my eye was twitching and we needed to move
and have a baby and I just needed to
control something so I got my IUD out and
now my periods are also out of control,
trash can overflowing with tampons wrapped
in bloody tissues, fluffy toilet paper,
empty vitamin bottles, every month
it’s like I’m sixteen, but now
these string-tied scrub pants
weighted down by pagers and pens
folded lists sticking out of back pockets,
this Vocera1 swinging from my neck tangled
stethoscope, and also this scarlet
tsunami, tidal wave of menstrual blood
overflowing levees of super tampons and
sandbag walls of pads stacked high,
a second puberty after twelve years
(how did I do this in school?) in the
middle of hospital rounding, of
unbroken strings of days and nights
interns and patients, never-ending
residency, my period! I drop my computer,
the Vocera and all the pagers with a
friend to run to the bathroom; it’s like I’m
xxxxxxxa teenager again.
Teenager Again (Origin Story)
“I’ve wanted to have babies my whole life,” she said, “but parenting while in residency seems so hard and sad. Breast feeding at 6am before leaving your baby, then pumping at work 13 weeks post-partum.”
She sat in a waiting room chair in the hospital corridor, legs curled under her. The hospital was still and quiet in the middle of her night shift. Months from graduation, this third-year resident physician was starting to dream about life – and kids – after residency. “I was so impatient to have control over something – my body – that I just took out my IUD! And having periods again after twelve years has been eye-opening. It has been a wild experience.”
About the Author
Julia McDonald is a physician, writer, and advocate for sexual and reproductive rights. They are faculty at the Maine-Dartmouth Family Medicine Residency, serve as the Medical Director of Mabel Wadsworth Center, and work internationally with a global humanitarian aid organization. In the last decade, McDonald’s writing has appeared in mainstream news media as advocacy for patients and commentary on the intersection of politics and medicine. More recent creative nonfiction and poetry appears in The Sun, Journal of American Medical Association, Please See Me, Beyond Queer Words, So To Speak, and the Write Launch. Dr. McDonald became a Certified Listener Poet with the Good Listening Project in the fall of 2024. Hysteriography: Poems about Uteruses, Menstruation, Pregnancy, Abortion, Loss, and Childbirth, released in 2025, is their first book.
