Tara McGowan-Ross - Nothing Will Be Different

NOTHING WILL BE DIFFERENT

NOTHING WILL BE DIFFERENT

a memoir

tara mcgowan-ross

Copyright Tara McGowan-Ross, 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purpose of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.

Publisher: Scott Fraser | Acquiring editor: Julie

Mannell Cover design and illustration: Laura Boyle

Printer: Marquis Book Printing Inc.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Nothing will be different : a memoir / Tara McGowan-Ross.

Names: McGowan-Ross, Tara, 1992- author.

Description: Canadiana (print) 2021025811X | Canadiana (ebook) 20210259744 | ISBN 9781459748736 (softcover) | ISBN 9781459748743 (PDF) | ISBN 9781459748750 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: McGowan-Ross, Tara, 1992- | LCSH: Indigenous womenCanadaBiography. | LCSH: Indigenous authorsCanadaBiography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies.

Classification: LCC PS8625.G695 Z46 2021 | DDC C811/.6dc23

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates, and the Government of Canada.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.

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for Megan & Alaska

This time everyone has the best intentions. You have cancer. Lets say you have cancer. Lets say youve swallowed a bad thing and now its got its hands inside you. This is the essence of love and failure.

Richard Siken, You Are Jeff

I thought I had mono once for an entire year.
Turned out I was just really bored.

Wayne Campbell, Waynes World

Eve was explaining the way the Pap test works, in a lot of detail. I was loving it. I was wondering if Ben told her I was a nerd or if she did this for everyone.

Ben was my doctor. A thin, almost gremlinish man, he was not tall but was very long long fingers, a long and perpetually craned neck. He had a bald spot, but also very pretty dark curls. He also had extremely large, kind eyes and a very impressive bedside manner, for a doctor.

I am not a doctor hater. I admire and respect doctors. I just think that in order to get through med school you either need to be a megalomaniac or a weird nerd, which is why visits with doctors are often so uncomfortable. Ben had never made me uncomfortable. One time, I asked him to prescribe me weed (before it was legal), and he said no, and I cried but not because he was mean, just because I admire and respect doctors, and being told no by people I admire and respect makes me embarrassed. When Im embarrassed I cry. So, that was really not his fault. Weed was also legalized quickly thereafter. Youre not my dad, Ben.

I had recently asked Ben for a Pap test. He said that he thought it would be better if Eve did it. Eve was the nurse practitioner at his office, he explained. She was a woman and well-trained. While this would have made sense if I had ever indicated that I was uncomfortable, in any way, with a male doctor performing routine medical procedures on me, I had not and this change of plans made me feel rejected. Why didnt Ben want to look at my cervix? I booked an appointment with Eve, feeling both the sting of the repudiation and extreme embarrassment about how affected I was by the whole thing. Were Ben and I not at that point? The cervix point? Why did I care? I made a mental note to talk to my therapist about it, while I changed the subject by showing Ben a new mole that had recently appeared on my knee.

So there I was, with my skirt up around my hips, squatting off the end of the table so that Eve could scrape my cervix. Eve had drawn the navy-blue curtains shut around the examination table, even though we were in a closed room, which was a classy touch. Everything in Eves office was shades of dark blue, except for her triumphant diplomas, of which there were many. The diplomas were in big, beautiful mahogany frames. Eves office was neater and better decorated than Bens examination rooms. Eves clothes were nicer than Bens clothes. Eve was extremely helpful. Eve had an even better bedside manner than Ben.

I was less impressed by her good bedside manner, probably because she was a woman and because shes a nurse. As she cranked my vagina open with a plastic speculum, I thought, judgmentally, that nurses had to have better bedside manners because they dealt more directly with patients. As she inserted a long swab into my vaginal canal and started to scrape my cervix, I decided that wasnt fair, and who was I to undervalue this persons labour? She makes less money than a doctor, after all, and was she not at least as skilled? I applauded myself, silently, for catching my critical rhetorical error as Eve deposited my cervical mucus onto a piece of glass. My leg started to cramp from holding myself half-suspended off of an examination table. As a society, we have a problem with systematically undervaluing the work of women, I thought. I have to work on my internalized misogyny. I was genuinely proud of myself for thinking these things. I miss Ben.

All done! said Eve.

Oh, really? I said, pulling my skirt down and heaving my rear end back onto the table. So fast.

When my underwear was back on, I asked her for a breast exam. I told her I felt myself up often, which was true, and that I had noticed a few small lumps in my left breast, and I wasnt sure what was normal to be there and what wasnt. Id never had a breast exam before. She explained that my lack of breast exams were a normal result of my youth, and that most lumps were benign, and that shed be happy to take a look. I took off my shirt and she very gently maddeningly gently pressed into the flesh of my breasts and lymph nodes in my armpits. I wasnt sure if shed ever examined a big person before. Thats just skin and a bit of fat, girl, I wanted to say, but I didnt. She was going to have to really get in there if she was going to feel anything.

I had to really get in there, to feel it. Id found it first when I was lying on my back, on my mattress on the floor, probably watching television. Id been working my fingertips into the plethora of tiny aches and pains all over my body a mass of tight tissue in my left quadricep, the tension in the soft parts between my iliac crest and the pillowy expanse of my stomach. I had moved up to my head, and worked down again: my fingers on my sinuses, trying to push the liquid out to somewhere, I didnt know where. My fingers making cold, shivering indentations when they found the tightness in my trapezius or the guitar string rigidity of my levator scapulae. On my chest, my hands moved the fat and breast tissue out of the way to uncover my constantly rigid pectoral muscles. Thats when they found something. It was an accident. I was on my way to do something else. I only found one, at first: it was a little bit swollen, angry. Searching around more, I found another one in the corresponding armpit.