So one of the things you must know about me – MUST – is that I have a plethora of talents that serve no noble purpose in the adult world and which are highly unlikely to bring me either fame or fortune. As this blog progresses I’ll reveal them in their underwhelming and quirky glory. For now, I’ll focus on one of them. Here goes:

My ability to render silly/smutty almost any song lyrics almost instantly.

And since another one of these aforementioned mediocre talents of mine includes the ability to memorize song lyrics, well, you can imagine the sonorous depths to which my brain often sink.

An example, just to further emphasize and underline my disgrace before your eyes. A few months ago I went to a performance of the Phantom of The Opera. Excellent seats, very good performances, mediocre ice cream on sale at intermission. Anyway, for days afterwards I sang the line, “It was the Phantom of the Opera.” Only, I had changed the words to, “She lost her panty in the Opera.” I know baby Jesus. I weep as well.

In secondary school classmates would comment on my ability to know the words to every single song on radio. Incidentally, I’m not even restricted by songs I’m hearing for the first time. By the time the second verse rolls around I’m usually able to join in partially and with some level of confidence that I can accurate anticipate the words I don’t know.

Imagine then, possessing this ability and living through the heyday of Britney Spears. I wasn’t a Britney fan and scorned those who adored the force-ripe femme fatale. But I knew – and still know – all the lyrics to her songs, including the insipidly cutesy, brain coma inducing, saccharin monstrosity:

Oops I,
Did it again to your heart,
Got lost, in this game oh baby,
Oops you,
Think I was sent from above,
I’m not that innocent.

Before any of you write to question the above, that’s the rendering of the chorus that comes after that forehead crackingly annoying Titanic inspired scene (scene? Can you have scenes on a record?) where it’s implied (much the way a brick flung into your face implies slight annoyance by the thrower) that the guy has gone deep DEEP sea diving to retrieve the Heart of the Ocean necklace for her. Insipid.

Oh by the way, those of you wondering where I am (and those of you who are not, shame on you), I’m currently in the UK. Why I’m here is none of your business (but I’ll probably tell you anyway). Yes it’s cold no ass and yes it’s already snowed. Fun times my friends. Fun times.

Kids are overrated. I’ll pause now so that those of you who have kids can fly into an offended rage and email me your scornful disagreement (note to self, do not check email for a while). I had my goddaughter over this weekend – a sweet, respectful, well-behaved girl of seven. Helpful, cheerful, responsible. Neat, quiet and communicative. At the end of the experience I’m almost 100% sure I don’t want any children.

I know what you’re saying. “Suszanna, the kid must have been some sort of monster to make you conclude this.”

No. No she wasn’t.

“So then, the problem must be you,” you’ll counter-propose. And I’ll say yes. Yes it is.

Look, I’ve been on my own all these years so yes, I’m spoilt. I LIKE to sleep in late. I LIKE cooking my food spicy. I LIKE picking my nose while I read. I LIKE not having an audience when I do these things or having to consider that pepper is NOT a good condiment for a seven year old.

For three days I was made bereft of naps. For three days I was robbed of long showers. For three days I had to comb hair that was not my own, which I don’t comb anyway. For three days I had to hear the sentence, “You can tell she’s a princess, she turns the world around” sung over and over and OVER AGAIN.

I hate Barbie.

I hate iCarly.

I hate the colour pink.

I heard the plotlines for Barbie movies and iCarly episodes repeated until my brain felt it was about to split and ooze out my eye sockets.

Barbie was created by Satan and lovingly fashioned by his own, two cloven hooves. iCarly was made by one of his minions. They both wore pink when they created them.

Look, I’ve heard the argument that there are moments in parenthood that make it all worthwhile. The first word spoken, the hugs, the way they look when they’re asleep. My niece is almost two and has a smile that melts my charred and blackened heart. On Sunday she became possessed with the idea of my being the only person she would allow to pick her up and the mamaguay almost worked. Really, it almost did, especially when she ran pell mell across the lawn toward my car and threw herself at my legs when I stood up.

