A Divine Accident

ne Sunday, I took the girls next door to visit my neighbor, Esther Rubin. We were

seated at her dining room table when I felt a gush like someone had turned on a faucet.

Totally unnerved and embarrassed, I made a mad rush for her bathroom, hoping I wasn’t

leaving a bloody trail behind me. Again, I didn’t share the cause of my abrupt departure

from the table.

When the episodes happened with increasing regularity over the next three weeks, I

knew I had to take action. One thing was certain. I wasn’t pregnant and in the throes of a

miscarriage. Fretting over my dilemma one more weekend, I finally reached for the

Yellow Pages to look up the number for our family doctor, Dr. Vinetz, who was a

wonderful and compassionate man. I trusted his opinion.

“What you’re describing isn’t normal, Carol,” he said, after listening to the

enumeration of my symptoms. “We’d better take a look and see what’s going on.”

The very next day, I was on his examining table with his sweet assistant Fanny

holding my hand. Dr. Vinetz poked around for what seemed like an eon and then inserted

a stainless-steel speculum. “Does this hurt? Do you feel pressure when I do this? How

about here?”

Finally he stepped away from the table, pulled off his vinyl gloves, and seated himself

on a stool next to me. “I’m not at all happy with what I was able to see with the

speculum, Carol. You have a mass of considerable size in your uterus. Because of the

frequency and extent of the hemorrhages you described, it should come out. It’s a fibroid

tumor that’s feeding on your estrogen and growing larger. Sometimes, such tumors

recede by themselves when a woman’s hormones return to normal after giving birth. In

some women, however, they seem to thrive. We don’t want it to break off from the stem

and cause a rupture.” He paused and pursed his lips, as though waiting for an outburst