On "Selfish. Spoiled."
@kayjay I think wanting to revive someone you love at whatever cost is totally understandable! But it’s also selfish. When a person has been dead for 45 minutes, the decision to bring them back is not being made in that person’s best interest. It’s a decision made out of desperation and grief. She wasn’t thinking about him; she was thinking about herself.
Which is fair enough! It's hard to be thoughtful and loving and selfless in the grips of an emergency. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have done the same thing in her shoes. I just think that’s the part of the story that seems ethically sticky—not the stuff that came later.
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On "Selfish. Spoiled."
I don't begrudge this poor lady her second husband. But I have to admit the word "selfish" crossed my mind during the "bring him back to me" part. She asked them to revive Robert after he'd been dead for 45 minutes, against the doctor's advice. You never know how you're going to behave in an extreme situation, but YIKES.
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On What It's Like to Get a Biopsy
Oh man. I had a similar experience with my colp a few months ago. My doctor didn't mention the goop or the nightmare clot. When I passed the clot, I stayed up all night googling increasingly harrowing combinations of keywords. Finally--after hours--I found myself on some kind of hysterectomy message board reading hundreds of panic-posts by women who went through the same thing. One woman described how she and her husband BURIED THE NIGHTMARE CLOT IN THEIR YARD because they were convinced she had a miscarriage. It was the most haunting thing I've ever read.
The fact that many (most?) doctors fail to inform women about what to expect following this routine procedure is infuriating, horrifying, and just plain mean. And the fact that the only stuff you can find about it online is buried ten threads deep on obscure message boards is so disappointing and wrong. And while I applaud and appreciate the ladies running the hysterectomy website I found, I really wish I could have found info in a context that was a little less...charged?...while I was trying to ID the nightmare clot and waiting with bated breath for the results of my procedure. I thought about blogging about my experience, but in the end I was too freaked out about letting people I know reading about my vagina. Like, I know it's nothing to be ashamed about. I really do. But also: gah!
Thank you for being so open. Fucking A.
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On Ask a Married Dude: Bob and Eli
Oh gosh. If I wrote the Hairpin and scrolled through hundreds of comments from people who took time out of their day to write about how much they hate me, I think I’d have a stroke.
I don’t hate you, LW!
I mean, let’s be honest: you have behaved horribly, and it sounds like you have every intention of continuing to behave horribly into the foreseeable future. You are self-absorbed and self-destructive. You have terrible judgment.
But hey, you’re human. People cheat. People fall in love with people who aren’t good for them. People lie to their spouses. People lie to themselves. People have babies to fix their marriages. And plenty of people do those things without the kind of self-awareness that you seem to exhibit here.
I think you recognize on some level—maybe in your head, if not yet in your heart—that you have made some bad decisions and that you need to take dramatic steps to fix them. A lot of commenters said that it doesn’t seem like your letter contains a real question, and I agree. I think you were looking for some real talk, just in general. And while you might not have been able to foresee that the comment thread would be filled with this sort of vitriol, I can’t imagine that you honestly believed for one single second that anyone who’s even HEARD of the Hairpin would tell you that Bob sounded like anything other than a total fucking skeez.
Face your shit, girl. I’M ROOTING FOR YOU!
PS: I too pictured Killer Bob as I read the letter.