It did make me think about all the things we do, for fun, as part of life, and whether or not we think about the responsibility and the consequences. So here are a few medical truths for you, while you’re horizontal today:

• HIV is the big bad scary wolf, but its little cousins have just as big an impact on your life. At 13 you don’t know you want kids. Hell, in my tweenies I don’t know that I want kids. But I bloody well want the power to make that decision.
• Get yourself PROPERLY checked out (not once in a life time- it’s gotta be regular people!). Great, you’re HIV negative. So?! There’s Chlamydia, gonorrhoea, LGV, syphilis, HPV (àcervical cancer). My rule is if I’m going to do something, I want to know the ways in which it gets fucked up. So I can avoid them. For example, did you know STIs in pregnancy could cause miscarriages?! Educate yourself! Google is your friend...No nookie till you do.
• Why the hell do you not have a condom?! Right now, at this moment in time, in your wallet/makeup bag/bedside drawer...Seriously?! *smack yourself twice*