A Vogue Profile of My Uterus After Her Removal From My Body

After love, loss, and an emergency hysterectomy, she's ready for a new life.

Tucked into a corner table at the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, my uterus is surprisingly small in person. Wearing no makeup, a pair of vintage Persol sunglasses, and a Rick Owens leather jacket, she’s the portrait of laid back LA It Girl chic - a far cry from the internal, dutifully functioning organ she was for thirty four consecutive years.  A waiter, trying not to stare, asks if she would like another glass of Sancerre. “Why not?” she laughs, her vasculature wobbling slightly.  “Now that I’m no longer in a human body I don’t feel so encumbered by my old responsibilities,” she takes a deep breath and casually brushes her fallopian tubes away from her face. “I’m finally free.”

To say she has earned her newfound freedom - and the occasional glass of perfectly chilled afternoon wine - is an understatement. “She worked herself to exhaustion,” said her close friend and frequent collaborator the Left Ovary over email. “Seeing her build herself up and then slough herself out month after month, year after year was overwhelming. Then with what happened over the past four years, in retrospect I should have seen the emergency hysterectomy coming.” 

That four year timeline is whiplash inducing by any account. Since late 2018 she has miscarried, then gestated and birthed one baby, then hemorrhaged requiring a D&C (the subject of a moderately successful New York Times Op-Ed), then after just a brief hiatus, gestated another baby, was sliced open for an emergency C-Section, and then - during a very public complication on the operating table, was removed.

“I was shocked,” my Right Ovary told me in a text message. “My heart goes out to her. We were never that close - I know she’s living her own life now, I just hope she takes time to repair.” 

I asked her if she was enjoying her new life in Los Angeles and she pauses, haunted by the memory of her arrival here just a few months ago during my emergency partial hysterectomy after a C-Section. Ever the nurturer, she tries to read my face “Is it difficult for you to hear about the placenta percreta?” I tell her it’s fine. She takes a sip of her wine and continues. “I never expected to be the center of so much attention in such a short amount of time. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a bit of a shock when they said the placenta had gone….” she tears up a bit, we both do. “All the way through me.” Her voice lowers to a whisper, “The surgeon said the hole was as big as a golf ball.” 

Her phone buzzes. She hesitates, then reaches for it, “I wouldn’t normally - I’m just waiting for more biopsy results” she offers by way of apology. 

It was her (as of this writing) on-again boyfriend, the actor Chris Evans. “I’m sorry to cut this short, my fiancée - I mean -” she flushes even more crimson than usual. “Whoops! I guess Vogue has the scoop. We’re engaged. It happened in our backyard in LA. He’s…” she searches for the words to describe him, “A magic human.”

As she flops off the banquette and rolls toward the exit, I notice all the patrons at perhaps the most celebrity-jaded of establishments in the known universe turn their heads and gawk. The room falls silent except for her delicate squelching as she makes her way through. The double doors open, and just before she ventures out into the desert-crisp chill of the early evening, she looks back at me for just a moment.

She gathers herself, scarred and broken, but somehow more whole for it, radiant in the dim restaurant light. “Goodbye,” she calls out over the hush of the enraptured room. “Maybe we’ll meet again!”  As she rolls out into the jasmine-scented California dusk, I know - as does she - that we never will.