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LEXIE SAT IN THE SMALL examining room in her paper gown, clutching the open seams together. The cold and sterile room, painted in soft shades of blue, neither relaxed her nor eased her mind. She glanced from a diagram of a baby emerging from the birth canal to a poster on contraception and swallowed.
The doctor knocked softly on the door, then entered. He appeared to be in his sixties, with tufts of gray hair lining the sides of his head and small frameless glasses perched over a long nose. He wore the standard lab coat over top a pair of spotless khaki’s.
Lexie wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of having a male doctor. Originally scheduled with a female, when she checked in, she was informed that due to an emergency C-section, she would either need to reschedule or see Dr. McMillan. She wanted nothing more than to get the appointment over with, so Lexie chose to stay.
The doctor pulled the stool over to where Lexie sat and cleared his throat. “I’m Dr. McMillan,” he said, reading her chart. “I hear you’re having a baby girl. Congratulations.”
Lexie tried to smile, but the muscles around her mouth froze. “Thanks,” she said, though her voice fell flat.
“It was a couple weeks earlier than usual to do the sonogram, but my records indicate here that you didn’t have an eight week one, so that’s why we chose to do it early. Everything in the sonogram looked normal though. The baby looks healthy. Since this is your first time here, we’ll still need to do an examination.”
He flipped through her records, along with the forms she completed in the waiting room. Meanwhile, Lexie eyed a canister of extra-long, sterile, Q-tips and shuddered.
“Wait a minute,” he said, peering down at the last paper on her chart. “We don’t have your medical records yet.”
A soft knock interrupted them. Lexie jumped at the sound, and a second later, a young blonde popped into the room. She wore scrubs printed with pink and blue puppies.
“Linda, before we do the examination, you need to see if the front desk has ever received her medical records,” Dr. McMillan said.
“Um. There aren’t any,” Lexie interjected.
Dr. McMillan’s head shot up from her paperwork. He seemed startled like he hadn’t remembered she was there. “Excuse me?” he said.
“This is my first appointment to see a doctor since my pregnancy.” Lexie chewed her lip.
Dr. McMillan’s face tightened, and his ears flattened to the sides of his head, while his mouth pinched into a tight line. “You mean to tell me, you’re eighteen weeks pregnant, and you haven’t had any prenatal care?”
His eyes were like laser beams, staring right through her. She wished for some explanation other than the truth to explain the reason for everything: why she was pregnant, and why she had yet to see a doctor. But there were none. Instead, the truth was all she had.
“I didn’t expect this, and I’ve been having some trouble coping. I was raped,” she said, forcing the words out, ignoring the bitter sting on her tongue.
Lexie’s explanation hung in the air like a wet sock, uncomfortable and unwelcome. The nurse’s eyes flickered to Lexie’s hands, folded over her lap, her privates, and then looked away. Maybe she was being paranoid, but for a moment, Lexie wondered if the nurse blamed her, her vagina a clear implication of blame. She glanced at the doctor, with his unwavering expression of disapproval.
“Why didn’t you immediately seek medical treatment? They would have given you a dose of Levonelle, the morning after pill.” His tone was scolding, causing Lexie to fight back the rise of blush to her cheeks.
She reminded herself that she wasn’t at fault. Regardless, she remained silent, clenching her sweaty hands together, staring at the blood pressure cuff slung over a hook on the wall. With a sigh, the doctor slid forward on his stool, then instructed Lexie to lie back, with her feet in the stirrups.
She did as instructed, feeling the cool air on the flesh where the gown exposed her.
“Scoot forward more,” he said.
Lexie moved forward so that her bottom was on the edge of the table. A cold sweat broke out over her body. She tried to ignore the anxiety bubbling in her chest and the image of Dr. McMillan’s shrewd eyes examining her while she lay splayed and vulnerable, like a piece of meat.
Wincing at the sharp stab of the speculum inside her, she breathed through the exam. Expert hands moved over her abdomen as he kneaded, feeling and measuring her uterus—an uncomfortable reminder of the changes occurring within her body. Lexie turned her head to the side, staring at the pristine white cabinets and sink, waiting for his probing hands to complete their examination and her humiliation to end.
When he finished, Lexie heard the snap of gloves as he removed them and threw them in the special trash bin marked biohazard.
“You may sit up, Ms. Dodson,” the doctor said.
Lexie sat, pulling her gown down over her thighs. With one hand, she clasped the seams at the back and watched the nurse leave the room with her Pap smear.
“Everything looks okay,” he said, making notes in her chart.
Lexie strained her neck to see what he wrote but couldn’t make out even a word of his scribble.
“Have you had any STD testing done, since your...” Dr. McMillan paused. “Incident?”
What a way to put it, Lexie thought. Yet hadn’t she once referred to it the same way?
Incident. Like what happened to her was just a passing thing, something that came and went—inconsequential—like the flu, spilled milk, a fender bender.
“Um. No, I haven’t.”
Dr. McMillan frowned and gave a small shake of the head like she was the most incompetent raped woman to walk the earth; like there were no others before her too traumatized to think of such things. Because, truth be told, until this moment, Lexie hadn’t thought of STDs. She had been too consumed with the breaking of her spirit and her will to live to worry about the potential destruction of her body. The possibility of an STD never occurred to her; however, Dr. McMillan’s expression, combined with the thought of an irreversible agent at work inside her body left her stomach clenching and rolling. A thick sheen of sweat coated her neck and beaded her brow, while the words AIDS and HIV, rattled in her brain like brittle bones.
“You need to be tested. Especially since the baby could be affected if you contracted anything. Of course, no physical signs of herpes, gonorrhea, warts, or any others are present now, but many times, physical manifestations can take years from the time of contraction.”
He handed her a blue card. “Here is the card for the lab. They’ll do the bloodwork we need without an appointment. They take walk-ins, and I would prefer you went this afternoon.”
Lexie nodded, her gaze flickering down at the card, her mind preoccupied, unable to register the name of the facility, the address, nor the phone number.
Dr. McMillan sighed. “You know, we could have prevented a lot of this had you taken care of these things in the first place.”
Lexie peered up at the doctor, his head spotted with age, shining under the harsh fluorescent light, his wrinkled brow, and starched lab coat. He spoke as if her situation were an inconvenience to him.
He handed her another card and said, “This is the name and number of a therapist. She deals with situations like yours. I’m not sure if she’s worth her charge, but this is what they tell us to give women like you.”
Women like you. The words were a fist to the face, and Lexie wondered what kind of woman he considered her. What category did she fit in: raped, broken, empty? The woman prior to her rape would have seen this callous, chauvinistic doctor for the ignorant man that he was. She would have sneered at him, told him to “shove it.” But the new woman, the broken one, couldn’t find fault with him or his attitude because deep down, she feared the worst; he might be right.
“I’ll see you back here in a month,” he said.
After Dr. McMillan left, Lexie got dressed. She grabbed her purse and the two cards the doctor gave her. She glanced down at them and pocketed the one for the lab. Without a second thought to the therapist’s card, she left it on the examination table, along with the pictures from her sonogram. Then she left the room, closing the door behind her.
She didn’t need anyone to make her feel worse about her situation than she already did. The things she did wrong and the type of woman she had become were clear enough. She did a good enough job shaming herself all on her own.