Everybody says it’s different when you have your own kid. But what if it isn’t? It’s not as though you can return the bugger and say you made a mistake, you’ll take a puppy instead.

Ok, maybe I’m being too hasty. Maybe I’m grand charging. Maybe my new, super efficient ovaries are trying to sabotage my womb so they get to enjoy their newfound hyper proficiency a bit longer. As an aside, while my surgeon was rooting around inside my reproductive system he decided to make my ovaries even MORE efficient than they already were. So essentially I only have to smell sperm now and I’ll be knocked up. Yeah me!

You know what. No. I don’t think I am. I’ve just made myself a delicious grilled salmon and couscous dinner and poured myself a lovely Pinot Grigio. I have a collection of John Updike’s early stories to read and one last Ferrero Rocher rondnoir to consume while doing so.

Tonight I do NOT have to pervert science by telling a little girl string beans make teeth grow so she’ll eat all her dinner. I don’t have to hide my chocolate behind garlic so I won’t have to deal with the dervish-like spinning frenzy the sugar rush inevitably results in. I don’t have to drink water with my dinner in an effort to get her to drink enough water each day so as to avoid constipation (a constipated child is NO FUN, no matter what people may tell you). And I don’t have to tell the same, unfunny story of the time she pummeled my chest at 6.30 a.m. because she was up and deal with the inevitable collapse into helpless giggles.

I know what some of you may say. That it sounds like I did a good job. That it seems I may be ready for motherhood. And to those of you that may be saying this, I have six words to say. Screw you. I’m having another drink.

One of the larger fibroids, surrounded by some smaller ones. They were tested and diagnosed as benign. 

It’s been eight weeks since my myomectomy and I thought, in the interest of science and overshare, that I’d tell my story to you, my dear readers. If you are unaware of what a myomectomy is, do not be afraid. I am well prepared to enlighten, after months of research, endless inopportune harassment of my gynecologist and hours of online video viewing, not to mention my own personal experience of being sliced open in a frigid theatre.

A myomectomy is the surgical removal of fibroids that are too  big to be removed by the less intrusive and less sick leave inducing laparoscopy procedure. What is a laparoscopy you ask? So what? You intend to do NO work for yourself? Look it up.

The decision to have a myomectomy (so called because another name for fibroids is myomas) came after years of suffering with very painful, very heavy periods. I remember being at university and the attending university doctor, a woman it should be noted, telling me that my option regarding this problem was to delay completing my degree, have a child and then return. Sometimes (note the conditionality attached to the word chosen), childbirth resulted in a reduction of menstrual discomfort.

My thoughts during this conversation are fresh in my memory and number two in total. One: Discomfort my ass. My entire midsection feels like some animal trapped inside it was clawing and gnawing its way through me in a frenzied attempt to escape and two: how the hell was having a baby a plausible option? Did one buy them pre-cooked in the grocery and just added water? I left her office disappointed and a bit depressed if I am honest. Which I always am. Always. Honest that is, not disappointed and depressed.

What followed is years of doctors telling me similar, unimpressive versions of the same shiteous suggestion. Make a child and the cramps could get better. Could. If that was the sort of reason people were having children for then no wonder the country’s in such a state of hot messiness. My personal theory was, after the vagina blowing agony of natural childbirth, menstrual cramps would forever after feel like an afternoon spent eating scones and blowing bubbles.

Even during my time in the UK, doctors still could not discover what was the cause of my “menstrual discomfort”. There was no infection, no endometriosis. Everything was ruled out except for, what I subsequently learnt, the most obvious cause. It is estimated that 50% of women in this country have or will have fibroids. Oh, by the way, it’s called FIBROID and not fryball (gentle Jesus in heaven who came up with that one and also, is looking up a word in a dictionary so hard that the word fryball persists to this day in our local lexicon?). That statistic was told to me by my gynecologist so please, don’t leave comments questioning this because I will not answer.

