Kathy Harris, at 49, had known pain. She had given birth before epidurals were fashionable. She’d had a hole pushed through her navel for a tubal ligation. And she had broken a tibia eight years earlier, the last time she’d been skiing. But the agony that brought her to the hospital’s emergency department was different. It made her think of death and want it.
Nonetheless, she managed a bit of humor when I met her, four days after the worst of her ordeal. I am a gynecologic surgeon, and when I asked her to describe her pain during that time, she gave me a look that said there are some things a male doctor will never understand. “Ever been stabbed in the vagina?” she asked. “I felt the point go through and come out my left groin.”
