REVERSE LANDING STRIP | Liddy Grantland
It’s the second full day in the hospital when someone tells me to stop taking my birth control.
My memories are hazy, fueled in part by sky-high calcium levels that also made it impossible for me to read up close, and to keep most anything down, including oral medications. I remember having trouble keeping my eyes open long enough to have conversations with visitors. I remember forgetting people had visited.
I also remember, upon admission, drawing on some deep-seated caregiver instinct from my days supporting the folks I took care of in their group home when they were hospitalized. I remember, from those long-ago days, haranguing staff to give folks their regular medications—the blood pressure ones, the thyroid ones, the antidepressants, the stool softeners—at the designated time. I remember taking notes that said they got their evening meds as late as 1 a.m.
So once they finally get us in a room, I hand over my Lexapro and my birth control and ask about them, probably more than a few times.
It wasn’t until they had a reasonable idea that my horrible symptoms were a result of some kind of invasive cancer and that that cancer might be lady parts-originating, that the doctor on-call said, “Stop taking birth control—now.”
Then: a liver biopsy. Breast cancer in the liver, breast cancer to the bone, breast cancer everywhere, skyrocketing my calcium and pock-marking my liver, all of it fed by estrogen and progesterone. Hormones my body makes, and hormones my body was taking, because I’m 26 and that’s what you do when you don’t want a baby right now and haven’t really decided if you want a baby in the future because you have time, of course you do. Right?
The injection that stops my hormones in their tracks goes in my ass, and it hurts like hell.
I have vague memories of a conversation about freezing my eggs. The Depot Lupron injection, now shot into my ass every four weeks, would affect my fertility even if I stopped taking it. So could chemo and radiation. It had suddenly become entirely possible that I’d be on hormone blockers for the rest of my natural life anyway and that the surge of hormones it would take to grow a baby would advance the cancer that was, at that moment, ravaging my body.
I don’t remember anyone explaining the pregnancy hormones thing. I remember, hazily, drawing those conclusions myself.
Freezing eggs meant delaying treatment, so it is advised against—if not literally, then at least in the doctors’ short, clipped tone. I get the feeling through my fatigue that choosing to go through the rigamarole of preserving a chance at biological children would have been the wrong choice, the one that flighty ladies who don’t want to live a long time would make. So I said, “No, go ahead, zap me.” And they did.
(It’s just, when I think back on it, it all happened really fast.)
I have some bleeding in the hospital, just spotting, but they gave me a diaper all the same. Then: no periods anymore. Maybe: forever.
Menopause at 26.
The first thing I notice about my body without its typical hormones is that my vagina smells different. It never smelled bad, of course; it just always smelled like a vagina. Now it smells like a different one.
The second thing I notice is the missing drops of fluid that would naturally accumulate in my underwear during the day. My underpants become so dry at the end of a day that I could mistake them for clean if I went by visuals alone.
At home, with my therapist on the other end of the phone, I talk about how cavalier I had been before all this about the decision whether or not to have children. I always said I would decide later (I always said I would decide) and that I was ambivalent about bringing children into a world so impacted by climate change and late-stage capitalism.
Now though? With the choice gone, it seems at least a part of me did want to do just that—have a baby from my own body.
Or, at least, I wanted the ability to choose.
I look up one day after I was discharged from the hospital and realize that I haven’t masturbated in over a month. A dry spell, no pun intended, that was exceptionally rare for me.
That night, I touch myself for the first time since I started cancer treatment. I seem to have lost only hair that I did not hope to lose: my head hair thinned considerably while my legs and armpits stayed just as naturally hairy, as did the edges of my pubic hair, with the only loss being a kind of odd, reverse landing strip in the middle. So I find my vulva for what feels like the first time, the skin in the middle hairless, soft as petals.
Masturbating takes lube and patience, but that could be the cancer or the feelings associated with it, too. Whatever the reason, I buy a new vibrator. (No, I don’t have an income anymore, but I do it anyway.) I feel, if not the same pleasure as before, then something similar, at least.
When I think about being touched again by another person, even my partner of nearly nine years, I wonder about this body. Thinner, with a port bulging from my chest, with patchy hair and dry down-belows. Cancer all over, pain all over. I wonder, not if he’ll love it, because he loves me, but if he’ll like it—like what he perceives in this body.
Liable to cry if you remind her that she will likely never have kids from her own body, not because she made any kind of choice, but because her body did things that other humans responded to appropriately.
Liable to cry if you remind her that she may not live long enough to watch a kid grow up anyway, and she should maybe worry about her own life instead of some other, pretend human’s life.
Liable to cry if you remind her what agency she is missing, even now.
Might as well stick with just the vibrator, I think, and be done with the decision-making or lack thereof.
My oncologist never brings it up, the lady business, as if the problem has fixed itself with the introduction of the shot. In a way, I guess, it has. Decision made. What’s left to talk about?
But then I go for radiation to painful spots of lesions in my bones—my shoulder, my hip—and they leave me waiting nearly an hour in the lab for a blood test that’d confirm I’m not pregnant, since radiation can cause terrible birth defects, despite the fact that I’m documented as receiving a medication monthly that would make it physically impossible for me to be pregnant.
What I mean to say is that my body is going to be perceived one way for my whole life, as a body that could have a baby; and if the rest of my whole life is at least marginally sick, I will never not have to think about the problem of pregnancy—or of never having one. Maybe it’s similar to how people who choose to be childless feel, too. All I know is that it happened overnight and convoluted, and it didn’t happen because I asked it to. Neither did cancer.
Both hurt worse than I’d like to admit.
Liddy Grantland (she/her) is a queer disabled writer and care worker from South Carolina. She shared time as a Direct Support Professional and team leader at L’Arche, Greater Washington, D.C., an intentional community of Medicaid-funded group homes for those with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Grantland provides practical support to those seeking abortions as a full-spectrum doula, clinic escort and community educator. She is in the process of a Master of Social Work program and, as of January 2025, lives with Stage IV metastatic breast cancer. Her work about bodies as people can be found in her book “Flesh and Bones: Learning to Love this Body” and on her Substack at OurBodiesOurselves.substack.com.