This 50% by the way is not an accurate representation of the actual numbers since many fibroids go undetected due to, in part, the fact that many women still refuse to go see a gynecologist. Look, if someone has to stare at your crotch, doesn’t it make sense that it be someone that’s qualified to do so? Your boyfriend/girlfriend checking out that strange rash on your labia doesn’t count. Please ladies, go and smear your Paps. Anyway, back to the fibroids. Mine sat comfortably in my uterus living rent-free and without any contribution to taxes and property maintenance for years.

There was a six month stint where I tried various birth control pills that made my hormones unstable so I almost constantly wavered between “Mr. McGee don’t make me angry” Incredible Hulk anger and “I wonder if I kill this jackass how much lye I’ll need to get rid of the body,” wrath. Which was pleasant. This was in addition to the existing monthly cocktail of two week-long cramps BEFORE my period came, constipation, breakouts and bloating that looked like a 4/5 months pregnancy.

My periods had gotten so bad that I had to call in sick every first day of my period because the only way I could tolerate them was to ingest a combination of 3 different types of painkillers every four hours for the first 24 hours which rendered me comatose. When the pain started spreading over two days, I started to get desperate. Despite what doctors had been telling me for years, I told myself that this could NOT be normal. This could not be what every woman went through and if it was, how could it be that there were no viable and reasonable options for treating with it? I listened to friends and female coworkers say yes, they too had terrible cramps and yet watched as they went jogging/dancing/drank alcohol/went to work etc. like normal, things I was rendered physically incapable of doing each and every month with almost no empathy and very little sympathy.

Deliverance came in the form of a wonderful doctor whose name I won’t publish here because I’m too lazy to call and ask permission but I’ll be happy to give if requested privately. After years of being told I was exaggerating/making up/mismanaging what was a common, normal, insignificant physical inconvenience my doctor did a simple ultrasound and in less than ten minutes time confirmed what people had spent years downplaying and negating.

I had two large fibroids – abnormally large for my age in fact – that were pressed against my lower intestine and were the cause of my years of horrible periods and several colonic problems. They had caused the terrible bloat, digestive problems, constipation and horrible cramps that I had suffered with for almost half the month, every month and lead to heavy bleeding and my almost constant anemia. Apart from the two large ones, the ultrasound detected two smaller ones within the wall of the uterus itself (later, after cutting me open during surgery he would in fact discover over 20 smaller fibroids).

After discovering the fibroids via ultrasound, my doctor did something that no other doctor before him had done and which would forever ensure my respect and gratitude towards him. He talked. He spent the next 30 – 40 minutes having a conversation with me where he explained EXACTLY what was and had been going on with my body and what were my options with regard to treatment. He took out a piece of paper and drew where the fibroids were. He explained the ultrasound photos to me. And he acted as though he actually gave a damn. He was the first doctor to show that he believed and was sympathetic to my experiences. And he was the first to say that I didn’t have to live with it, without suggesting that I had a hysterectomy or had a child. By the way, having a hysterectomy was offered as an option since I was in my early 20s. In fact, when I asked him whether or not I should have a child before having the surgery he responded, “Were you planning in having one this year? If not, then why would you want to now? Don’t change your plans because of this.”

After that visit, things steadily became different for me emotionally. The cramps were still there and would be bad until the surgery was done but now I knew the source. I felt my plans change. I felt my purposes change. And I felt my life change.

Two months after my myomectomy, I feel – I AM – a new person. The most significant change has been hormonal. My doctor swears he’s done nothing that would affect this but I feel IMMENSELY different emotionally.

Pre-surgery, some months I felt like I was standing outside of myself, watching me say and do things that were driven by an uncontrollable anger that was scary in its lack of logic. I knew that my rage, depression and sense of despair were not what I wanted or truly who I was but I was unable to do anything about them. For two weeks of every month my body felt like someone else was controlling it remotely. This feeling has gone and it is marvelous. It is beyond marvelous; it is miraculous.

