“Hmm, your blood pressure is low. We’ll check that again in half an hour. Is there any chance you could be pregnant? Wait, of course not; you just had a hysterectomy!”

The nurse frowns awkwardly as she administers my blood thinners, the shot you get when you can’t even begin to walk, leaving a constellation of needle bruises across the abdomen. I’m getting used to this—the repetition of a mandatory question about my fertility and my half-rehearsed answer, something playful so she won’t feel too awkward about having reminded a very young woman of what she will never have. I’ve tried responses like “Well, wouldn’t that be something?” or “In that case they took out the wrong organ yesterday!”

The night before my uterus is removed, my nurse is a model-gorgeous woman, sardonic and odd, like the sidekick on a TV show who producers pretend is less stunning by slapping spectacles on her. I lie in the bed, knees to chest and clinging to a teddy bear, and I make her Google things on the giant computer she hauls from room to room to take patient notes and scan our medication. Despite lots of prepping from my amazing doctors, I want to find out again what they’ll do with my cervix once they remove it, what will it be shaped like, what will its purpose be, and will they leave a hole in it (the answer: no). I ask her to search whether women feel an immediate hormonal drop, like the period from hell minus the period. Lastly, I ask the likelihood of my ovaries’ dying before I can harvest any eggs, of menopause setting in. Of finally losing every part.

“Is there any chance you could be pregnant?” she asks as she gives me my meds one last time.

“Well, not after tomorrow,” I say. I wish there were a word for when nobody likes your jokes but you make them anyway.

I spend twelve days in the hospital before they perform my hysterectomy. During that time, I get very used to the gasp of pity from nurses, doctors, nutritionists, interfaith chaplains—the subtle intake of breath when they look at me, 31 but with the face of a nineteen-year-old, blue-haired with puppy-print pajamas, curled in the hospital bed. I learn not to hate it, that gasp. I realize they are simply sorry. Being sorry for someone you don’t know is kind, even if it feels condescending and like the false utterances of empathy that women on reality TV favor. (I’ve been watching a lot of feuding housewives from this bed. The ones in Australia are really out of control.)