By Charis Cleek

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

Tammy was pissed. The doctors were not subtle. She would have preferred they ask her straight up. She could handle it. She knew exactly what was going through his mind.

13-year-old Tammy was certainly not pregnant, and her doctor was dancing around it in a way she did not appreciate.

She first noticed her pants getting tighter. She thought she was gaining weight, so she dieted and did sit-ups.

Still, they continued tightening. It was only her stomach, and she knew what her peers were assuming. She was the pregnant freshman. It pissed her off.

Tammy told her parents, “I don’t know what’s wrong, but I can’t fit in my pants anymore.”

That was how she ended up at the hospital.

Tammy peed in a cup so the doctors could tell her what she already knew. She hated the insinuation most of all. Just because she was a teenage girl did not mean she was hiding something or being dramatic. She felt like her doctors weren’t listening to her.

Portrayals in popular media today show an evident lack of trust in the voices of teenage girls. In a 2022 Grey’s Anatomy episode titled “Let’s Talk About Sex,” a teenage girl with stomach pain, Diamond, is being diagnosed when the doctors treating her have a private exchange.

“Mom’s on the way. She also said that it could just be bad cramps, because Diamond has ‘extremely traumatic periods,’” one doctor says.

The other doctor responds, “‘Traumatic’ or ‘dramatic’?”

Not yet having seen test results, the doctors discount Diamond and assume she is being “dramatic.” A half-lit top-down view of Diamond lying in an MRI machine with her arms up shows the viewer how vulnerable and powerless she is, like Tammy and countless other teenagers with similar experiences.

Unsurprisingly, the pregnancy test came out negative. Tammy’s reward: a vaginal exam and an ultrasound. Her feet in stirrups, scooted all the way down on the exam table built for adults, not 13-year-olds, the speculum felt hard and violating, the ultrasound gel was cold, and everything was unfamiliar.

But finally, they had an answer.

“You have a tumor on your ovary,” the doctor said.

Tammy exclaimed, “Oh my God, do I have cancer?”

Tammy quickly learned that she probably, most likely, maybe didn’t have cancer. The doctors couldn’t guarantee it until they took the tumor out and ran more tests, but they told her that tumors filled with fluid, like the one she had, were typically benign.

Benign (harmless, aka not cancer), ovarian cyst (the tumor growing inside her), and oophorectomy (her next step: surgery to remove an ovary) were just a few of the new words she learned very quickly. As much as it scared her, she wanted to know what was going on and what the doctors were going to do about it.

Tammy had an ovarian cyst, a fluid-filled sac on her right ovary that likely developed as a result of her menstrual cycle. She added it to the list of reasons she hated her period. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), around 20% of women develop at least one asymptomatic mass in their lifetime.

Tammy’s symptoms were just extreme bloating—which was why she could barely fit into her pants. Her doctors seemed concerned that her cyst was very large and still growing, so they wanted to remove it as soon as possible.

Tammy wanted two things:

“I wanted it out and I wanted it to not be cancer,” she said.

According to the NCBI, for an oophorectomy, surgeons enter through the abdomen. Generally, they are very low-risk surgeries, but because Tammy’s cyst was so big, she had to have a laparotomy or an “open surgery.” This meant that the surgeons would be making an incision in her abdomen, but they couldn’t know how big it would be until they were in the operating room.

She was scared. Scared at the possibility of having cancer, the prospect of surgery, and a little scared that she would have a huge scar and wouldn’t be able to wear a bikini anymore.

For a moment, Tammy was hopeful that with a missing ovary, she might only get her period every other month. But the doctors assured her that it was unlikely, and her other ovary would compensate for the missing one. She felt scammed.

“The tumor was the size of a small watermelon.”

Literally.

The doctors drained a gallon of fluid and still took out a huge mass. She would have a five-inch scar trailing below her belly button to show for it.

Tammy was disgusted with the picture her doctor showed her of the tumor afterwards. However, there was a piece of her that was grateful for the proof her “tumor baby” was not in fact a human baby.

“I mean, nobody else would have believed it,” she said. “It’s totally legitimate. Like, oh, she went off, she had her baby, she gave it away, and now she’s back at school… it was gross, but it made what I went through tangible for myself and for other people.”

After the doctors confirmed the tumor was benign, all Tammy had to do was recover.

Her hospital room was filled with flowers, balloons, cards, family, and friends. It was painful to cough, walk, use the bathroom, or do any movement, and she was supposed to be careful about twisting her torso, so Tammy laid still and read. It was awesome.

The loss of an ovary, a tumor, and a gallon of fluid, paired with hospital food caused Tammy to lose 30 pounds in what felt like one night. She felt skinny and weak. When she was finally discharged and allowed to go home, her grandma gave her a two-pound box of See’s Candy. She pounded it.

Tink, tink, tink.

She could hear them pulling the staples out of her abdomen one by one. It was disgusting.

Her path moving forward was now clear: keep the incision clean and uninfected, it would scab and close up on its own, and in a few weeks she could go back to school.

Her mom took her job as Tammy’s at-home nurse very seriously. Everything the doctor recommended was performed to a T. So long as Tammy caught up on her schoolwork and didn’t get an infection, everything would be back to normal in a flash.

Days went by, and the wound didn’t change. There was still a hole, and it was so itchy.

Two or three weekly check-ups later, and it was clear there was a problem. But what could be wrong? As annoyed as she might have been at her mom’s constant preening, she knew that it was because of her help that her incision, which had been open for almost a month, was not yet infected. Her doctor was at a loss. Everything about the incision indicated it should have been healing faster than it was.

One day at the doctor’s office, Tammy had an idea.

She asked the doctor, “What are we using to keep my incision clean?”

“Betadine and hydrogen peroxide,” he replied.

She continued, “Does betadine have anything to do with iodine? Because I’m allergic to seafood and I know that shellfish, which is what I’m very allergic to, is high in iodine. Could that have any relation?”

Her doctor looked thoughtful for a moment and said, “Well, let’s try it. Let’s get rid of the betadine, only use hydrogen peroxide, and see what happens.”

Betadine is an antiseptic (used to keep Tammy’s open wound from becoming infected) and was technically doing its job, but the allergic reaction she was simultaneously experiencing also kept her from healing. So when she stopped applying it daily, her wound started to close. Immediately.

Tammy felt so smart.

After getting the all-clear, she returned to school, enjoyed more days at the beach in her bikini, and showed everyone the disgusting picture of her “tumor baby.”

“It was from then on that, every time doctors ask for a medical history, I say I’m allergic to iodine, betadine and derivatives.”

Today, Tammy recognizes the importance of advocating for yourself at the doctors office.

“Well, I think that experience really made me realize that doctors don’t know it all.”

20 years after her experience, Tammy was at a fertility treatment clinic. She asked about the tests that her doctor was planning on running and they told her, “We’re going to take some images of your reproductive tract, but first we have to give you an iodine injection so that we can see what’s happening.”

Instantly, she informed them, “Oh, I am actually allergic to iodine.”

So, before injection, Tammy was given antihistamines to preempt any allergic reaction. Advocating for herself might have saved her life.

Tammy reflects on the lessons her experience taught her and acknowledges that the doctors don’t always think of everything, so it’s important we know our own bodies and bring that knowledge to the table when we’re in the doctor’s office.

“It’s okay to advocate for yourself, particularly speaking up for yourself and ask questions, even if you feel like they’re the expert, or that they should know, maybe they don’t, maybe they’ve overlooked something.”