And the periods? So far, the periods are better. There’s still cramping but already so much better to manage and this will only improve as my body continues healing and returns to pre-surgery normalcy. The bleeding is much less, the bloating is completely gone and I’ve not had any constipation since the third day after the myomectomy. This post is getting long so I’ll have to end soon. But I plan on writing another post about the actual surgery for those of you that are interested. In the interim, feel free to message or email me for information. And if your doctor is dismissing what you’re experiencing? Pick up yourself up and go find one that will take you seriously and work with you until he/she finds what’s going on. And if your doctor has recommended that you get a myomectomy? Go for it. From the moment you open your eyes post surgery you’ll be grateful that you did.

Thursday night, 12.35 a.m. It is a time that, pre curfew, men and women of certain liberations would be making their way home after their pre-Friday libation warm-up. In these curfewed times, it is the so solidly placed behind the hour of lock down and lock up that most are asleep or, at the very least, inside for the night. However, 12.35 a.m. did not meet me in either state last night. Instead, it met me, in hastily dragged on shorts to protect the innocent, confronting a man outside my door.

In pre curfew times a sense of dread would certainly be coursing through your veins as you read that last sentence. Trinidad being what it was in those criminalized, uncertain days and nights, there may have been many directions the story could have taken but the almost certain assumption would have been that none of them was good. In these times of curfew however, where the people speak of sleeping well at night (except for me at 12.35 a.m. last night), our Prime Minister reminds us of the peace we have bought at the low, low price of our basic rights and freedoms and, let’s not remember, despite the more than 1 dozen murders since the State of Emergency began, crime is at its lowest for months.

So against the backdrop of this gold-plated serenity, I opened my door at 12.35 a.m. to confront the man outside my door. Perhaps a bit of background: in bed by 10 p.m. I’d been awoken after eleven by the sound of someone talking. After waiting over an hour for it to stop I finally decided to go outside to see if I could figure out where it was coming from. Remember, in these curfewed times I’ve been constantly reassured that I can now do this, which I could not under the PNM or indeed, before August.

Instead of encountering a bandit – a victim of abuse, abject poverty, decayed societal morality or perhaps all of the above and several other factors you can feel free to add at will – I encountered instead a fellow tenant – a UWI student and therefore, one of our nation’s best – who I now had to teach at 12.35 a.m. the reasons why he could not be carrying on a conversation outside my door.

He is, of course, a victim of another type of decay. The terminology hasn’t been coined as yet I think. It’s a decay, a decomposition of basic intelligence and consideration. It’s the condition that results in motorists waiting interminably to be allowed to filter, as the main traffic speeds up as they approach. It’s the decay that sees mothers giving their babies and children orange and grape soft drinks in the belief that it’s fruit juice. It’s the decomposition that has resulted in a new generation of workers, those who, at 19, 20, 21, are tired of work and the wait for reward that comes with professional growth and skill acquisition. It’s the decay that led this man, older than 18, to spend over an hour outside my door on his mobile and look at me utterly bewildered when I told him he’d have to move from outside my bedroom window as he was preventing my sleep.

The thing that surprises me now, Friday evening, as I write this, is that he genuinely seemed to not understand why I’d be upset at his having kept me up for over an hour. His face registered no sense of having inconvenienced me, or of having been inconsiderate or of having encroached on my personal space and at an unforgiveable time as well. Almost 24 hours later, he has not even said sorry. I never was able to get back to sleep after that awakening and spent all of today tired and groggy. He, I am sure, slept fine.

In a conversation with my landlord, he told me that, in addition to the flushing of sanitary pads, someone had attempted to flush newspapers down the toilet. When they confronted the person – a UWI student – they said they didn’t know the newspaper would clog the system. And that’s how the conversation ended. This person didn’t offer compensation. Neither did they offer an apology.

To be continued.

Ok. So let me tell you, I hate UWI students. Hate, hate, HATE UWI students. Even when I was one myself I hated them. I didn’t hate myself because, of course, I’m always fabulous. And well I didn’t hate my best friend. And I didn’t hate the ones that I liked. But apart from those I was and remain to this day disgusted by them all.

And I especially dislike the ones for whom St. Augustine is some strange, new uncharted land. They stand at the entrance of campus and see the words Terra Incognita and perhaps dragons and serpents threaded through the always verdant lawn and think, “Duuuuurrrrrrrrrr…

“What strange new place is this? No-one has been here before me. Nay, I am the first to rest my eyes on this strange and wondrous land and, like Christopher Columbus (or Cristóbal Colón for you nit picking Latino bitches out there although since the man was Italian technically speaking it should read Cristoforo Colombo), I will claim this land as my own and squeeze from it endless pleasure.”

You see it in their eyes as they try to swagger past you with their denim yeast infection tight pants and petroleum by product styled hair. They are no longer in their parents’ house and now they can stay up late and eat KFC for breakfast and oh my God, LOOK, boys, boys, BOYS, swoon! Or, worse yet, geezus, meh mudder eh here to see me and warn me look at PUSSY! Pussy pussy pussypussypussy! Eh horse, ah going and DEAD with pussy first semester. Watch meh

Why this rampage tonight? Oooooo, I thought you’d never ask. I have SUCH a doozy to share with you. You’ll like this one.

Well, my landlord’s informed me that the reason why the sewage system is wonky is because somebody has been flushing her sanitary pads down the toilet. A UWI student. Isn’t that WONDERFUL!? Doesn’t that just fill you up to your neck with confidence in our future leaders? How the hell are you going to change the world if you can’t change your own damn sanitary pad? I mean, really. Really? Somebody has to tell you this? You haven’t worked out the mechanics of feminine hygiene yet but you’re moving on to tertiary level education? And this education is FREE?!?! This is what I’m paying tax to support?

Man, give me a precocious 8-year-old any day. Or at the very least a dragon. Do dragons menstruate?

A blog entry, like a pair of testicles or premenstrual nipples, must often be handled carefully. Writing is not the easiest of mediums; you’re so removed from the receiver, that is, the reader, that anything not got completely right well, might as well have not been attempted in the first place. Sort of like Madonna’s latest cheek implants.

So in deciding to start this blog, I contemplated for a long time whether this was a wise decision. Yes, I was approached over a significant period of time by a reasonably impressive array of people to start one. But these people chiefly consisted of my friends and most of my friends are one doubles vendor cuss-out away from a forced vacation at St. Ann’s or the new Santa Rosa jail (where the lingering scent of pig excrement still floats like gossamer on even the most delicate of breezes to settle in your nostrils like ground provision settles in the stomach on a Sunday afternoon).

I wondered, were the fingers of these supporters placed on the cyber-pulse of our society or around its throat? Could I trust the blurry encouragements communicated over frozen margaritas or via messages posted on my Facebook wall at 2 a.m.? I cogitated this for longer than any of you dear readers would imagine. Then, one day – TOday in fact – I had an epiphany. Fuck all y’all. I’d do this blog for one reason and one reason only – it gave me the chance to say whatever the hell I wanted anytime I wanted and without even having an audience!

So, with that skewered and completely selfish motivation I present and welcome you bitches to MY BLOG!!!!! I hope we have lots of fun together. Together we shall climb to the apexes of intellectual enlightenment. We shall tumble to the mud crusted depths of scatological discussion. We will become chroniclers of the changing political landscape and shoe heel heights. My friends – be you existent or be you imminent – we shall journey towards literary and self-discovery and make each other laugh, cry, think and scratch our crotches contemplatively while doing so. And on those rare occasions where perhaps you may not agree with me, I wish to say now, as our feet are poised midair to take that important first step on our hopefully long journey together, this is MY blog. If you don’t like what I say get the hell out and go look at some porn or something.

Kisses!